The Fromson File

No sooner than the mourning for Christina-Tayloir Green had been put behind Tucson than we in Los Angeles were jolted by another incomparable episode of gun madness. The scene occurred on the grounds of Gardena High School, southwest of the central city.

Police helicopters flew overhead. Detectives swarmed onto the school grounds, Several kids were handcuffed for questioning. It was like a scene from NYPD Blue, only this one was not in Hollywood. It was set by a 17-year old boy, carrying a loaded 9mm Baretta handgun in his backpack. From what eyewitnesses said, he had placed his backpack down on a desk and a gun inside accidentally went off. Two 15-year olds: a boy and a girl were wounded. The girl was rushed to a nearby hospital where she underwent lengthy surgery, suffering from a skull fracture and brain trauma. The boy had been grazed in the neck by the same bullet. They were lucky. Unlike the nine-year-old girl in Arizona, they will survive. The names of the wounded students, as well as the boy with the gun, were momentarily withheld. Everyone involved claimed the shooting was an accident.

It occurred in mid-morning that several students described as a climate of fear. Everyone, it seems, was afraid of the persistent gang violence that has been present on the school grounds for some time. But why then did school authorities not deal with the problem forcefully and immediately? If the boy with the gun apparently was both afraid and angry, why didn’t his parents detect his fear and, moreover, how did the boy obtain the gun and from whom? Unanswered questions for sure.

The following day a school security guard was shot point blank in the chest near a campus across town – in the San Fernando Valley. The bullet knocked the guard down and though a protective vest prevented the bullet from entering his body, the gunman got away. Nine schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District — the largest district in the country — were on lockdown for much of the day until the suspect was captured.

After reading accounts of these incidents, I endured the chills and a flashback of memory on the day after one commemorating the birthday of a man of peace; an apostle of non-violence who himself was destined to die some 50 years later. My thoughts went back to 1965 when I walked alongside Dr. Martin Luther King as a reporter on the March from Selma, Alabama.

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Tags:   Gabrielle Giffords · guns · Jared Loughner · lausd · Los Angeles · Martin Luther King · tucson · vietnamNo Comments.

I have seen too much human blood spilled in my lifetime — of people I did not know — mostly in wartime. I was trained to use a rifle and a handgun at Fort Ord. California before shipping overseas as a GI. In self-defense, I killed Chinese soldiers in Korea. In Vietnam, I had to write a letter of condolence to the parents of a gallant U.S. Army advisor who was killed a few feet away from me in a Vietcong ambush. Now, whenever I go to Washington, I make a point of visiting the Vietnam memorial to lay flowers aside the name of Captain Byron C. Stone, a West Point graduate, who was killed with three other advisors. He was the only son of an elderly couple in Mobile, Alabama. Nearly four years later, in the midst of the Tet Offensive, when it was still unclear that the Vietcong had been routed from Saigon, I kept a .38 caliber weapon alongside my bed as a protective measure in an apartment I shared with another journalist. I kept the pistol until I returned home to the United States and then threw it in a garbage can. I did not feel comfortable having the weapon anywhere near my family.

Eventually, when two armed teenagers were killed in a high school gang fight in the San Fernando Valley, I chastised their parents in a broadcast I did in Los Angeles, citing the story of my experience in Vietnam. I also made a strong plea for gun control. The reaction was predictable. Dozens of angry letters came in from radio listeners. Two of them actually called me a fool. Others said I was just naïve, and a few threatened my life.

A decade or more later, the idea of gun control is still a hot button issue; out of reach and beyond the will and courage of most politicians in the U.S. Congress or most state legislatures to face down one of the strongest and most endowed lobbies in history, the National Rifle Association.

The tragic events that unfolded last Saturday could alter the national discourse. The reporting of the past 72 hours or more has reminded us of the other tragedies that have confronted us in our public and private lives since the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy as well as the innocent victims of Columbine and Virginia Tech. And the list grows. Now it is up to the most articulate figure in the land to put the national pain into some perspective; that man, of course, being the president of the United States.

From the horrific story in Arizona several positive symbols have emerged: first, the heroism of several unarmed people who had the courage to tackle and disarm the killer, Jared L. Loughner. Secondly, the team of surgeons who operated feverishly to save the life of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, and finally, American newspapers that have published the story in enormous and riveting detail. The daily press ain’t dead yet.

Certainly, the reporting by Marc Lacey of the New York Times, and journalists of the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, as well as other daily newspapers have given people across the country as complete a picture of the tragedy as anyone could possibly expect. The public may have forgotten that the talking heads of television and radio could not thrive without the newspapers that land on their laps every morning. The printed word, be it on paper or online or any other form of technological wizardry has helped to inform any American with the patience to read and understand the terrible story that has grabbed the nation’s conscience by the throat.

The confusing hypocrisy that always seems to have divided Americans is the issue of
how we control the proliferation and use of guns. It is what almost every decent law enforcement officer in the land wants. I hesitate to use the commonly used phrase of gun control because that frightens many office seekers like lead poisoning. Nontheless,the muffled debate until now is between those who want to end gun violence and are appalled by the tragedy in Tucson and those who equally are shocked , but fervently stick to their constitutional right to own a gun; even among those who do not know how to use one. The debate always is the aftermath of a senseless massacre that has shocked the nation once again.

Unfortunately, the supporters of gun control automatically want to silence the loudmouths on talk radio and television or dispense with Sarah Palin In spirit, I understand them, but as a First Amendment fanatic, I believe Beck, O’Reilly and Limbaugh have the right to voice their reckless or cynical points of view, however absurd they may be. Americans are entitled to hear and evaluate them, but NOT act on them as we might assume Jared Loughner did in attempting to assassinate Congresswoman Giffords. We do not know at this point what it was that affected the unstable gunman, but odds are that we will not be pleased by what we hear once Loughner agrees to testify in court.

