His Career Was Comedy, His Bio a Series of Mysteries

“Hey, whose Grandpa didn’t tell some tales?” asked the headline on a New York Times obituary in February 2006 for television actor Al Lewis, best known for playing the vampire-ish Grandpa on “The Munsters,” the 1960s CBS comedy.
 
It was a lighthearted and deservedly cheery send off for a brilliant character actor, political activist and restauranteur whose contributions to our lives ranged from a million escapist TV laughs to bold radical street activism.
  
The headline was also a colossal understatement. Al Lewis told more than just “some” tales like the embellished fish stories everybody’s grandfather leaves us with. In fact, the same obit story listed him as age uncertain. That’s because the birth year once had been publicly misstated by Lewis, who was born in either 1910 or 1923 as Alexander Meister. Or Albert Meister. In New York City. Or 287 miles from there in Wolcott, a small town in far upstate Wayne County, N.Y.
 
That town near Lake Ontario entered the Al Lewis narrative late in his life when a reporter asked him why no birth certificate in NYC could be located to clear up the matter of the actual year in which he was born. Lewis then explained that his mother had briefly lived in Wolcott to work in a factory.
 
Sealing Al Lewis’ stature as the greatest man of mystery is that no birth record for any A. Meister can be found in Wayne County, said imdb.com, a public figure biography site.
 
Imdb said that days after Al Lewis’ death, one of his three sons announced that Lewis had in fact been born on April 30, 1923, not 1910 as the actor had claimed.
 
“Why the deception?” asked the web site Everything2.com. “It could've been part of his tryouts for ‘The Munsters.’ If he was born in '23, he was actually a year younger than Yvonne DeCarlo, who was supposed to be his daughter. But by claiming to be 13 years older, perhaps he felt he'd seem more grandfatherly to the show's producers.
“At any rate,” Eveyrthing2 continued, “it seems likely that Lewis told a bunch of stories about his youth, either to support his claims about his birthdate or just for the joy of telling stories."
 
Al Lewis’ lifelong penchant for fudging brought anything but joy to historians and journalists, who often had to retract or revamp information they had confidently published about one of the television era’s most beloved and eclectic entertainers.
 
In fact, that New York Times obituary was the second one within days the nation’s newspaper of record published on Al Lewis, the latter correcting the first’s careless inclusion of already discredited information. The Times obituarist Dan Barry wrote that almost every claim Lewis made about his early life - his birth date and place of birth, his wartime adventures in the merchant marine, his education - was unverifiable and possibly false.
 
Among others were that Lewis had faced danger touring the maliciously anti-union Southeast to help John L. Lewis organize workers, rallied outside the White House in support of condemned immigrant anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, performed as a clown in a traveling circus, sold hot dogs at Brooklyn Dodgers games at Ebbets Field, and in the mid-1960s hired Charles Manson to babysit his three children (he recalled Manson as trustworthy and caring).
  

Regarding Al Lewis’ educational resume, the imdb.com site added: “Although he claimed to have a Ph.D. in child psychology from Columbia University, the university has no record of it, under his stage name or his real name.”
 
Lewis’ reliability began being questioned in the early 2000s after his wife of two decades, Karen Lewis, found documents while preparing for her ostensibly 93-year-old husband’s hospitalization for an angioplasty which showed he was in fact just 80. That was the first she knew of any age discrepancy, but the Times quoted her as saying the finding didn’t affect her feelings about him.
 
A reporter soon examined the actor’s commonly reported story that he had served as a paralegal in the trial of the Scottsboro Boys, a landmark civil rights case involving nine black Alabama teenagers falsely accused in 1931 of raping two white women.
 
A 1923 birth would have made Lewis eight during the trial (or college age if he were born in 1910). At whatever stage of life, Lewis said he learned of the Scottsboro Boys’ plight after his mother attended a rally for their freedom.
 
His mother, if one trusts the following Al Lewis recollection on the web site Everything2.com, “worked in the garment trades. My mother was an indomitable spirit. My grandfather had no sons. He had six daughters. They lived in Poland or Russia, every five years it would change. My mother being the oldest daughter, they saved their money, and when she was about 16 they sent her to the United States, not knowing a word of English. She went to work in the garment center, worked her back and rear-end off and brought over to the United States her five sisters and two parents. I remember going on picket lines with my mother. My mother wouldn't back down to anyone."
 
Nothing suspicious about that classic early 1900s immigrant working class bio.
 
Also perfectly plausible is the 6-foot-1 Lewis’ description of his playing basketball in his youth in New York City and later serving as a non-hired scout for NBA teams – but was he the very best scout in the game?
 
When Lewis boasted to independent radio station WFMU’s blog that, “you can call Marty Blake, the chief scout for the NBA, he lives outside Atlanta, and ask him who is the most knowledgeable man of roundball you have ever met. Without hesitation, he will tell you, Al Lewis.”
 
