People From Cleveland

"Throughout the war, the four of us- Marshall, King, Arnold, and myself- worked in the closest possible harmony. In the postwar period, General Marshall and I disagreed sharply on some aspects of our foreign political policy. However, as a soldier, he was in my opinion one of the best, and his drive, courage, and imagination transformed America's citizen army into the most magnificent fighting force ever assembled. In number of men and logistical requirements, his army operations were by far the largest. This meant that more time of the Joint Chiefs were spent on his problems than on any others- and he invariably presented them with skill and clarity. King had an equally difficult task. His fleets had to hold Japan at bay while convoying millions of tons of supplies for the second front. He was an exceptionally able sea commander. He was also explosive and there were times when it was just as well that the deliberations of the Joint Chiefs were a well-kept secret. The President had a high opinion of King's ability but he was a very undiplomatic person, especially when the Admiral's low boiling point would be reached in some altercation with the British. King would have preferred to put more power into the Asiatic war earlier. He supported loyally the general strategy of beating Germany first, but this often required concessions of ships which he did not like to make. He could not spare much, since, until the last months of the war, he was working with a deficit of ships. America was fighting a two-ocean war for the first time in its history."

"The President of the United States of America takes pleasure in presenting a Gold Star in lieu of a Second Award of the Navy Distinguished Service Medal to Captain Ernest Joseph King, United States Navy, for exceptionally meritorious and distinguished service in a position of great responsibility to the Government of the United States as Commanding Officer of the Salvage Force entrusted with the raising of the U.S.S. S-4, sunk as a result of a collision off Provincetown, Massachusetts, 17 December 1927. Largely through his untiring energy, efficient administration and judicious decisions this most difficult task, under extremely adverse conditions, was brought to a prompt and successful conclusion."

"Partial to Baltimore. Won fame in Massachusetts in Spanish war. The Saturday Night Club during youngster year. Then Stein and he reformed. Noon-walks. Spoons occasionally. Hops,- Well, yes! Temper? Don't fool with nitroglycerin. Court beauty No. 2. Rooms with the "Full Dinner Pail". Laugh as rosy as his cheeks."

"Admiral King claimed the Pacific as the rightful domain of the Navy; he seemed to regard the operations there as almost his own private war; he apparently felt that the only way to remove the blot on the Navy disaster at Pearl Harbor was to have the Navy command a great victory over Japan; he was adamant in his refusal to allow any major fleet to be under other command than that of naval officers although maintaining that naval officers were competent to command ground or air forces; he resented the prominent part I had in the Pacific War; he was vehement in his personal criticism of me and encouraged Navy propaganda to that end; he had the complete support of President Roosevelt and his Chief of Staff, Admiral Leahy, and in many cases of General Arnold, the head of the Air Force."

""When they get in trouble they send for the sonsabitches." Asked whether he had said said this, Admiral King replied no, he had not, but he would have if he had thought of it. They were indeed in trouble when they sent for King, bringing him from the brink of retirement to be Commander in Chief, U.S. Fleet, and King would have been ready to admit that he enjoyed a reputation for toughness and ill temper that had few equals in the upper ranks of the U.S. Navy. He took charge of that navy at the depths of its despair and lifted it to the heights of triumph. He was a hard man in a hard time, well suited to lead a fighting fleet, but he was also a thoughtful man of a breadth and incisiveness that gave him an early and enduring grip on Allied strategy. Much of the war went the way he wished it to. The strongest mind within the American Joint Chiefs of Staff was the mind of Ernest J. King."

"King's oaken hull began to split in 1947, when he suffered a stroke. His mind remained alert, but his iron-plated timbers began to creak and sag. He moved into a suite at Bethesda Naval Hospital for full-time care, and at one point he shared a floor with the acutely depressed James Forrestal, who ended his life by jumping from the sixteenth-floor window in 1949. King spent the next seven summers at the naval hospital in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. He slipped his moorings and sailed over the bar on June 25, 1956, at the age of seventy-eight. He was buried at Annapolis, home of the United States Naval Academy. The only hymn sung at his funeral was a Navy anthem, an old favorite of Roosevelt's: "Eternal Father, Strong to Save.""

"King, sixty-three years old in 1942, was as gruff a man as Nimitz was a serene one. Hard-drinking and legendarily ill-tempered, he once confessed that he had not actually uttered the self-descriptive epithet "when they get in trouble they send for the sonsabitches" but that he would have if he had thought of it. Yet King's choleric manner masked an incisive strategic intelligence, possessed of qualities that perfectly fitted him for senior command: the ability to anticipate, the capacity for penetrating analysis of his adversary's predicaments, an unerring grasp of the reach and limits of his own forces, and a pit bull's determination to seize the initiative and attack, attack, attack."

