Two Short Thoughts: The Role of Luck in History; The Place of High-Level Political Violence in US History in US History
With this "Short Thought" I am introducing a new, occasional, feature to my place on OpEdNews. Today, there will be another one following right along after this one. We'll see for how long the feature lasts. Just FYI, I will be continuing with my regular (most) weekly columns, as well completing the serialization of the 2nd (2013) edition of my book The 15% Solution.
The Role of Luck in History: Indeed, it does, on occasion, play such a role. Here are five major examples.
1. None of the U.S. fleet carriers were at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on Dec. 7, 1941. Providentially they were out on maneuvers, and thus a) did not get destroyed or severely damaged, and b) were available to be able to destroy the main Japanese carrier force at the Battle of Midway just six months later.
2. On July 20, 1944 there was a carefully planned, by high level Wehrmacht officers, assassination attempt on Hitler, at a suitably high-level meeting. They wanted to remove him, so that they then could discuss a planned surrender with the Allies (to which, of course, he was unalterably opposed). The attempt wasn't planned carefully enough, because the bomb carrier placed the briefcase containing the explosive on the wrong side of a heavy table-leg from where Hitler was sitting. And so the war, with the loss of several millions of additional lives on both sides, went on for almost another year.
3. As it happened, Nixon's Watergate burglars for some reason left a piece of tape on the latch they had picked to get into the DNC headquarters. And it just happened that the watchman on that night happened to make a second inspection round, and came across the tape. And it was from there that the whole of what became known as the "Watergate Scandal" became un-taped.
4. The name of "Judge" Aileen Cannon (otherwise known as a member of the Trump defense team in the "Stolen Docs" case) was randomly pulled from a hat to oversee the case-against-Trump that otherwise would have been the one that would have most easily led to a Trump-conviction at the Federal level.
5. Trump was not killed in the attempted assassination today. (Some say it was luck, others the result of one or another conspiracy. I am not going there.) Phew. Of all the potential Repub. nominees he is the most easily beatable by President Biden (or whomever the Dem. nominee might eventually be; for whatever reason --- there are several). A conventional far-right wing Repub., e.g., Cruz, Rubio, Hawley, Vance, come to mind, who would easily pull in Repub. voters who couldn't bring themselves to vote for Trump, and win.
The Place of High-Level Political Violence in U.S. History
A New York Times Editorial this morning (July 15, 2024) is headlined: "The Attack on Donald Trump is Antithetical to America." Oh really? Actually, it is as American as apple pie. Since the 18th century there has been no other major power which has such a history.
1. The Burr-Hamilton duel removed one of the brightest minds from the debates/policy-developments in the early days of the world's first Constitutional democracy.
2. The Lincoln assassination among other things made the institution and then real implementation of Reconstruction impossible, because it installed the former slaveholder Andrew Johnson, (who had been picked by Lincoln to "balance the ticket"), as a President thoroughly opposed to any meaningful form of Reconstruction.
3. The Garfield assassination removed a President determined to restore as much of Reconstruction as could be managed in the early 1880's. It absolutely cleared the way for "The Lost Cause" and Jim Crow to be firmly established in the South from the 1890s onwards.
4. The McKinley assassination made T.R. the President and installed the first major governmental economic policy reform era in U.S. history.
5. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X both had major negative (for different reasons) impacts on the Civil Rights movement, and with King, the anti-Viet Nam War movement as well.
6. The MAJOR impacts of the JFK and RFK assassinations. Both were pledged to end the U.S. involvement in the Vietnamese civil war, and JFK (see the "American University" speech, June 1963) had planned to attempt "peaceful coexistence," with the Soviet Union under Khruschev, after re-election in 1964.
7. If the Reagan assassination attempt had been successful, that event might (or might not) have had a major impact on U.S. foreign policy vs. the Soviet Union, and in Central America, from the 1980s onwards.
8. My comment on the non-assassination of Trump can be seen above. What impact it will have on U.S. Presidential history remains to seen. But it will have one.