Tank Man's Victory for Humanity

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No one seems to know for certain who he was — or is — after 25 years.

He has come to be known as "Tank Man" — TIME magazine dubbed him the "Unknown Rebel."

It was a Sunday morning in Beijing in early June 1989. It was Saturday night in Texas where I was working for a daily newspaper.

My memory is that it was around 9 or 10 at night, a couple of hours from our deadline for the Sunday morning press run — which would have made it 10 or 11 on Sunday morning in Beijing.

In China, it was the day after the Chinese military forcibly suppressed the Tiananmen Square student demonstrations. That was the lead story on the front page of our newspaper, as it probably was for nearly every paper, but, considering the time difference, it was also a developing story, and we were trying to keep an eye on it.

Back in that newsroom in Texas, most of the pages were done, and we were sort of killing time while we waited for whichever articles we were expecting locally — but we knew that, if events began to unfold rapidly in China, we might need to substitute a revised version of the wire story we had on our front page — possibly at the last minute.

That's how it is sometimes in the news business. Well, actually, that's how it always is. The nature of news being what it is, anything could happen at any time, and a newspaper's editors have to be ready for the unexpected.

With Tiananmen Square, we had the luxury (if you want to call it that) of knowing where to watch for dramatic events to unfold — but we didn't know the when part, and that is just the way it is. Most of the time, when you're working the copy desk, you just have to hope that, if something dramatic does happen, it happens before your deadline.

Well before your deadline.

And a major event did unfold that night.

As we watched the TV in the corner of the newsroom, "Tank Man" walked out into the middle of the avenue and confronted a column of Chinese tanks. I watched in stunned silence with the rest of my colleagues. If someone had asked me about it at that moment, I would have replied that I expected to see the tanks roll over that man live on TV.

It had already been a bloody weekend in Beijing.

But the lead tank tried to go one way, then another, rather than crush the man. The man moved each time so that he remained in the tank's path. Eventually, the tanks' crews shut off their engines.

Tank Man then appeared to scold the tanks and their crews.

In the aftermath of the event, some people identified Tank Man as being an individual named Wang Weilin, a resident of Beijing, but that has never been confirmed, and no one seems to know what became of Tank Man after he was taken away. Some say he was executed; others say he is alive and well.

Back in Texas, we had to remake the front page to run a picture taken by Associated Press photographer Jeff Widener. Turned out to be one of the most iconic images of the 20th century.

But it was one of those events that can't really be captured in a single photograph. You have to see the video; in 1989, that could only be done via television. The advances in technology in the last quarter of a century have revolutionized the news business. In the 21st century, a newspaper can post a video to its website that expands on articles and photos in its print edition.

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Tank Man carried no weapons when he confronted the tanks, just two shopping bags. I couldn't tell what they contained.

It was almost comical at times, the way he chided the tanks. I was reminded of a father bawling out misbehaving children.

But the Chinese military was hardly made up of children, and I suspected at the time that Tank Man probably would be taken into custody and executed.

I hope he is still alive.

But, even if he is not, Tank Man was a reminder of words that were spoken by educator Horace Mann 130 years earlier: "Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity."

On this day a quarter of a century ago, Tank Man did win a victory for humanity.

When East Met West

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"This was the week that changed the world."

Richard Nixon

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In hindsight, I don't think I really understood the significance of what was happening when, 40 years ago today, Richard Nixon began his historic trip to the People's Republic of China.

I wasn't old enough. I had a general understanding of the fact that the United States had been fighting a war in Vietnam (actually, I couldn't remember a time when America wasn't involved in that conflict — for awhile, I guess I must have thought that Vietnamwar was all one word, like damnyankee — and I must have figured that it was a constant fact of life). I knew that there was another war being waged — called a "Cold War" — but I didn't know what that meant.

To my young mind, Nixon's trip to China seemed terribly contradictory. As I understood things (and my understanding was shaped considerably by my Democratic parents, who made no secret of the fact that they loathed Nixon), Nixon escalated American military involvement in Vietnam, presumably because of the belief that if Vietnam fell to the Communists, so would the other countries in the region, and that could not be allowed to happen — yet he went to great lengths to ease tensions with the Communists in China.