"King never forgot a grudge. Now, he's used you to get back at me."

"Admiral Ernest J. King was the exacting, hard-driving Chief of Naval Operations."

"King had grown up alone with his father in an Ohio household from which his chronically ailing mother had been removed. He was ever after a loner, a brusque man who fathered seven children but seemed to love only the Navy."

"Our Chiefs felt that they knew so little of what was really going on in the Pacific, of what the U.S. Navy planned to do, and of the amount of resources that these plans would absorb, that some enlightenment would be valuable. They also felt that 'Uncle Ernie' would take a less jaundiced view of the rest of the world if he had been able to shoot his line about the Pacific and get it off his chest."

"While Ernie King loved history, there was one story from ancient times that may have escaped his notice. As a boy, the Greek admiral Themistocles was said to have been taken by his father to a deserted beach, where his father showed him the carcasses of old war galleys lying sun-baked, prostrate, and neglected. That, his father told him, is how a democracy treats its leaders when they no longer have use for them. King had once objected to a wartime pay raise for soldiers, sailors, and officers. When the shooting stopped, he said, a grateful nation would distribute just rewards to the men who had brought them safely through the fire. When asked if he would write a book about the war, King replied that while he would do it, the book would have only two words: "We won.""

"The admiral who shaved with a blowtorch had given no thought to life after the war. Like Patton, Grant, Sherman and other men who stare transfixed into the bonfires of Mars, King settled into the realization on the day Japan's emissaries signed the surrender documents, he had accomplished his life's work. "King was a lost soul when the war was over," said one friend. "He had served his purpose. He had done what he had set out to do. He had won his part of the war." There would be a massive demobilization as the Navy returned its men to civilian life. The Pearl Harbor inquiry would become public, Congress would slash the Navy's budget, and old salts like himself would be put out to pasture, to make way for younger admirals."

"In connection with the matter of command in the field, there is perhaps a popular misconception that the Army and the Navy were intermingled in a standard form of joint operational organization in every theater throughout the world. Actually, the situation was never the same in any two areas. For example, after General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower had completed his landing in Normandy, his operation became purely a land campaign. The Navy was responsible for maintaining the line of communications across the ocean and for certain supply operations in the ports of Europe, and small naval groups became part of the land army for certain special purposes, such as the boat groups which helped in the crossing of the Rhine. But the strategy and tactics of the great battles leading up to the surrender of Germany were primarily army affairs and no naval officer had anything directly to do with the command of this land campaign. A different situation existed in the Pacific, where, in the process of capturing small atolls, the fighting was almost entirely within range of naval gunfire; that is to say, the whole operation of capturing an atoll was amphibious in nature, with artillery and air-support primarily naval. This situation called for a mixed Army-Navy organization which was entrusted to the command of Fleet Admiral Nimitz. A still different situation existed in the early days of the war during the Solomon Islands campaign where Army and Navy became, of necessity, so thoroughly intermingled that they were, to all practical purposes, a single service directed by Admiral William F. Halsey, Jr. Under General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, Army, Army Aviation, and the naval components of his command were separate entities tied together only at the top in the person of General MacArthur himself. In the Mediterranean the scheme of command differed somewhat from all the others."

"King brought great operational experience, a powerful mind, and an eccentric and unbending personality."

"With Forrestal as Navy secretary, King knew retirement would follow quickly. He had gotten along with Knox only because the Chicago newsman knew nothing about the Navy, admitted it, and stayed out of King's way. Forrestal would not. During the war, King had cursed Forrestal out in the halls of the Navy Department, and had browbeaten him into staying out of naval operations. "I didn't like him, and he didn't like me," King said."

"No fighter ever won his fight by covering up- by merely fending off the other fellow's blows. The winner hits and keeps on hitting even though he has to take some stiff blows in order to be able to keep on hitting."

"While directing the movements of his ships in the western Pacific, Yamamoto, who fully realized the potential strength of the United States, was watching for the reaction of Nimitz and the possible approach of reinforcements. Neither King nor Nimitz could be lured into false moves by any of his strategems or taunted into premature action by newspaper critics at home."