So Kliph Nesteroff, the author of WFMU blog entry “The Myths and Politics of Grandpa Munster,” ran that claim past Blake, who concurred: “He (Lewis) knew everything there was to know about basketball from the tips of your toes to the top of your head.”
 
However, Nesteroff also wrote: “Lewis liked to say he worked on the defense committee of Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. If there were any semblance of truth to this, it would have occurred when he was no more than five years old.... Neither was he in Washington, as he claimed, the night the American communists Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, sentenced to death for treason, were executed.”              
                                             Al "Grandpa" Lewis with Beverly Owen,
                                one of the two actresses who played Marilyn Munster

 
It IS known that Al Lewis, living out his left-wing values, donated his time and most of his earnings from the two-year run of The Munsters to charities, particularly a program helping teenage runaways, who were proliferating in Los Angeles during the late 1960s. But the admiration one feels upon hearing of this altruism quickly turns to skepticism, when Lewis identifies one of those kids he brought under his wing:
 
“That's how I met Charlie Manson. He babysat my three kids…. He sat for four or five hours, he amused the kids, he brought the guitar and he played, no big deal, no sweat."
 
Back in the real world of documented facts, Lewis ran for governor of New York as the Green Party candidate in 1998, opposing Republican incumbent George Pataki. Like a premonition of Bernie Sanders and with an accent to match, Lewis toured the Empire State fervently condemning health insurance companies, polluting industries, U.S. wars, and corporate tax breaks which made the poor overtaxed.

At age 88 (or 75?), he won 52,533 votes in that '98 race, above the 50,000-vote threshold for receiving automatic ballot placement in the subsequent election. Four years later, however, Lewis decided not to make another run, citing long odds of being elected as a Green.
 
He sought to be listed on the 1998 ballot as “Grandpa Al Lewis” to gain momentum from his TV recognition. A state judge turned down the request.
 
Before The Munsters premiered in 1964, Lewis played New York City police officer Leo Schnauser in the comedy “Car 54, Where Are You?” from 1961 to ’63. Real police in his hometown loved the character and Lewis did public appearances on their behalf. Relations 40 years later between police and radical candidate Al Lewis were cooler when the Green gubernatorial hopeful criticized police use of force practices as racist.
 
Everyone, however, loved “Grandpa,” and Lewis’ most memorable TV character was how he was often addressed by political supporters, TV fans and customers at Grampa’s Bella Gente Italian, a Greenwich Village restaurant he founded and where his regular presence was a draw. Lewis would greet customers entering, chatting with them, posing for pictures and signing autographs.
 
One unlikely sounding distinction by Al Lewis that was in fact documented before millions is that he was once censored by Howard Stern. You read right, censored by Howard Stern, America’s chief poddy mouth of the air.
 
Lewis, who discussed political issues with iron fervor, but free of obscenities on his own Saturday radio show in the early 2000s on New York City’s WBAI, once joined Stern in an outdoor rally against the FCC’s frequent fining of Stern and others for regular use of words banned on airwaves. Not realizing that his public address microphone also was tied into a live broadcast of Stern’s show, Grandpa told the crowd: “We're here because we all have a purpose… And that purpose is to say ‘Fuck the FCC! Fuck 'em! Fuck 'em! Fuck 'em!’ ”
 
An uncharacteristically mortified Stern frantically slapped his hand on the mic to try to keep his fines from piling even higher.
 
"I really thought [he'd] lost his mind," Stern said on the WFMU blog. "As far as I was concerned, my career was over because we're on the radio live.”
 
For once, there was no doubting Al Lewis meant every word he said. 
 
Brian Arbenz, of Louisvile, Ky. USA loved the leftist positions of Al Lewis, and the fun antics of Grandpa on The Munsters.

Tom Snyder's Tomorrow -- A Breakthrough in the Night

 

Tom Snyder's classic grasp of viewers'

First World problems

 Not just cursing the darkness, but lighting a candle.

 

In 1973, American TV was three networks, half-hour newscasts, the polite comedy of Carol Burnett and a long procession of strong-jawed cops named Kojak, Banacek, McCloud and Harry O.

All in the Family was past its peak, the cynicism of St. Elsewhere and Hill Street Blues was yet to come, Letterman was still in Indy and Donahue in Dayton, and Walter Cronkite could not have imagined Colbert and Stewart’s live audiences.

Television was an industry resting comfortably, its finances and ratings still unchallenged by cable or the Internet. And though Richard Nixon was falling before their eyes, newscasters, actors and producers felt the American system overall was legitimate, so TV programs were deferential to the power structure.

But in late 1973, the staid institution of television was about to get a little cooler. NBC quietly gave a few intrepid viewers a more edgy and street-smart talk show than the straight up Mike Douglass, the glittering Merv Griffin, or the iconic and aloof Johnny Carson.

Tom Snyder began hosting “Tomorrow” on NBC after Carson’s Tonight Show, at a weeknight time slot drawing 2nd shift workers, insomniacs or school kids planning to play hooky. In other words, people just a little off the mainstream.