And, later that year, he went to the Soviet Union, where he ushered in detente and signed the Anti–Ballistic Missile Treaty. It didn't make sense to me. Nixon, I had heard, was a virulent anticommunist. Why was he going to such great lengths to be a friend to the Chinese?

I have come to understand that Nixon was walking a diplomatic tightrope, trying to end a war in southeast Asia without yielding the territory to the Communists while simultaneously opening lines of communication with the Communist superpowers.

I have also come to understand that Nixon was one of the early practitioners of triangulation. His visit to China threw genuine fear into the Soviets, who were concerned about the possibility of an alliance between the Chinese and the Americans. Consequently, they were more agreeable to detente.

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That was the key, I was told. Only Nixon, with his anticommunist credentials, could have done something as globally stunning as his trips to China and Russia in 1972, playing one against the other and, essentially, getting more from each than he originally sought.

By anyone's standards, that would be a particularly challenging mission, but, in the spring of 1972, while the Democrats were trying to settle on a nominee to face Nixon in the general election that fall, Nixon went to China and got tons of free publicity.

In a different (yet still similar) sense, it was the foreign policy equivalent of Lyndon Johnson's domestic agenda, most notably his support for civil and voting rights legislation.

Racism was never confined to the South, but it was most prominent there, and, for that reason, I have heard it said, it took a president from a Southern state who rose from humble beginnings to get those laws pushed through Congress.

When LBJ told the nation "We shall overcome," it had more significance than it would have if it had come from the mouth of Johnson's patrician predecessor from New England.

Similarly, when Richard Nixon told the nation that his trip to China had changed the world, it had the weight of legitimacy behind it. Nixon was often — and justifiably — criticized for not being honest and sincere, but his visit to China went beyond the man and embraced the moment and charted a new course for the future.

So many things have changed in the 40 years since Nixon's trip to China. Before he went there, most Americans probably thought of a medieval culture, a closed society, when they thought of China. Or they thought of the stereotype of Asian markets producing inferior goods.

After television brought images of the modern China to America, that perception was changed forever.

It's Tough to be President

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"It's good to be king and have your own world
It helps to make friends, it's good to meet girls
A sweet little queen who can't run away
It's good to be king, whatever it pays."

Tom Petty

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Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think the fantasy of the presidency that fueled the Barack Obama campaign in 2008 has matched the reality.

I think Obama and the millions who believed in the simplicity of the "Yes, we can" slogan really and truly believed that a president is a kinglike figure whose word is law.

If something is not so, their reasoning went, it is because the king has not willed it to be so. Not for any other reason.

Well, it has taken more than half of Obama's term, but it seems to be dawning on some people that it's a lot more complicated than that. Many of those who supported him in 2008 are not so eager to support him today, at least not on the premise that he is going to be some kind of transformational leader.

They have seen that there are clear limits to what a president can do. It has nothing to do with race or gender or religion.

Rather, it seems to have a lot to do with the fact that man simply cannot control things to the extent that he likes to believe he can.

That's a lesson we never seem to learn. We thought we had conquered nature a century ago with the unsinkable Titanic, and few things seemed to have changed by the age of the space shuttle.

Obama's campaign began with an emphasis on ending the military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has taken baby steps in that direction. Mostly they have been responsible steps and seem likely to keep things relatively stable, but things are boiling over in other Middle East countries now, and that is affecting gas prices here in the United States ...

... which, in turn, affects the nascent economic recovery upon which the very lives of millions of Americans depend.

Obama isn't an economist. I'm sure he imagined addressing all sorts of things as president — injustice, racial and gender inequality, educational deficiencies, health care, energy self–sufficiency, etc. Fiscal policy, belt tightening, that sort of thing wasn't high on his agenda.

I'm sure the last thing he wanted to do as president was promote job creation. But that is what destiny demands of the individual who is president at this time.

All the things Obama wanted to achieve depended on things remaining about where they were when he entered the presidential campaign in 2007. But the economy officially began its decline later that year, and job losses began to mount after Obama had claimed the nomination.

That changed things dramatically.