"Ernest J. King, Chief of Naval Operations, was a spare, no-nonsense officer with a strong distaste for publicity, some enemies among the Army and British brass, and one of the sharpest strategic minds in Washington."

"Adorno retains the concept of the system and even makes it, as target and object of critique, the very center of his own anti-systematic thinking. ... His most powerful philosophical and aesthetic interventions are all implacable monitory reminders—sometimes in well-nigh Weberian or Foucauldian tones—of our imprisonment within system, the forgetfulness or repression of which binds us all the more strongly to it."

"The moderns were interested in what was likely to come of such changes and their general tendency: they thought about the thing itself, substantively, in utopian or essential fashion."

"Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good. It is a more fully human world than the older one, but one in which "culture" has become a veritable "second nature.""

"Postmodernism theory is one of those attempts: the effort to take the temperature of the age without instruments and in a situation in which we are not even sure there is so coherent a thing as an "age,"or zeitgeist or "system" or "current situation"any longer. Postmodernism theory is then dialectical at least insofar as it has the wit to seize on that very uncertainty as its first clue and to hold to its Ariadne's thread on its way through what may not turn out to be a labyrinth at all, but a gulag or perhaps a shopping mall."

"It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations."

"... how works that posit the end of history can offer any usable historical impulses, how works which aim to resolve all political differences can continue to be in any sense political, how texts designed to overcome the needs of the body can remain materialistic, and how visions of the "epoch of rest" (Morris) can energize and compel us to action. There are good reasons for thinking that all these questions are undecidable: which is not necessarily a bad thing provided we continue to try to decide them."

"It would seem essential to distinguish the emergent forms of a new commercial culture - beginning with advertisements and spreading on to formal packaging of all kinds, from products to buildings, and not excluding artistic commodities such as television shows (the "logo") and best-sellers and films - from the older kinds of folk and genuinely "popular" culture which flourished when the older social classes of a peasantry and an urban artisanat still existed and which, from the mid-nineteenth century on, has gradually been colonized and extinguished by commodification and the market system."

"Fruit trees in this world are ancient and exhausted sticks coming out of poor soil; the people of the village are worn down to their skulls, caricatures of some ultimate grotesque typology of basic human feature types. How is it, then, that in Van Gogh such things as apple trees explode into a hallucinatory surface of color, while his village stereotypes are suddenly and garishly overlaid with hues of red and green?"

"The problem of postmodernism - how its fundamental characteristics are to be described, whether it even exists in the first place, whether the very concept is of any use, or is, on the contrary, a mystification - this problem is a t one and the same time an aesthetic and political one."

"Utopia is a spatial matter that might be thought to know potential change in fortunes in so spatialized a culture as the postmodern; but if this last is a dehistoricized and dehistorizing as I some times claim here, the synaptic chain that might lead the Utopian impulse to expression becomes harder to localize. Utopian representations knew an extraordinarily revival in the 1960's; if postmodernism is the substitute for the sixties and the compensation for their political failure, the question of Utopia would seem to be a crucial test of what is left of our capacity to imagine change at all."

"The last few years have been marked by an inverted millenarianism in which premonition of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that (the end of ideology, art, or social class; the "crisis" of Leninism, social democracy, or the welfare state, etc., etc.,); taken together, all of these perhaps constitute what is increasing called postmodernism."

"The success story of the word postmodernism demands to be written, no doubt in best-seller format; such lexical neoevents, in which the coinage of a neologism has all the reality impact of a corporate merger, are among the novelties of media society which require not merely study but the establishment of a whole new media-lexicological subdiscipline."

"If the ideas of a ruling class were once the dominant (or hegemonic) ideology of bourgeois society, the advanced capitalist countries today are now a field of stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without norm. Faceless masters continue to inflect the economic strategies which constrain our existence, but they no longer need to impose their speech (or are henceforth unable to); and the postliteracy of the late capitalist world reflects not only the absence of any great collective project but also the unavailability of the older national language itself."

"This matter of periodization is not , however, altogether alien to the signals given off by the expression "late capitalism," which is by now clearly identified as a kind of leftist logo which is ideologically and politically booby-trapped, so that the very act of using it constitutes tacit agreement about a whole range of essentially Marxian social and economic propositions the other side may be far from wanting to endorse. Capitalist was itself always a funny word in this sense: just using the word - otherwise a neutral enough designation for an economic social system on whose properties all sides agree - seemed to position you in a vaguely critical suspicious, if not outright socialist stance: only committed right wing ideologues and full-throated apologists also use it with the same relish."

