The X-Files Retrospective: Morgan & Wong, The Creators And Deconstructionists of 10-13, Part 1: Origin Stories

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Educating on Education, Part 5: What The Argument on Ruby Bridges In Florida Gets Wrong About...Well, Everything

 

Note: The next article in this series is going to be among the most controversial I’ve ever written because so much of the subject has essentially become a choice of one extreme or the other. If you argue that any part of this subject has the slightest level of nuance, you are branded as a bigot by the loudest voices in the room.

I have been reluctant to delve into the subject at all for that reason but since the inspiration for this series was, in a way, inspired by an article that raised the very points I’m going to – and put this argument in a way that not only had I never seen before but is almost never discussed – it needs to be talked about. And it has to be talked about in regards to education because it symbolizes, perhaps better than anything else I have argued in these series, that these battles are not about the children at all.

I have spent a lot of time and energy arguing against the outrage that has come to pass for public discourse. I don’t deny that many people have a right to their anger, and I don’t argue that anger is always unproductive. I just refuse to accept it as an alternative to solving the problem.  I know that both sides have staked their claims on this issue and many won’t budge. I expect this won’t change their minds. But I’ve gotten a lot of favorable responses over the last few months from people who seem willing to listen. It’s to those of you this article is written.

 

Over the last several months one of the biggest shouting points by progressives and Democrats have been the restrictions of teachers not being allowed to teach black history as part of the curriculum in elementary schools and high schools. Florida in particular has become a flashpoint for this level of outrage.

As I’ve argued in this series, the educational process in school is not designed to help children or teenagers to learn anything in a realistic fashion. This is true in many subjects but especially history. It is not until college that one can fully get a grasp of the nuances that history has.  I fundamentally think the outrage about how history is being taught in our schools is misplaced given how it is fundamentally taught in our schools: both sides are essentially arguing about what questions their children will have to memorize for a standardized test. Like almost everything else you learn in high school, most graduates will forget the parts that they don’t care about the moment they graduate, if not at summer vacation. The only reason I came away with a love of history at all was because my father and grandfather were historians and I had an inside track. I may very well have known more about history that some of my teachers (who, for the record, were not thrilled when I pointed out they were leaving stuff out). Growing up in the 1990s I learned very quickly how flawed the textbooks and  sources I were reading from were; I seriously doubt they’ve improved in thirty years.

One of the major flashpoints that I wish to discuss is one which I have heard about a Florida teacher not being allowed to either teach the story of Ruby Bridges in his class or even show the 1998 Disney TV movie about her life. I am a scholar of movies and know quite a bit about Disney’s films of that era and I had not heard of that particular film which according to imdb.com aired on January 1998 on The Wonderful World of Disney. There are for the record reasons I find it very ironic that this subject has become a flashpoint. I will deal with them in ascending order of controversy.

Let’s start with the near certainty that none of the students who would have been the intended audience would have given it the ‘reverence the subject the outrage seems to warrant. I speak from personal experience. I lost count of how many movies I watched from elementary school to my last year of high school – probably dozens – and I’ll admit that I was paying attention to every detail. I’m relatively certain I was the only one.

The attitude of a student when any teachers shows a movie in class is generally one of two things: “Good, I don’t have to pretend to pay attention” or “I won’t have to bother to actually read anything for the next two or three days.” (The average period was forty-five minutes when I was in school; it would take at least two classes to watch a film like Ruby Bridges). The reactions were always among laughing or talking throughout the entire film, doodling or doing something else rather than watch the movie. I can imagine that’s only gotten worse now that everybody has an iPhone.

Of course, as The Simpsons once told us, when any teacher shows a film it essentially means they want a free period themselves.  This was always considered a sign of surrender when I was in school. Maybe it’s moderated a bit over the last quarter of a century but I seriously doubt it when it comes to high school. A teacher showing a film is less someone trying to instruct rather than one who doesn’t want to prepare a lesson plan for a couple of days.  Maybe the Florida teacher had purer motives than most of the instructors I had growing up but the realist in me tends to doubt it.

This actually gets to the next point, and I’m going to go off on a slight tangent. I find it very ironic that so many on the left have found themselves overwhelming pro-Disney the last few years because it kind of flies in the face of not only everything the left stands for but so much of Disney’s own history. This is, after all, the same studio that had crows that were essentially minstrels in Dumbo went seventy years before it finally had an African-American lead in one of its animated films, and Song of the South, need I say more?

