T. Belman. To implicitly compare Pres Trump’s fitness to command with that of Queeg’s is ridiculous. Pres Trump has an impressive list of accomplishments to his credit. That in itself proves his competance. It is scandelous that the Democrats say otherwise.
Also Greenwald’s argument that past accomplishments or acts should entitle Queeq to unquestioned support is also ridiculous.
The 25th Amendment to the US Constitution got a little inspiration from a passionate Jewish lawyer in ‘The Caine Mutiny’
[..]
Herman Wouk’s 1951 novel is about a group of Navy officers who remove a volatile captain from his command of a minesweeper when he freezes up during a typhoon. The officers are tried for mutiny and acquitted. The Pulitzer Prize-winning book, the subsequent play and the 1954 movie made “Captain Queeg” a byword for erratic leadership.
Humphrey Bogart earned an Oscar nomination for his performance as Queeg, who nervously spins a pair of ball bearings in his hand and obsesses about missing strawberries before breaking down on the witness stand.
Jose Ferrer, left, portraying Lt. Barney Greenwald, Van Johnson, center, as Lt. Steve Maryk, and Humphrey Bogart, as Captain Philip Francis Queeg, appear in the 1955 Hollywood movie ‘The Caine Mutiny.’ (AP Photo)
Less well remembered is the twist at the end: At a celebration of the mutineering officers’ legal victory, Lt. Barney Greenwald, their defense lawyer, dresses them down for undermining Queeg before the typhoon. Greenwald insists that had the crew given Queeq the loyalty he deserved, he would have had the confidence to take control during the storm.
In the novel and the play, Greenwald’s Jewishness is made explicit.
“Greenwald’s Jewishness is at the moral heart of the piece, drama that rings true every moment,” a New York Times critic said in a positive review of the 1981 revival.
Men like Queeg, Greenwald tells the acquitted officers, protected the country from fascist invasion before the United States entered World War II, while the officers pursued lucrative careers until they were drafted.
The final scene of the film — Hollywood! — denudes Greenwald’s speech of its Jewish content but preserves the power of its message: The men who protected Americans from fascism deserved better consideration.
“The Germans aren’t kidding about the Jews, they’re cooking us down into soap over there,” Greenwald says in the novel. “I just can’t cotton to the idea of my mother melted down into a bar of soap … I owed [Queeg] a favor, don’t you see? He stopped Hermann Goering from washing his fat behind with my mother.”
The 103-year-old Wouk, who is Jewish, based the novel on his World War II experiences in the Navy. He served aboard two minesweepers, including the USS Zane. In addition to “The Caine Mutiny,” he wrote “The Winds of War,” a popular 1970s novel that made the plight of Europe’s Jews central to its sweeping account of US involvement in World War II. He has also written a primer on Judaism, “This is My God.”
Greenwald’s agonized plea that commanders deserve fuller consideration of their ability to lead before they are removed informed the process that led to the passage of the amendment in 1967, as The Washington Post reported last week.
John Sutherland, a Harvard law professor asked to advise on the issue, told the US House Judiciary Committee in 1956 about how he stayed up all night reading ‘The Caine Mutiny.’”
“Did you finish it in one night?” asked Emmanuel Celler, D-N.Y., the chairman of the committee, who eventually drafted the 25th Amendment with Sen. Birch Bayh, D-Ind.
“I finished it about 2 o’clock in the morning,” Sutherland said. “It is a bully novel.”
Sutherland apologetically added that he did not mean to “depreciate the solemnity” of the hearings by comparing the deliberations of Congress to a popular novel, but Celler, who was Jewish, appreciated the mention of Wouk’s work.
“It is an excellent analogy,” Celler said.
Sutherland likened a vice president who assumes the presidency simply by declaring the president incapable to Napoleon, who crowned himself emperor.
In this file photo taken on June 20, 2018 US Vice President Mike Pence speaks as US President Donald Trump looks on before signing an executive order on immigration in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC. (AFP PHOTO / Mandel Ngan)
“Didn’t he seize the crown and put it on his own head?” he asked before adding that would not be acceptable to Americans.
John Feerick, a revered New York lawyer who helped draft the amendment, told the Post that the film was a “live depiction” of a constitutional crisis. The “Caine” analogy was not new to Feerick: He cited it in a 1965 book on presidential successions.
“A Vice-President would be on precarious ground in a case where a President had become insane, refused to declare himself disabled, or disagreed with the decision of the Vice-President,” he wrote at the time.
In those circumstances, Feerick wrote, a vice president might be “too reluctant to act or, if he did act, he might be labeled a usurper.”
The solution in the amendment is a complicated formula: A vice president must muster a majority of the Cabinet to declare to Congress that the president is no longer fit to govern, whereupon the vice president assumes the presidency. Should the president declare himself fit to govern, he reassumes the presidency, and the vice president and the Cabinet have four days to reassert to Congress that the president is indeed unfit. The vice president then reassumes the presidency for up to 23 days while Congress considers whether the president is fit to govern. Ousting the president requires a two-thirds majority in the Senate and the House of Representatives.
Three weeks and a two-thirds majority to consider whether a commander deserves the humiliation of ouster. Barney Greenwald would approve.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.