Immediately, the deep-voiced brawny Milwaukee native with the big smile and even bigger eyebrows began appealing to such viewers, cutting through the formality of network TV with a fun rebelliousness. Snyder often would turn to an unseen stage person for a little on-air banter. Sometimes he’d ask them how that night’s intro’s special effect was done, using the unscripted spontaneity of today’s in-home YouTubes, though the voice and delivery of the longtime news anchorman were fully professional.

Though respectful and engaging toward his guests, Tom Snyder would frequently rag on the layers of phoniness of his industry -- even his own employer.

“A man coming back from Disneyland asked a gas station employee where he could buy his kid a Mickey Mouse outfit. The employee responded, ‘Why don’t you buy him NBC?’ “

A booming laugh, or a sly grin would follow such comments, then Snyder would glide to the next segment or guest, always while wielding his cigarette and seated so laidback he could have been in a beanbag chair.

 John Lennon in 1975 on the music world,

 and the "bed in" for peace. 

Watching Tomorrow was like dropping in at your fav used bookstore to exchange observations with the bohemian owner. The TV screen disappeared, as though you were there with Tom Snyder and his guests. You weren’t confused or put off by his constantly talking to some off-camera person you never knew.

That device wasn’t Snyder’s only breaking of TV protocol. There was also his light regard for the powerful.

This reached a then-shocking high point in 1976 when he read before the nation a brief letter from President Ford’s re-election committee asking him to endorse the president. Snyder read it politely and professionally then, saying nothing, vigorously crumpled the letter up and thrust it toward the floor, smiling all the way as he casually segued to the next segment.

Tom Snyder’s politics weren’t left or right, but anti-orthodoxy, whether that meant hammering the hypocrisy of anti-communist bombast Billy James Hargis in 1977, or the next year reading a news story about an Inspector General report alleging that $6 billion was misspent by the department of Health, Education and Welfare.

“This isn’t six million. This is six with nine zeros after it,” Snyder said. “Bureaucracy in action, and you can depend on it!”

 

In New York, Tom shows how to start a show. The buzz eases you into watching.

 

                        ...And those effortless Segues
                                  He seemed to be at leisure rather than at work 
 

The more political Tomorrow interviews were with guests ranging from Huey Newton lauding the Cuban revolution of Fidel Castro, to Ayn Rand lauding, well, very different ideas.

Snyder’s quintessential interviews were with stars and fringe characters from pop culture, such as grown up Our Gang actors, original Star Trek cast members; Mickey Dolenz and Davy Jones 10 years after The Monkees TV show peaked; and a group of sidekick announcers including George Fenneman of Groucho Marx’s You Bet Your Life and Don Wilson, the second banana to Jack Benny.

                 Tom and Trekkies: a natural combo

 

Tomorrow underwent changes to try to reverse a drop in ratings in the early ‘80s, including the addition of a live audience and a nightly segment with Rona Barrett. NBC cancelled Tomorrow in 1982, but Tom Snyder reprised the show’s format twice in the ‘90s, on a cable show, then on CBS’ The Late, Late Show with Tom Snyder, which ended in 1999. Six years later Snyder announced he had chronic lymphocytic leukemia, from which he died in 2007 at 71. 

As for me, I loved the no-audience, Snyder-and-guest centered years of Tomorrow. Though I was always a devoted and contented viewer of the NBC show, I sometimes bristled at Snyder’s giving undeserved attention to the outlandish, a trend epitomized by his prison interview with Charles Manson, the racist, murderous, sex offender who used media to steal a mystique.

On the sillier but still dangerous side, Tomorrow gave time in the early 1980s to the ridiculous pseudo-philosophy of "Breatharianism," interviewing Wiley Brooks, the founder who claimed he had not eaten in 17 years and that with the right spiritual mindset, all anyone needs is air and sunlight, instead of solid food. (Don't try this at home; witnesses years later said Brooks frequented restaurants and food marts for regular grub while insisting Breatharian followers need not do so.)

Happier memories are of John Lennon on Tomorrow in 1975, acclaimed news anchor Douglas Edwards in 1980, and a group of rising yet obscure TV personalities to keep an eye on for the future whom Snyder interviewed circa 1977 – one was a bit part actor and game show panelist named David Letterman. 

But night in and night out, Tomorrow guests were grass roots figures who exuded innocent quirkiness to end the day with – a woman found to have the world’s loudest laugh, a man who claimed to have been cognizant of his own birth (hard to disprove, really), and two atheists from Madison, Wisc.

I remember them for the way they raised my civic hackles by asking, “If we’re controversial in a liberal place like Madison, imagine how people would feel about us in Louisville?”

“I don’t know,” a pensive Snyder responded. “I’ve never been to Louisville.” At least he reserved judgment on our underrated liberal city, but the exchange still tarred us as the definition of a town time forgot.