The unanswered question is who is giving the purveyors of their exaggerations and inflammatory language the means to pollute the air waves? After all, as consumers we deserve truth in packaging and should know the names of the principal owners of our television and radio networks. Of course, most Americans are wise enough to know already. Nonethless, it would be useful to be reminded of just who is making it possible to present the warped view of American politics 24/7. We know it ain’t a Fox. But it is in one sense, the well-heeled multi-billionaire who may be too embarrassed to admit he is the man who makes it possible to peddle the poison on the Murdoch Television Network.

Tags:   Fox News · Gabrielle Giffords · gun control · guns · Jared Loughner · media · vietnamNo Comments.

An obituary deep in the pages of the New York Times on Thanksgiving Day disclosed the death of Huang Hua, perhaps one of the most discreet, influential negotiators in China’s contemporary history. He was unknown to most Americans. In the 1930s, he helped the American journalist, Edgar Snow, write a series of newspaper articles about China that eventually was turned into a best-selling book about Mao Zedong and his rebel army entitled, “Red Star Over China.” Snow never acknowledged Huang’s assistance in any of his reporting.

In 1944, he served as an interpreter, accompanying the U.S. Dixie Mission into the caves of Yenan where, for the first time, American military officers and diplomats got their first glimpse of, and extended meetings with, Mao Zedong and other Communist Party officials. It was a controversial initiative that angered the ruling Nationalist Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek and eventually led to the firing of John Stewart Service from the U.S. State Department and cost Colonel David Barrett the likelihood of his promotion to Brigadier General.Their treatment was a forerunner of the Cold War madness that led to the dismantling of America’s outstanding corps of China diplomats that was to follow.

I first met Huang in 1971 by which time he had risen through the ranks of the Communist Party and was China’s ambassador to Canada. I was on a flight to Ottawa to cover the visit of Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin as a forerunner of my CBS News assignment to Moscow. Huang happened to be on the same plane and I had a history of the Dixie Mission written by Barrett that was in my bag. I offered it to Huang and his wife because it contained a photo of him with the U.S. delegation. That seemed to break the ice for me and I managed to keep in touch with him, using Chinese professors as conduits over the years.

Huang proved to be remarkably at ease with Americans probably because of his earlier background as a student at a Beijing university run by U.S. missionaries, his friendship with Snow and his contacts with Presidents Nixon, Carter, Bush and Reagan and a number of journalists after he rose to become foreign minister. They were days, particularly after Mao’s death, when cordiality and not ideology occasionally ruled the day.

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Some day, there will be a sharp awakening for the need to join those of us who have been arguing for years to launch a national railroad initiative. Unlike the dim-witted politicians in New Jersey, Wisconsin, Virginia and elsewhere, common sense dictates the need to get on the track and truly put America back to work.

The GOP should stop yapping about Paul Krugman of the New York Times by calling him “a liberal” as if that makes a difference. Here’s the common sense he has reminded us of today:

We are no longer the nation that used to amaze the world with its visionary projects, We have become, instead, a nation whose politicians seem to compete over who can show the least vision, the least concern about the future and the greatest willingness to pander to short-term, narrow-minded selfishness.

Nonetheless, the initiatives to build high speed electrically-powered trains for densely populated states and even for the country at large are stubbornly opposed by Republican lawmakers at both the state and federal levels. Too costly, the neanderthals argue. Well, they ought to re-examine their history to realize that another Republican, President Dwight David Eisenhower, knew how to cope with the problem back in the 1950s. He took the necessary cash out of the bloated defense budget and with it, built the U.S. freeway system, enhancing the country’s growth and prosperity for decades to come.

If only the contemporary brand of Republicans had the courage to think like Ike, who after all was the highest ranking general in the 20th century until he ran for and was elected to the presidency. President Barack Obama and his Republican torturers should hightail it out of Iraq and Afghanistan and think about America first. Dispense with the cockamamie notion that U.S. funding will help to foster democracy in those two “countries” and invest the sorely-needed capital where it belongs.

Right here at home, we need to build rail cars, lay track and install electrification, construct stations along hitherto unavailable passenger routes and with them encourage the growth of industry and provide jobs for the millions of Americans who want and need the opportunity to go back to work for their families and their dignity. In short, do what every sensible country in the world already has done by encouraging economic growth within eyesight all over the landscape. Apparently too few members of Congress possess the imagination, let alone the passports, allowing them to have traveled abroad to see for themselves. But, without a doubt, a nation rail initiative would arouse the hopes of millions of Americans who are tired of hearing about “infrastructure” and are not quite sure what that means anyway.

Get on my imaginary cross-country, whistle-stopping train, President Obama, and remind people it was the railroads that fostered the nation’s economic progress a century ago. It will be 21st Century railcars, powered by electricity, that will liberate us locally, regionally and nationally from our gas-guzzling, single-passenger coffins that make our existing roads nightmares, day and night. If the public won’t respond and the struggling auto manufacturers won’t build small cars, then tax the hell out of them. Together, they are endangering national security, or have Americans become so dumb that they cannot imagine what will happen in the event of a major earthquake or other natural disaster when the roadways will be cluttered with cars and the immediate dispatch of ambulances, fire engines and police to the rescue is needed?

WAKE UP AMERICA AND PUT OUR PEOPLE BACK TO WORK!

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