Then there’s the fact that Disney is an evil corporate overlord which, as I have illustrated over and over, the left has absolutely no problem vilifying on any occasion. The changes that have happened in Disney over the past five or six years are little more than the pop culture equivalent of the tokenism they excoriate Bud Light and Target have done in the past year.  Disney has a famously horrible background when it comes to racial and gender hiring and has not radically improved it behind the scenes over the last decade.  And its not as if Disney’s creations that seem to highlight inclusion are literally original.  I find it hard to fathom how having an African American Little Mermaid is some kind of racial breakthrough when it’s literally the definition of posturing.

But as we all know, Hollywood has always been one of the right’s outrage points and anything that can be done to make conservative medias heads collectively explode is in the case of Disney – and only Disney – enough to make many on the left basically forgive and forget a century of horrible corporate behavior.  At best Disney can be seen as the lesser of two evils, but while the left seems to always consider evil ‘evil’ in any other case, in the case of Disney, they’re the hero. This is clear when they talk about the fact there is a Disney movie made about Ruby Bridges that can’t be shown in class.

If ever there was evidence that the people shouting have no idea what they’re talking about, let me enlighten them. To be clear, I never saw Ruby Bridges. But I saw more than my share of Disney movies in my childhood and into young adulthood.  And from what I remember, the typical Disney approach to a dark time in history – be it World War II, immigration or the Civil rights South – has always been the Disney approach to history. And when it comes to race in particular, they would make the kind of films that either involved white saviors or the so called ‘Magical Negro’. You know the kind of movies that so many African-Americans have spent their lives raging about ruining their culture.

Now to be fair, I don’t know if Ruby Bridges is that kind of movie.  The director Euzhan Palcy has an impressive track record. Her 1989 movie A Dry White Season is one of the great films on apartheid that I’ve ever seen. The fact that the writer of the film Toni Ann Johnson’s most famous other scripts are Save the Last Dance and Step Up 2 is less encouraging, but I don’t know Hollywood. The film did win several awards including ones for the lead Chaz Monet. But having lived through so many movies of this type (Perfect Harmony, Back To Hannibal and Goodbye Mrs. 4^th of July are among the ‘best’ of those) I find it extremely hard to believe that the Disney version of Ruby Bridges life is as wrenching a film experience as Glory, Malcolm X or, yes, A Dry White Season were before it had been made or that Selma and 12 Years A Slave were. This is, after all, a movie for children by Disney.  I expect that the ugliness that Bridges went through is the most toned down version possible. The PG rating itself would seem to be a give away: how can one truly get the nature of Bridges’ experience down when it would have surely impossible in that film to use the word that she clearly heard the most often throughout her experience?

And is that last fact that gets me to what I just can not accept about Ruby Bridges and what I’m certain that whatever course she was taught in or the movie of her life was inadequate to express: what it was really like for her. This next part will no doubt inflame the most people but since it is the part I just can’t wrap my head around, that in a sense inspired this essay and is at the heart of what this series is about, I think it needs to be said.

Ruby Bridges was six years old when she became the first African-American child to attend a whites-only school in Louisiana. According to the page on Wikipedia, her parents responded to a request from the NAACP to volunteer to participate in the integration of the New Orleans school system. Her father was resistant but went along because her mother thought this was better to give her daughter a better education but to take this step forward for all African-American children.

‘Volunteered her’. We’ve seen the famous portrait by Norman Rockwell. According to Bridges, “she saw the crowd” but because she lived in New Orleans, “she thought it was Mardi Gras.” She was walked to school by marshals, who were proud of her courage. Did anybody even consider the fact that she might not have comprehended what was happening to her?

Only one person in the entire school agreed to teach Bridges. For one year, that teacher taught her along as if she were teaching a whole class.

Bridges was threatened with poison, marshals only allowed her to eat the food she brought from home. She could not participate in recess.

We commemorate Ruby Bridges as a hero. In actuality she went through an entire year of intense trauma, threats of violence and was essentially isolated from a proper educational experience in the name of progress. And there’s no indication she was asked if she wanted to do this. She was ‘volunteered’. Her parents basically put her through a year of immense torment that no doubt has to have given her immense emotional scars that probably she has had to deal with for the rest of her life. The fact that Bridges has essentially disappeared from public view not long after this happened is hardly surprising.

Ruby Bridges life is heroic, but her heroism is not that of Martin Luther King or Rosa Parks or Cheney, Goodman or Schwerner. Her celebration has nothing to do with Ruby Bridges but what she represented to other people. And that is the part that I keep having problems with.