 

      In 1977, Tomorrow's Visual Art 

  

Professor Abe Rezny and filmmaker Steve Cohen demonstrate a hologram

 

And of course, what anti-orthodoxy show could go nine seasons without an entire week of guests on the theme “The Business of Sex in America.” That was on Tomorrow in 1976.

And in nine years, any big star is going to have a celebrity feud or two, and Tom Snyder had one each of three varieties: the quickly settled, the drawn out, and the put on.

Rob Reiner, while guest hosting The Tonight Show, was reading a quick promo for Tom’s guests coming up and he thoughtlessly started it off by saying, “Most of you probably don’t stay up for Tomorrow, but…”

An incensed Tom Snyder on the air blasted Reiner’s dismissive line, and Reiner apologized in a letter which Tom read the next night. The All in the Family star said that intro was spoken unintentionally, and he realized how unfair it was. Tom accepted, saluted Reiner for his class and all was fine between them from then on.

But not necessarily with Edwin Newman, who called Tom Snyder “an incompetent” in news. The great upholder of standards said NBC should not have let Snyder anchor a primetime news special on rising health care costs (yep, that long ago; it’s the permanent American issue). Whether or not the two ever spoke about Newman’s criticisms isn’t clear, but when Edwin Newman was the host of Saturday Night Live in the early 1980s, Joe Piscopo played Snyder in a skit chatting with the real Newman.

Then there was the mutually beneficial “feud” that started in 1977 when Tom Snyder gave his opinion of the new Fernwood 2 Night, a parody of talk shows, by moving his thumb downward and making the sound of a bomb descending and exploding.

Fernwood star Martin Mull, in character as host Barth Gimble, jumped at the opportunity to get talked about among the more recognized shows, and explained to the Fernwood 2 Night audience that disparaging remarks from a person like Snyder could be expected “when you’re as old as he is and still haven’t made primetime.”

Tom Snyder played a clip of that remark on Tomorrow, then let out a resounding laugh, his oversized eyebrows flailing, baritone voice booming and cigarette smoke dancing in approval.

 

                 ____________

Brian Arbenz passed judgement nightly on "Tomorrow With Tom Snyder" during his college years in the late 1970s watching on WAVE-TV, Channel 3, in Louisville. 

The Amazing Contradiction -- What did and didn't upset Americans

One night in 2013, TV viewers of CBS’ Amazing Race saw a few minutes of the reality show’s contestants on a stop in Hanoi, Vietnam searching for clues that had been placed around a memorial to Vietnamese who died from U.S. bombing during the war four decades earlier.

The memorial was fashioned from wreckage of a downed American B-52 bomber, which was primarily what sparked an instant online protest, including the comment: "My father's friend was on that plane…. (I)t glorifies the death and killing of our men."

The VFW’s national commander wrote to CBS President Les Moonves charging that "the B-52 scene, as well as the young people singing a propaganda song, was totally unnecessary to the show's plot, which speaks volumes about naïve producers who think they're in charge when they are not."

Amazing Race contestants in Hanoi in 2013.

CBS, at the start of the next Amazing Race episode, apologized “to veterans, particularly those who served in Vietnam, as well as to their families and any viewers who were offended by the broadcast."

This single scene on CBS in 2013 brought forth from the grass roots of America what 168 half-hour shows on that network from 1965 to 1971 could not prompt.

Hogan’s Heroes, a CBS sitcom about American, British and French World War II Prisoners of War in the fictional German camp Stalag 13, was a huge hit during a period when TV comedies were silly escapism (talking horses, flying nuns).

At first, Hogan’s Heroes did draw criticism from reviewers and commentators for trivializing the suffering of prisoners of war and American World War II veterans overall. But from millions of people whose fathers really did endure the misery of fighting the Nazis – like, for instance me – came not a complaint. At least not enough to stop the show from being a ratings smash hit, and winning two Emmys during its six seasons.

In my childhood, I chuckled along with America at the hijinks of the good guy-ish American Colonel Hogan, the ineptitude of the unwittingly usurped Col. Klink, and the oafishness of the huggy rotund Sgt. Schultz, whose hilarious catch phrase was, “I know nothing, I see nothing.”

Beyond my knowledge back then was that Schultz’ constant repeating of this was his preparation for war crimes trials, and his fixation on their likelihood meant he was conceding the war, which he had no interest in waging in the first place.

John Banner, who played Schultz the harmless Nazi, was in real life almost killed by Nazis, who were anything but harmless, as European Jews such as him knew at the core of their souls.

Banner, an Austrian-born actor, by luck happened to be performing in Switzerland when the Anschluss, or forced annexation of Austria by Hitler’s Germany happened in 1938.

From Geneva, the place his theatrical troupe was staying, Banner applied for refugee status and was accepted by the United States.