Obama used to be a community organizer. Like anyone else whose work requires them to promote a special interest, his only concern was getting his share (or more) of the pie. And it was from this perspective that he ran for president.

But now he is president, and, although he occasionally reverts to form, he slowly seems to be realizing that being president isn't what he — or his supporters — imagined it to be.

And, with fewer people working — and with many of those who are still working taking home a paycheck with less buying power — there is considerably less flexibility in either the presidential agenda or the federal budget.

Obama tried to have it his way. He devoted his energy to everything but job creation through the first half of his presidency — and tried to let nature take its course. But he has seen that nature doesn't always cooperate.

There was the three–month distraction of that oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, but that was in our hemisphere. Now there is the triple threat of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster on the other side of the planet in Japan.

As well as the spreading unrest in the Middle East.

Even with all that is happening in the world today — and whatever may happen in the world in the months to come — now Obama has no choice but to devote all of his efforts to seeking dramatic — and less likely with each passing day — improvements.

Dubya once joked (well, I assumed he was joking) that everything would be easier if the U.S. was a dictatorship.

I was reminded of that when I read in the New York Times — in a piece that was published the day before the earthquake in Japan — that Obama "has told people that it would be so much easier to be the president of China."

You have to put it into the correct context, I think, because of the proximity of China to Japan. It was mentioned in connection with the instability in the Middle East.

I really doubt that, upon reflection, Obama would say that being president of a country with a population roughly four times that of the United States would be any kind of bargain — especially with all that is going on in that part of the world now.

Yet Michael Goodwin of the rival New York Post seized on that and wrote that there were two ways to interpret: "One is that Obama resents the burden of global leadership that comes with the American presidency. The other is that he longs for an authoritarian system, where he need tolerate no dissent.

"Under either or both interpretations, his confession ... means Obama has hit a wall."

Perhaps.

I'm inclined to think that things look a lot different from the inside than they did from the outside — where, on the night of his election, Obama reminded his fellow Americans that "we cannot have a thriving Wall Street while Main Street suffers."

It's tough to be president.

A Dramatic Day

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Until recently, if anyone thought of Oct. 15, 1969, it probably was in connection with the World Series, which was known at the time — and is still remembered today — as the triumph of the Miracle Mets, the Amazin' New York Mets, over the heavily favored Baltimore Orioles.

October 15 wasn't the day that the Mets wrapped up their improbable championship — that happened the next day — but it may have been the day when the Mets' triumph became all but official.

On that day, the teams met in the fourth game of the World Series. The Mets held a two games to one advantage. After dropping the opener on Oct. 11, the Mets got a narrow win in Game 2 and a 5–0 victory in Game 3 and entered Game 4 with the chance to build a 3–1 lead, which has been virtually insurmountable in the annals of World Series competition.

Oct. 15, 1969, was a controversial day. For one thing, it was Moratorium Day, a global demonstration against American involvement in Vietnam. The mayor of New York (where Game 4 was to be played) ordered flags flown at half–staff in honor of all who had died in Vietnam, but the commissioner of baseball, in an apparent effort to keep the Series out of the political debate, said the American flag would be flown at full staff during the game.

That wasn't all, though. A photograph of Mets pitcher Tom Seaver, who lost the opener to Baltimore, was used in antiwar literature that was circulated outside New York's Shea Stadium that day — even though Seaver insisted the photograph had been used without his permission.

Seaver was slated to pitch on October 15 as well. He shut Baltimore out through eight innings, then yielded a run in the ninth and the game went to a 10th inning, when the Mets scored the winning run. They clinched the championship with a 5–3 victory the next day.

For the most part, public attention was devoted to Moratorium Day and the fourth game of the World Series on Oct. 15, 1969. I know of nothing that President Richard Nixon said about the World Series, but he did say that, while activities like Moratorium Day were expected from antiwar activists, "under no circumstances will I be affected whatever by it."

Nixon's actions in Vietnam were, indeed, apparently unaffected by the massive protests, but, within the last week, we have heard, through England's Telegraph, of actions that Nixon apparently took to prevent a nuclear war on that day.

