Page 18 THE VILLADOM TIMES IV • May 12, 2010 – that, and he used to call me at home and tip off my wife when somebody was planning to mess up one of my stories out of sheer envy and make me look like the idiot they all wanted to me to be after the SDX award. My wife also gave Peter advice about health food. She does that a lot. I once told him to skip a book about the Salem Witch Trials because I didn’t think he had the knowledge base to follow through on it and he listened to me. He wrote another sports book instead and that also did well. I remember the day he left the City Room like it was last week, though it has to have been 30 years ago. “I’m getting out of here. I won’t be back this time. You’ve actually got some talent. Get out of here before they get you too. These people are like starfish. They suck the talent out of you and spit out what’s left like a clamshell. I’m leaving. You get out while you can.” His advice was good. I split shortly after this good advice from a qualified attorney and best-selling author. The residuals on Indians aren’t like the residuals on baseball, but sanity is important, too. The reason I mention all this is that I want to show that I have no pathological desire to destroy the name or reputation of any reputable author who has sold more books that I have. Golenbock was a good guy and his baseball books were good. I also greatly admire the late Walter Lord, a splendid historian and a gentleman to his fingerprints besides being a friend of the family. I liked and respected my friend the late Rod Thorpe. Mary Higgins Clark, whom I know slightly, is a lovable person and a self-effacing and sizable talent and totally rules in her own niche. The late Dee Brown, whom I also knew slightly, was a grand old gentleman and a fine writer and probably did more for Indian rights than any number of loud-mouthed troublemakers, and certainly did more than I did, though I tried. (He gave my first book a favorable review, and that was a significant honor.) Yet those of us who studiously avoid writing diet books, cook books, sports books, and books about the sex lives of celebrities have long since learned that we should not expect to break into the Top Ten and that any royalties that fend off an eviction notice are about all we can expect. Having said all this, I must aver that I am extremely happy that an increasing portion of the American public has been apprised of the egregious errors of the late Stephen Ambrose. The latest takeout on Ambrose is that he lied about how many hours he spent interviewing Dwight David Eisenhower, who was President of the United States when I was a little kid. Ambrose claimed hundreds of hours of interviews. The Eisenhower diaries and the Eisenhower family indicate Ambrose spent five hours, and never spoke to Eisenhower alone. Go with the diaries. Ambrose claimed Eisenhower came to him for the biography. The family indicates that Ambrose came to them. Ditto. Ambrose also accepted the word of some of the people he interviewed that the inept C-47 pilots chickened out and made life miserable for the paratroopers they dropped in Normandy. The C-47 pilots demanded a retraction and never got one. Life is tougher than you might think under German anti-aircraft fire, and the C47 pilots deserved equal time. Ambrose, who was a kid when World War II ended and never, so far as I know, wore a uniform or heard a shot fired at him in anger by anybody but the critics -- never gave the retraction to the pilots. He also claimed that a British sailor chickened out dropping U.S. soldiers at Normandy and an American officer had to pull a .45 automatic pistol on him to make him land. The British say otherwise. So does the one American survivor in the landing craft. The American G.I. indignantly denied the incident, and said his officer was a hero and not a thug. The aftermath of war is not nice either. Some years ago, a Canadian historian named James Bacque wrote a book called “Other Losses” in which he described the conditions that he reported had killed almost a million German soldiers captured in the last stages of World War II and sequestered on very short rations and without shelter by the Americans as part of “The Morgenthau Plan” to divide Germany into five pastures all the better to hand Stalin Europe’s greatest industrial plant. (Morgenthau’s son pointed out that the actual author of the Morgenthau Plan was Harry Dexter White, confirmed by FBI investigation as a Soviet agent.) Ambrose leaped into the fray and suggested the Americans had simply let the Germans go and forgot to record their departure. The casualties, Ambrose said, were 60,000 and not 600,000. That isn’t what the Germans remember and it isn’t what some of the remorseful American guards remember. Glossing over homegrown traitors and homicidal mistakes to claim we did nothing wrong isn’t real patriotism, and it isn’t honest history. Dwight D. Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur both thought the atomic bombings were an atrocity and a mistake, and said so. Americans need to get over this endless denial of our own imperfection. We have little to fear if we do so. Japanese-American Relocation wasn’t the Holocaust, and Hitler and Hirohito were far worse than FDR. But while Ambrose’s simplistic good-guy bad-guy version of World War II may play well with some, the rest of the world knows that a German or Japanese child roasted by American or British incendiary bombs was just as dead as an English or Dutch or Polish or Chinese child killed by German or Japanese bombs. The fact that bombs were made in the U.S.A doesn’t make them cute. Maybe I’m envious of Ambrose the way sports fans were envious of Golenbock. But maybe I’d be embarrassed to have my name attached to the sort of history that shrugs off Dresden or Hiroshima or No Gun Ri or My Lai because the murderers were American. Wave the flag all you want – but don’t wrap it around your head so you can’t see women and children screaming and burning just because it’s your own county that kills them. Let’s honor our veterans with what they fought for: the right to speak and write the truth. Male envy is a terrible force to be reckoned with. Guys try to act like they are too macho for anything as feminine as being jealous of another guy’s success, but trust me, men and women are equally bad on the score of hating people who do something we haven’t done and probably can’t do. My own experience with this sort of thing started when my first book, “The Road to Wounded Knee,” hit print and the best-seller list many years ago. People who used to like me, or so I thought, came to hate me. When the book won the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Distinguished Public Service, the assistant managing editor who was hosting the ceremonies at Rutgers treated the whole thing as a joke and a mistake. He had never won anything similar. A guy who was once one of my five best friends looked as if he wanted to push me over a cliff when we all got together at a party a few weeks later. My wife spotted this instantly and whispered, “Don’t stand between Kevin and the cliff…” I got off easy. The guy they really wanted to kill was Peter Golenbock, author of “The Bronx Zoo,” a huge best-seller about the New York Yankees. Writing books about Indians was an easy blow-off – Indians were, at the time my first book came out, the minority nobody cared about. Some people told me – and they were serious – that Indians were extinct. But baseball – ah! – that was a topic most he-men thought they knew about, and they took Golenbock apart line by line, paragraph by paragraph, page by page – out of male envy. John Koster was an eccentric even if his book did win a serious award and stuck to the lower level of the best-seller list for some weeks. But Golenbock wrote the book they all thought they could have and should have written, and it was a huge best-seller. Golenbock was a marked man. I’ve recently experienced the same response recently with “Custer Survivor,” which a lot of people could have written if they had bothered to check the handwriting and the forensics. I’ll try not to stand near any cliffs. Peter and I were friends. I wasn’t in his ballpark in terms of sales, but he and I were both somebodies in a world of nobodies and he was an intelligent man and a good writer. He was also a lawyer. Somebody once handed him the text of an article I had written about a man who was falsely accused of Nazi war crimes and asked him to analyze it legalistically. Peter was Jewish and no friend of war criminals, so I expected the worst. He jumped up, seized me by both arms, and said to my surprise: “This is a masterpiece! They framed this $%##$&$% and you proved it. We should get a Pulitzer out of this!” (We didn’t, but it got an NJPA nomination.) He was, as I said, a lawyer, very intelligent, a young Groucho Marx in terms of his wit and repartee, and head and shoulders above most of the other people in the City Room, and I’d like to think that’s why we were friends The Ambrose Lightship posthumously sinks Letters to the Editor Dear Editor: John Spiech is the person I will vote for on May 11 for Mahwah Township Council. His past record of accomplishments and commitment to the township are many: past council president, member of the planning board for 12 years, former chairman of Region Open Space Fund, former chairman of Water Sub-Committee, former liaison to the Senior Advisory Board, member of library board of trustees, member of the Mahwah Environmental Commission, member of township Green Team, member of Co. 2 Volunteer Fire Department, and organizer and Scoutmaster of Boy Scout Troop 258. Having John and his wife Pat as friends for the past 50 years has enriched my life here in Mahwah. John makes informed decisions based on facts and experience. He welcomes challenges. His idea of fun was to hike the Appalachian Trail, a commitment he made to himself over the last four years. The best way I can sum up my trust in John Spiech is to tell you that when Boy Scout Troop 258 went on camping, canoeing, and hiking expeditions years ago, I trusted him with the welfare of my three sons. I definitely trust him with the welfare Support for Spiech and challenges currently facing Mahwah. Dorothy Vanderbeek Mahwah Dear Editor: I am writing in response to Mr. Weixeldorfer’s ad in last week’s paper about the council members taking benefits. As a lifelong resident, township employee and volunteer fireman in Mahwah, I am present at virtually all of the township events. Do you know who else is at all these events? The mayor and council. I have personally seen the amount of time the council members put in. Daniel, rest assured that money and benefits are not the motivating factors. If you really want to figure out how much they make an hour, it’s probably more like $5 per hour. The amount of time and work you will put in is equivalent to a full time job. Also, the decisions you will make are important to our community. Taking benefits to help you and your family, while helping ours, is your reward for having low salary while on the council. Marc Bracciodeta Mahwah Money, benefits not motivators