Commenting on the contradiction between this personal history and his comedic portrayal of a Nazi soldier, Banner told the Los Angeles Times in the mid-1960s: “Some people ask me how we can be funny about a prison camp in the war. And I say to them, how was it possible to write about two little old ladies who killed twelve men and buried them in the basement and make it funny. Well, somebody did, and it was called Arsenic and Old Lace.”

That’s a somewhat fair comparison, because that 1941 Broadway hit was in fact inspired by a real-life couple in Connecticut who in 1917 were found to have fatally poisoned and buried male residents in their home for the elderly. And the story went from unspeakable atrocity to side-splitting comedy in a quarter century.

That’s the same elapsed time between the horrors of World War II and Americans tuning in to Col. Hogan outwitting Klink interspersed with laugh tracks and tooth paste commercials. It was as though being a POW in a German stalag was a rollicking week at summer camp.

It wasn't. "Rations were meagre. The men -- but not officers -- had to work, often at heavy labour," the website of the British Imperial War Museum said of German treatment of allied POWs. "(T)he days dragged and there was a constant battle against boredom. Prisoners tried to overcome this by staging entertainments and educating themselves. Contrary to the popular myth, most men were too weak from hunger and work to escape."

That site also said something that clashes with the one tasteful feature on Hogan's Heroes -- the progressive racial breakthrough role of actor Ivan Dixon. He played a black American POW named Kinchloe, who did secret radio surveillance for the allies, a role that launched Dixon on an acclaimed career as a director and actor. If the U.S. Army during the real World War II would not have treated an African-American fairly, the Nazis, or course, would have oppressed Kinchloe vastly worse.

The Museum's site said allied POWs from groups Nazi ideology considered "racially and politically inferior" were often starved and brutalized. 

In an American online remembrance of POWs, the National World War II Museum’s site said:

“In one of the coldest winters on record -- 23 December 1944 at Stalag Luft III in Sagan, temperatures hovered just below 0°F -- 80,000 Allied POWs were evacuated from camps on the eastern edge of German territory and forced, mainly on foot, to camps further away from the advancing Russians.”

I remember an adult leader in our Boy Scout troop, himself a World War II veteran (though not a POW), telling us circa 1970 about this brutal march of allied POWs in the snow. Yet he did not mention Hogan’s Heroes, apparently never regarding the then hit show’s lighthearted portrayal of the harsh life of POWs as a controversy.

Across America, there were no reports of angry letters to CBS about the nature of the show, no advertiser nervousness about supporting it, and very few if any complaints from Jewish or holocaust survivor organizations. Of course, POW camps, where prisoners got Red Cross packages and could write letters home, were not the same things as Hitler’s concentration camps, which were created to exterminate an entire people.

Yet, the reality of the holocaust was anything but removed from the set of this sitcom. Hogan’s Heroes cast member Robert Clary, a French-born Jew who played POW LeBeau, was a real-life survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp – a striking fact that serves both to dampen and inflame criticism of Hogan’s Heroes.

Adding to this elephant in the living room, actor Leon Askin, whose recurring role was no Schultz or Klink, but a real Nazi Gen. Burkhalter, was Jewish and a refugee from Vienna; and Werner Klemperer, who played Klink, was European-born to a Jewish father and gentile mother.

In the last 40 years, Clary has spoken about the holocaust on tours organized by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, appeared as himself in a 1982 movie about survivors gathering in Israel, and worked with Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation archiving recordings of survivors’ recollections.

“Inevitably, at his lectures someone would ask Clary how he could work on Hogan’s Heroes after what he went through during World War II,” entertainment writer Brenda Scott Royce said in her book, Hogan’s Heroes – Behind the Scenes at Stalag 13. “He is weary of repeating himself.”

Clary told Royce: “Really, with the students, it’s the first  question they ask."  Royce's book says that among Clary’s responses are: POW camps were not death camps, the character Louis LeBeau was not Jewish, and most overridingly: “I’m an actor.”

Clary does not try to frame Hogan’s Heroes as anti-fascist commentary, or poetic justice by a troupe of European Jewish performers.

“We did not deal, really, with Nazism…. As a comedy, you cannot do that,” he said in Royce’s book. “I played Louis LeBeau… and I enjoyed it.”

And so did we, for six years.

Yet flashforward to our era, and a few minutes in Hanoi is widely condemned as cold disregard for the sufferings of POWs four decades earlier.

What explains this drastic difference in the public’s perceptions? Are we wiser? Hypersensitive? Oversaturated with 24-hour opportunities to crusade instantly with the clicking of a key? We used to leave that letter of protest sitting overnight by the car keys, enabling us to reconsider our visceral reactions before mailing it in the morning.

Today, we are lumped into algorithms and echo chambers to make online marketing more precise, and we are inflamed with catchphrases of fury to make partisan fundraisers produce more cash. Paul Ryan lied repeatedly during his acceptance speech at the 2012 Republican convention and both parties watched and learned as Ipad and laptop money donations surged with each false incendiary statement about President Obama.