The Telegraph reports that a Chinese historian claims that, on Oct. 15, 1969, the Soviets were about to launch a nuclear strike against China but were dissuaded by Nixon's assurance that, if they did, the United States was prepared to attack more than 100 Russian cities, thereby starting World War III.

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If that is true — and I have no reason to think it is not — it may lend some credence to a scene from Oliver Stone's 1990s biopic "Nixon," in which Nixon, Henry Kissinger and other Nixon advisers discussed foreign policy over dinner on the presidential yacht.

In the movie, Nixon talked about playing Russia and China against each other and using "triangular diplomacy" to get better diplomatic deals from each. Introducing the nuclear option may have been a high–stakes way to nudge each into doing as he wanted.

Nixon played hardball, as his handling of the Watergate scandal clearly demonstrated. In spite of extremely vocal opposition in this country to American involvement in Vietnam, Nixon followed his own course, initiating a policy that was, if anything, even bloodier than the approach that had been taken by the much–reviled Johnson administration, and he always claimed that, if he had not resigned the presidency, the Americans never would have been driven from Saigon less than a year after he relinquished power.

But perhaps there was more to it than that.

I was never an admirer of Nixon, but one thing was clear to me when he was alive and has become even more so in the years since his death. Things were never simply one way with Nixon. He was calculating, yes. He was manipulative. He was paranoid and secretive, and writer Richard Reeves may well have been correct when he observed that Nixon "assumed the worst in people, and he brought out the worst in them."

Nixon's personality may have been predisposed to wreck his presidency, but there were also aspects of his character that seemed to make him more empathetic than normally would be expected from someone who has often been described as a narcissist.

Perhaps Nixon was offended by the Soviet Union's belligerence, its reckless approach to the use of nuclear power only seven years after the Cuban missile crisis.

Even a narcissist may have a sense of what he/she believes to be correct — if only because it violates the narcissist's view of his/her role in events.

As a young man, Nixon was quite a poker player. During his time in the Navy in World War II, Nixon won enough money playing poker to finance his successful 1946 campaign for a House seat. Perhaps he felt that the Russians were forcing him to reveal his hand so he upped the ante.

The real truth may never be known.

But it is a fact that neither the Soviets nor the Chinese — nor, as a result, the Americans — used nuclear weapons on Moratorium Day 1969.

The only bombshells that week came in the world of baseball.

The Earthquake in China

I've been getting the feeling that there isn't the proper appreciation in this country for the genuine human tragedy that is unfolding in southwest China in the aftermath of Monday's earthquake.

There seems to be more attention being paid to the outcome of the West Virginia primary -- which appears to have been a foregone conclusion.

The New York Times reports that the death toll (as of Tuesday evening) exceeds 13,000."Officials said they thought the death toll could still climb dramatically higher as workers broke through to the affected areas and the full scope of the disaster became clearer," the Times reports.

A lot of things are still unclear at this point. China's giant pandas in two of the nation's panda reserves were alive, but it wasn't certain how they would get food. According to CNN, heavy road damage may make it difficult to get food to the captive animals.

They say the earthquake measured 7.9 on the Richter scale. That's pretty intense. Compare it, if you will, to the most powerful earthquakes recorded in North America in the last 20 years.

The strongest earthquake I'm aware of in North America since the dawn of the 21st century registered 6.0. The epicenter was in Parkfield, California, along the San Andreas Fault. It occurred in September 2004.

Before that, you'd have to go back 10 years earlier, to January 1994, when Northridge, California, in the Los Angeles area, sustained a 6.7 earthquake. There were 72 deaths, 12,000 injuries and $12.5 billion in damages. The quake also revealed some deficiencies in seismic resistance in modern low-rise apartment construction.

Before that, there was a 7.2 earthquake in Landers, California, in June 1992. It had an aftershock that was 6.4. The 7.2 quake was said to be the largest earthquake to have occurred in the contiguous United States in 40 years.

And before that was the famous "World Series Earthquake" in San Francisco in October 1989. Actually, the epicenter was in Lomo Prieta. It measured 6.9, and it killed 67 people.