Ruby Bridges, like so many other African-American students was sent into a battle she was not asked to fight. She and so many other African-American children in the South were more or less sent into segregated schools, with the military often having to stand guard, with a faculty made up almost entirely of segregationists and the hatred of an entire community – if not an entire  region of the country - centered on them.  I argued in my previous articles how difficult is to be in school for anybody, and in my article on The West Wing, I pointed out how schools have a way of ‘making kids different than other kids’ – something that all of these students had to know going in.

To be clear I believe entirely in civil rights, in every aspect of integration, in every aspect of equality. I have little doubt people will read the previous paragraph and call me a bigot regardless. But look at the world we live in now. Just as it was fifty years ago, children are still at the center of wars they don’t understand as to why are being fought.  Many of them didn’t ask to be put at the center of these wars, but their parents, then as now, considered their concerns irrelevant to the battles they are waging.  That these battles are being fought in a world that most of the combatants never set foot it should not shock us – the soldiers are never a factor to the generals or politicians.

Because that’s what these kids are – soldiers. Not ones who volunteered to fight, but who have been drafted into it and have no true understanding of the consequences around them. Most of them are either unaware of the stakes or focused on other things. It has always been hard to go to school in America as its always been hard to be a child in America. Because no one cares what your opinion is. So many adults have made up their minds about you in advance. Even the people who say they have your best interest at heart have their own agendas – and sometimes those people are your parents. I don’t presume to speak for anybody, but I’m pretty sure that Ruby Bridges wishes in her heart of hearts that she’d never had to have a childhood that anybody makes a docudrama about because none of those stories are happy ones, even if they are made by Disney. She might say in public she’s proud of her fight, but I bet a part of her wishes she could have spent her childhood playing with other kids uneventfully rather than having to have marshals with her walking to and from school. 

The left argues that we shouldn’t be teaching ‘the great man’ story of history. I think it might be worth remembering that for many of the ‘great people’, they honestly wish they never could have a place in history at all.  Some parents might be angry that Ruby Bridges isn’t being taught in history classes. If they do, the first thing they should tell them is that Ruby Bridges never had a choice to become part of history at all.

 

 

Educating on Education, Part 4 - Kind of: What My Favorite Episode of The West Wing Has to Say About The Proxy Battles We Wage in Schools

 

Note: This article could just as easily appear in other series I have written –  it could fit in the Disruption Series, my arguments with extremists, even TV criticism. I am including it as part of this series for two reasons. The obvious one is that, as you’ll see, it deals directly with both education and the way both sides turn it into a war. The other is because Sorkin is far more upfront about it and makes the kind of arguments that you honestly think need to be listened to.

 

As I mentioned in a previous article every Thanksgiving my family and I rewatch the ‘Shibboleth’ episode of The West Wing.  In that article, I mentioned how it took me years to realize the deeper meaning behind one of the subtle arguments Sorkin was making.

The article in this series is about a point that the viewer picks up fairly immediately and has as much context today as it did almost a quarter of a century. It deals with the flashpoint of religion and education, but it makes it very clear that there are far more sides to this than the black and white that the talking points will tell you.

As the episode begins Josh tells C.J. that they are holding off announcing the recess appointments because they want to add one more name: Josephine McGarey, Leo’s sister. When C.J. asks Josh if this was about Leo, Josh says with slight glee: “This is about Toby picking a fight on school prayer.” “He’ll get one,” C.J. says. The rest of this story is fundamentally focused between Toby and Leo.

We first see Toby discussing in it the Oval Office with the President. It’s clear that Bartlet does not like the idea that much. Toby (Richard Schiff) tries to argue that it’s not patronage if she’s qualified and Josie is – she’s a respected educator, the former superintendent of schools in Atlanta and a significant Democrat. Bartlet reminds him the recess appointment is used because it assumes the Senate will have no problem with the nominee. “They will have a significant problem with this nominee.” Toby says this is about starting a debate on school prayer, but that’s not the only reason. Bartlet says he’s known her for over twenty years and ‘he thinks she ‘All About Eve’.

This reference will not make a lot of sense to those who get the majority of Sorkin’s references. For those who might not know the movie, Eve Harrington is an aspiring actress who becomes a star after worming her way into the life of several creative people and is willing to climb over innocent people to get there. Toby deflects by saying: “I wouldn’t cast her in a play” but he doesn’t realize the deeper meaning. He will soon.

Leo (John Spencer) knows the moment that Bartlet tells him she’s on the list. He asks if she called the President. When he tells him no, his reaction is: “I’m amazed.” Toby says she called him. “I’m less amazed.” Then he gets the real problem: “Don’t get on Toby’s band wagon. It’ll take you to a place we are not prepared to go.” Toby and Leo spar and Toby says he will take the meetings with Republican leadership who will tell him very quickly how dumb an idea this is.