In 2018, spending for those crucial midterm elections, CNN reported, tallied $5.7 billion. Compare to 1966’s midterms, when war, racial equality, immigration policy, and a backlash against a president drove donors to give $24.5 million. (Adjusted for inflation and population size, that’s about 5 percent as much.)

The 24.5 million figure was considered alarmingly high back then, but in 1966 when we got all worked up about largely the same issues as today, we still had the time – or was it the callousness – to laugh it up over POWs.

MY DOVE-ORCE -- I left peace group activism. Peace was fine. Groupthink wasn't.

Protests were common in Louisville in the '90s
 and 2000s, and FORsooth documented them.
EDDIE DAVIS photo

Reconciling enemies was so central to our group’s identity that it was in our name. And in 1991, as editor of the monthly newspaper of the Louisville chapter of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, I relished the role of defying the dominant paradigm that had the mainstream of the United States welled up with intoxicating jingoism over a six-week military triumph. The Iraq we had beaten in the Persian Gulf War had been presented to the American people as their enemy for only five months, following 21 years of unquestioned backing of Saddam Hussein after he took power in 1969.

Alone among area media, our paper FORsooth (which means “in truth,” flowing from the group’s acronym) smashed the icon of American triumph, telling our community that we had not beaten Iraq in any war to stop aggression – we had returned to the throne an autocratic Kuwaiti royal family to keep our petrodollar economy afloat.

Using as sources University of Louisville engineering professor and Palestinian state activist Ibrahim Imam, civil rights radical Jack O’Dell, and American House of Saud author Steven Emerson, FORsooth introduced our readership to the concept of petrodollars.

No, the Persian Gulf War wasn’t really a “war for oil” but a “war for petrodollars.” We waged it to keep America’s dysfunctional fiscal mess artificially capable of coexisting with economic growth. Reaganomics was a fraud; his tripling of the yearly deficits would have sent the nation into depression were it not for the Persian Gulf oil state family dictatorships buying massive amounts of U.S. currency.

Brian Arbenz distributes FORsooth

 in West Louisville, where he tried to

persuade more peace activists to go.

His byline was George Morrison,
which was his legal  name in those days.

This unearned fiscal influx kept the U.S. from collapsing in its own ‘80s red ink. Moreover, the American and British economies were dependent on the family-run governments of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Yemen spending billions and billions of the profits from their 51 percent state-owned oil companies on infrastructure made by U.K and U.S. corporations, most notably Bechtel and Parsons. Both these flows of oil money back to us were known as “petrodollars.”

FORsooth eagerly said that the war was a horrible consequence of this fiscal neediness by the United States, not a shining example of our military responsiveness against aggression. We noted that when Indonesia brutally overran East Timor in 1975 and when West Pakistan rapaciously crushed the Bangladeshi independence movement in 1971, the State Department sided with the Saddam Hussein equivalents in those episodes.

Members of our Fellowship of Reconciliation chapter spoke in forums and debates at high schools and colleges, and though we were usually received favorably, one couple (the husband was a prominent criminal court judge) called us on the phone and both shouted denunciations of FORsooth writings about the war. In a TV exchange over the issue, a not yet nationally known Senator Mitch McConnell called a speaker from our FOR chapter “part of that blame America crowd.”

A Louisville woman blocks the Persian Gulf "victory parade," and in New York City, Ramsey Clark documents

 civilian deaths. FORsooth was there for both. 

What’s the matter, many in the general public asked. Can’t these peace activists see that this war was a totally good cause against a unilateral aggressor? Never mind that the U.S. had long given weapons to the side we were suddenly fighting. Don’t bother us with the fact that Kuwait had for years refused Iraqi demands that it stop illegally taking oil from oilfields under Iraq. And forget that Ivy League stuff about these petrodollars you say exist. We want to see this as simply good versus evil. Because we want that “Vietnam Syndrome” lifted!

Persian Gulf War passions soon faded, but our advocacy’s fervor didn’t. We kept denouncing unfair and fatal sanctions against Iraqis, kept calling for the establishment of a Palestinian state, backed LGBT rights and Affirmative Action, and kept demanding the end of U.S-created death squads in Latin America and the embargo against Cuba.

FORsooth frequently examined

Restorative Justice, which

corporate media overlooked.

And as I look over archived issues, it is striking that FORsooth – counter to corporate media cheeriness about the rational marketplace, the logical U.S. foreign policy and the post-racial America -- ran prescient pieces warning of soaring housing foreclosures, the specter of fascism behind the anti-Affirmative Action movement, and the unsustainability of American military power.

Renowned FOR activist John Swomley in 1998 foresaw precisely our

situation today

As the years went by, planes went into the World Trade Towers, our military went into Iraq, and the FOR and its paper FORsooth remained steadfast and unafraid to challenge all the dominant paradigms.