It was also the first earthquake to be broadcast live on TV, occurring as Game 3 of the World Series, between Bay Area rivals San Francisco and Oakland, was about to begin.

Some friends of mine were living in the area at the time. The quake struck during the time of day when rush hour has traffic tied up, but many employers let their workers leave early that day so they could attend the game or watch it on TV. As a result, rush hour wasn't heavy at all.

One of my friends, Jane, regularly commuted to and from work along the Bay Bridge between San Francisco and Oakland. When the quake struck, I had no idea if she or her husband, Mike, had been injured or killed. In truth, Jane later told me, traffic had been so light that she had been off the bridge for several minutes before the quake struck.

On an ordinary day, she would have been in the middle of the bridge -- which, as TV reports showed a horrified nation, was the scene of deadly drama for those motorists who were unlucky enough to be trapped there (as you can see in the photo on the left).

In spite of the absence of heavy traffic, there were vehicles on that bridge when the quake struck. And some of the occupants of those vehicles were killed.

In fact, one of the main things the Lomo Prieta quake taught seismologists was that roads and bridges in the Bay Area were not built to be as earthquake-resistant as they needed to be.

My friend, Mike, happened to be at home when the quake struck. Their home had survived the legendary quake of 1906, and it survived this one, sustaining only minor damage.

But it was days before I knew how my friends had fared. For about three or four days after the quake, I kept getting busy signals every time I tried to call San Francisco.

As it turned out, I didn't get in touch with them. They got in touch with me. When the phone lines cleared up enough, they started calling everyone they knew. Their call got me up out of bed. Even though I had to be at work at 5 in the morning, I was never so glad to get a phone call in my life!

Apparently, my friends told me later, the quake brought out the gallows' humor in many Bay Area residents. My friends told me there was something of a cottage industry locally for T-shirts bearing the message "I Survived the Pretty Big One."

The strongest quake in recent years actually occurred under water, in the Indian Ocean, on the day after Christmas in 2004. It spawned the tsunami that took the lives of more than 200,000 people. By some estimates, it was the second strongest earthquake in recorded history -- between 9.1 and 9.3.

When the quake struck in China yesterday, I experienced a sense of deja vu. A friend of mine, Kyle, and his wife are visiting in China. I had received an e-mail from Kyle during the weekend so I knew he was in China. But China is a big place, and I didn't know where he was.

So I sent him an e-mail last night asking if he was OK. He responded to my e-mail about 8 hours later.

He reported that he was fine. They had to evacuate the building they were staying in, and being in an earthquake was a new experience for Kyle. But he reported that the trains were running and they were about to leave for Beijing in another hour.

As far as I can tell, Kyle was about 450 miles from the epicenter of the quake, and the train was going to take him farther east. In Beijing, he will be more than 1,000 miles away from the scene of the destruction.

But this is a reminder (as if we needed one) that, when death comes, it won't bother to ask if you've accomplished all your goals, paid off all your debts, resolved all your issues. It won't inquire whether your death will cause pain and/or hardship for those you leave behind.

If it did, I suppose we could all take our cue from Ed Wynn, who played a crafty salesman in an episode from the earliest season of The Twilight Zone in 1959.

Wynn's character thought he could trick "Mr. Death" by getting him to agree that Wynn's character wouldn't be taken until he had fulfilled his lifelong ambition of "making a pitch for the angels." When Mr. Death agreed to the request, Wynn's character promptly decided to retire from sales -- immediately.

His reasoning was that death couldn't take his soul if he never made his pitch.

Mr. Death won in the end, though -- just as it will against the rest of us. Death always wins.

Economic status does not matter. Achievements will not be considered.

Age is no factor -- school children appear to be among the victims of the earthquake in China. In fact, whenever the loss of life can be numbered in the thousands or higher, inevitably you will find pregnant women and young mothers with infant children on the casualty lists.

This isn't the first major earthquake in China this year. Less than two months ago, on Good Friday, a 7.2 struck in a remote mountainous area of the country.

That part of the world has been prone to powerful earthquakes over the years. Monday's quake seems to have something to teach the authorities in that part of the world about being better prepared for the next disaster.

I hope the rest of the world will heed the warnings this disaster has given us.