"Theories of the postmodern - whether celebratory or couched in the language of moral revulsion and denunciation - bear a strong family resemblance to all those more ambitious sociological generalizations which, at much the same time, bring us the news of the arrival and inauguration of a whole new type of society, most famously baptized "postindustrial society"(Daniel Bell) but often also designated consumer society, media society, information society, electronic society, or high tech and the like. Such theories have the obvious ideological mission of demonstrating, to their own relief, that the new social formation in question no longer obeys the laws of classical capitalism, namely, the primacy of industrial production and the omnipresence of class struggle."

"What "late" generally conveys is rather the sense that something has changed, that things are different, that we have gone through a transformation of the life world which is somehow decisive but incomparable with the older convulsions of modernization and industrialization, less perceptible and dramatic, somehow, but more permanent precisely because more thoroughgoing and all-pervasive."

"If we are unable to unify the past, present, and future of the sentence, then we are similarly unable to unify the past, present, and future of our own biographical experience or psychic life."

"In sum, the accommodation of the Republic is not to the spokesmen for the many, which is to say that it is not political. Instead, the accommodation is to the few, or the few as they were in their youth, like Glaucon and Adeimantus, who must be tested by the conversation in order to determine their fitness for philosophy. This is the peculiarity of the Republic: to speak out on the most dangerous of things and to exercise restraint or a rhetoric of indirection in the discussion of that which seems least likely to endanger the city, real or imagined. In slightly different terms, what Socrates calls dialectic enters the city surreptitiously, and it must do so in order to make the city safe for philosophy. In exchange for this safety, philosophy offers to the city a foundation for justice that is exaggerated in the account of the beautiful city but in its more sober version is verified by the course of Western history."

"Howard Wise, [was] an art patron and a former dealer who gave important early support to the technology in art movement in the United States... In 1964 his Howard Wise Gallery in Manhattan presented On the Move, the first survey in the United States of contemporary kinetic art. The gallery's exhibition Lights in Orbit three years later was the first comprehensive survey in this country of kinetic light art. Mr. Wise also organized the first exhibition of the budding video art movement, TV as a Creative Medium, in 1969, and two years later he founded , a nonprofit organization that distributes artists' videotapes and provides editing and post-production facilities for independent videomakers."

"Howard was very important because he went against the mainstream in his gallery."

"I thought I would combine my artistic experience with my business experience and start a gallery in Cleveland because there really was no gallery of any stature there. I felt that Cleveland was artistically avery closed and ingrown community. The only real modern work that was shown was local work . My objective in opening a gallery in Cleveland was to bring the art from various centers in Europe and America."

"The shape and direction of video art's accelerated growth, since virtual nonexistence in the mid-'60s up to the present, has been influenced primarily by the priorities of major funders-the New York State Council on the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, among others . It has matured without the bevy of individual collectors who support more established forms such as painting and sculpture. Within video's media arts centers and funding organizations, there are many advocates, administrators, and curators who provide an infrastructure which enables artists to produce and distribute work, often doing so with little publicity or recognition. In this realm, Howard Wise stands out as an individual benefactor who preceded and has supplemented private foundations and public monies. He has been a central figure in the visibility, production, and acceptance of video art. For almost 20 years, he has been one of the few patrons of video art."

"Howard Wise is one of the people who is responsible for the idea of an alternative television."

"Ever since Marshall McLuhan has become a household name, people have become aware of the tremendous force, both actual and potential ; that TV is having and will have on their lives."

"My father resigned during the Depression, so I had that responsibility at an early age. Like any other business, the Depression had hurt us a lot and we had a lot of labor unrest among the 300-400 employees. I decided that I had better take a good look at the situation, and I got in touch with a labor consultant . He suggested that since we were a relatively small business we could keep an intimate relationship with the employees, so I did that. We had 10-year and 25-year clubs, and when it came my turn to get the gold insignia, or whatever it was, for my 25 years with the company I realized, "My God, 25 years," and I decided to quit."

"We’re going to tell you about what it’s like, and what just might happen to you, and if you still want to be a writers we’ll know you’re insane."

"“How quickly I could clean this desk,” she thought, “if only the wastebasket were larger.”"

"They wait in clutching haste for fate to fill the inside straight of their happiness."

"People who live their lives by proverbs waste their time doing lots of stupid things. “Getting even is the best revenge” is my motto."

"Marriage was something I thought happened only to other people, like fatal traffic accidents."

"I liked being the screwer rather than the screwee."