I decided to step down as editor in 2011 and cut back to part time work writing and helping a new crew do the publishing. After 21 years, I needed to slow down from a demanding if personally fulfilling regimen of researching, writing, opining, editing, driving 60 miles each issue to and from the printing plant, and then distributing the monthly FORsooth around parts of Louisville and Southern Indiana – all while working other full time jobs.

I absolutely loved doing all this, yet I also gained contentment of a different sort from stepping down. I had more time for unstructured, spontaneous face-in-the-crowd activism. Everyone was expressing appreciation in person and in letters to the editor for my decades of work. More than once, a stranger recognizing me in a sidewalk encounter praised my work and mourned my decision to retire. The chapter paid me a cash gratuity that was larger than I expected or deserved. Everything was harmonious. The future was bright.

Four years later, I left the Fellowship of Reconciliation. My long and deep association with FORsooth ceased. A planned stint on an FOR community radio station never happened. I have discontinued working with all the peace groups of which Louisville’s FOR chapter served as a sort of umbrella, groups with names like Interfaith Paths to Peace and the Council on Peacemaking.

Peace organizations are problematic. The peace part is fine. It’s the organization that is often the problem.

The veneer of my compatibility with group activism here began to crack in 2015 when I published a thoroughly documented column that examined the Middle East conflict as more than just a unilateral struggle for a Palestinian homeland. To be sure, I made it clear their nation deserved a homeland as much as Israelis did and that I firmly grasped that Israel’s settlements in the occupied territory were illegal. I said that the U.S. in the '70s should have made aid to Israel contingent on the settlements being removed.

But specifics in my column and the sidebar I published about petrodollars drew the ire of the Louisville FOR steering committee. As I see it, the groupthink was disturbed by things I wrote.

To summarize, my column and sidebar said:

*The $185 billion in U.S. aid to Israel since 1948 needs to be seen in the context of the whole story of the U.S. checkbook in the Mideast and Southwest Asia. Since '48, the United States has given $114 billion in aid to Egypt, $59 billion to Iraq and $52 billion in aid to Pakistan. Whereas Israel’s practices of demolition of Palestinian houses, onerous checkpoints and illegal settlements have been bad, Egypt, Pakistan and Iraq also have histories of awful human rights abuses against minorities.

*There is much more to our monetary aid to the Mideast than federal budget outlays. Persian Gulf petrodollar lobbies funded by our gasoline purchases have wielded power comparable to the Israeli lobby (the AWACS plane deal, U.S. militarizing of the Gulf, and even businesses which were seeking deals with Saudi Arabia pressuring South Carolina’s PBS affiliate into blocking a Frontline report on Saudi human rights practices).

*The much described apartheid is present only in the occupied territories, not all of Israel, and a Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions strategy should be more precisely focused on that occupation, not all of Israel. That makes sense – we’re out to end Israel’s bad policies, not its existence. And we can win the wide circle of supporters like we did with South African divestment if we make this distinction.

*My conclusion: peace activists need to look at reversing the arming of all sides, instead of focusing only on our arming of Israel. The excessive militarization of the Middle East overall is the chief hindrance to a Palestinian homeland and Middle East peace. As part of this, we need to face facts about Hamas’ continuing call for Israel’s destruction, while we keep fighting against Israel’s destruction of the Palestinians.

I fully agree, but alternative ideas for a strategy were not welcome.
EDDIE DAVIS photo

My piece seemed to echo those 1991 unorthodox positions that the Persian Gulf war was not plainly a crusade for good versus evil, but maintenance of a web of addictions. I was applying the same principles to this greater Mideast war.

Looking at how both sides are implicated in a conflict is the very life blood of reconciliation. But the Fellowship of Reconciliation wasn’t having it.

What I called for in my column went against a national FOR position, I was told during a meeting.

First of all, I responded, I don’t see any FOR position unambiguously clashing with what I wrote (A national FOR leader had said in a Louisville talk we covered that violence by both sides in the Mideast hampered peace efforts).

Secondly, so what if there is a clash? FORsooth had published pieces from area activists expressing views conflicting with national FOR positions on such matters as the Cuba’s human rights record and U.S. reparations for slavery.

I told the FOR chapter they were selectively pulling rank, stifling initiative, and refusing to honestly critique a side we support in a struggle. All of this is what turns good causes into bad ones, I said.

The meeting was civil if frank, and I have continued to get along well with FOR members when I encounter them. It has been an amicable divorce. And for me, a liberating one.

I immediately began to see that my “life partner” the institution of organized peace activism hadn’t been a good fit for me all along. I had been accommodating it by mentally looking the other way over matters I needed to speak up about – yeah, this is sounding just like a divorce, isn’t it?

 

Another defining moment was when I was told by a more experienced colleague, "That's endemic of the peace movement," when I had complained about a poor choice in 1990 by a peace delegation to Iraq -- including FOR members -- trying to head off the Gulf War. The group had assembled for a photograph joining hands around a highly military-themed monument memorializing but also celebrating Iraqi soldiers who had died in the Iran-Iraq War. It seemed to be showing solidarity with that 1980s war effort by Saddam Hussein. Opposing a U.S. war against a government should not equal a value judgement on that government's tactics, a distinction that picture failed to make.

Among issues other than their intolerance of my Mideast views was the matter of Louisville peace groups’ comfort with the privileges brought to them by racism.

I loved being in our city’s black community West Louisville, and I went there often for shopping, eating, hunting down news stories, getting my car serviced. I liked going there just because it is part of my community – as it is, not an afterthought. So did several other people in the FOR and associated groups. 

But the majority of white Louisville FOR members were not very different from whites in the city overall in the extent to which they lived by unexamined segregationist habit. Nationally, the group rested on racial and economic privilege, and not merely to the degree that is inevitable because of the nature of our society.

As time went by, I saw that the unconscious white comfort-zone bonding that underlay peace activism in Louisville was more conscious than I had thought.

After a consortium of groups organized a couple of night vigils against the Iraq War in white, bohemian neighborhoods, two of us suggested by e-mails that the next one be held at the African-American operated Lyles Mall, a shopping and social services center in the heart of black West Louisville.

“We’ll think about that,” was the e-mailed reply. Thinking was all they did (if they even did that). These organizers, whose activism had taken them to El Salvador, Vietnam and Palestine, would not hold a vigil three miles away in their own city’s black community. Some had attended events and rallies in West Louisville, but would they venture there on their own initiative? Would they roam beyond their tribe?

I recall procuring a photographer for a photo shoot at the same Lyles Mall parking lot for a “person in the street” feature I was writing, and again for a story in Shively, a racially mixed working-class suburb bordering West Louisville.

This photographer, who was white and grew up in a peace activist family, had very seldom been to West Louisville, and had never been to Shively. Yet, she had made two youth delegation trips to the Soviet Union.

She was completely happy to do these photo assignments, and moreover, I don’t wish to make lump-sum observations. There were some peace activists in Louisville who traveled to conflict points in the Third World and who had great involvement with and consciousness about the African-American community. There needed to be more, however. And whites here need to go to the black community on a wide basis, and interact with the people there as individuals, not just representations of issues.

EDDIE DAVIS photo

I knew a couple of white peace organizers who told of feeling unwelcome in their first efforts working in black Louisville organizations, and whether or not they realized it they were using these initial bad experiences as excuses to stay with white activism.

There were other incompatibilities between me and the peace groups, including their scant contacts with media that could have made us known much better in the community overall, not just among our genre.

Many activists would insist that through FORsooth, marches, leafleting and letters to the editor, they were reaching out, but FOR organizers did not try to hold a meeting with the Louisville daily newspaper’s editorial board, or to establish a rapport with any reporter. They often would tell the media about an upcoming event with too-short notice.

 

And the superb street protest photography of progressive documentarian Eddie Davis, which he made available to us at-cost, was underappreciated by FOR chapter leaders. His vibrant pics of marches and speakers told the story of an era, but most in the chapter preferred static podium or mug shots.

To address this problem of missed opportunities, I persuaded the FOR to include among its breakout sessions at its 1994 FOR National Conference, which was held in Louisville, one called: “Getting the Word Out -- Using Media,” which I would present.

Of the hundreds of FOR members and other activists attending this conference, two attended that break out session.

Well, three, if you count the man who fell asleep as I was conducting it. Really. This was a rather blunt hint that my idea of what makes good strategy was not shared by the body of the FOR.

I began to think that I -- despite being liked by the people in the Louisville and national FOR – was not really where I belonged.

Too much slumber was anything but the problem for a few other activists in the wider movement. They seemed unable to rest minds that were always alarmed and unable to establish priorities.

Though FOR members overwhelmingly were comfortable with themselves and emotionally mature, in the greater circle of these groups in Louisville, a few people were sectarian absolutists who lacked judiciousness or patience. Some had litmus tests – “If that position is in your platform, I’m walking!” – that keep the left spinning its wheels.

A few of the more fervent activists were mixing their own struggles from past personal troubles with the worldwide struggle. It is fine for people with such problems to be in activism, but sometimes those who worked with them grew tired of seeing meetings, marches and submitted commentaries weighed down by fist-clenching, unnuanced self-assuredness that jet fuel won’t melt steel, and so forth.

I know personal difficulties can’t and shouldn’t be fully separated from our world views, but please - a certain amount of separation is needed to improve our efforts at both.

Within weeks of leaving the realm of organized peace activism, I could see how minimal its impact had been on the wider community here. I could see how even groups and committees populated by good and sensible people were often rendered ineffective by overstressed zealots. And I also became aware of the problem of activists who - though well intentioned - are quasi professionals who are inwardly turned to each other, rather than toward the community.

And those who eagerly go to El Salvador and Russia, but only think of traveling 15 minutes to the west side of their own city.

Brian Arbenz has worked for peace, economic equity and reconciliation for more than 40 years, and will continue to, unencumbered by group politics.