In the second act,  Toby does meet with aides to Republican leadership. Toby sometimes can have a certain amount of arrogance and he goes into this meeting with the same level of it. He lectures the aides on how the recess appointment work, degrades them when they mention Josephine badly and dances around what the problem is with her. When they tell him you know what, he says: “I do, but I’d like to hear you say it.” When they say she’s anti-religion, he cheerfully tells them she’s the deacon at her church and teaches Sunday school. Finally they say: “she’s against prayer in school.”

Toby’s reaction is blasé: “ You know who else is against school prayer. The Court of Appeals. And your problem with her is when she was in superintendent she enforced the law.” When one of the aides points out that somewhere between fifty and sixty percent of the people think its wrong, Toby tells him: “Laws don’t work that way! We don’t ask for a show of hands!” (Remember a Democrat is saying this in 2000. How far we haven’t come.)

At the peak of his bluster he tells the aides that if they want to wage this fight, it will give them a second term: “But not because I’m right and you’re wrong – even though I am and you are – but because I’m just a little better at this than you.” Then one of the aide speaks up and tells him: “Not this time. This is a photograph of her.” When Toby asks what she’s doing, he says three words: “Enforcing the law.”

The third act is where all of this ends up playing out and it is the biggest reason this article is here and now in another series. Toby is trying to spin this for Leo saying that this is a photo of Josie breaking up several students praying. Leo goes into detail saying that: “It is a photo of her standing next to two cops, handcuffing two students who are kneeling for prayer, and one of the cops has his hand on his night stick.” Toby weakly says: “It’s not good.” Leo goes in for the kill: “One of the students is in his marching band uniform. One of the students is black. And you’re saying it’s not good? That’s a penetrating analysis from the White House communications director.”

Leo then tells his secretary to get his sister on the phone. When she leaves he said: “I begged you not to do this.” He laughs off the excuse Toby says that the post needed to be filled and Toby finally gets the core of why he did this: “It brings the problem front and center.” Exasperated Leo says: “Great! And what prize do we get for that?”

Leo’s statement is yet another example of the difference between trying to govern in a rational and civilized manner and how many extremists -  in this case, those on the left who feel very strongly about issues like this – think its better to argue for issues they think are relevant and lose badly on them then to try and have fights that aren’t winnable. I mentioned in my previous article on Shibboleth that Josie tells Leo she doesn’t shrink for a fight and Leo says she looks for them. As someone who has read to much by the left – and that includes so much about education  - they are doing this not to solve problems but to start fights.

Leo then tells Josie that she has to withdraw her name from consideration in order to make sure the President doesn’t look bad by having to do the same. Josie is angry about it and their argument gets to the core of what so many battles in society are waged -  and how it is seen by those who shout the loudest and those who have to govern.

Leo tells Josie about the picture and when she denies knowing, she says: “There were a lot of pictures.” Leo tells her this one is special. She knows it the handcuffs, but still tries to fight. Leo then tells her that a few years ago on a campaign strong through the south, he met a photographer who told him that he had Josie to thank for launching his career in photojournalism. Josie still pleas ignorance and then Leo shouts: “Look at the attribution on the photo! You called the press in!”

Now you could argue that all of this is just another story of posturing, except Sorkin gives Leo and Toby two speeches that make it very clear that they are not just looking at it from the perspective of politics. Leo says about the kids she is handcuffing: “These kids are remarkable in this day and age. These kids are phenomenal. Now there are laws and they need to be enforced. But we do not strut ever!”

Sorkin is saying as directly as he ever does (and he can be very blunt) that the proxy battles so many on both sides wage have an all-too human cost.  We never see Josephine  again on the show, but its far too easy to imagine a world where she uses this as a path to run for elected office, perhaps governor. She would use it to say that she might have a relative in the Bartlet White House but they wouldn’t hire her because she spoke the truth to power.  She already said she had the AFT and NEA lined up to fight for her for this appointment, I imagine she could have done the same even with this photo.  I could see so many leftist newspapers using photos like these as marketing strategies, saying she was standing up to the right on religion. That she was willing to throw teenagers in jail for it might give some pause, but I imagine they’d shrug it off by saying: :It’s in the South and these aren’t the good ones.” Considering that so much politics has become about ‘strutting’, they’d consider it an argument in her favor.

What makes this episode remarkable is that when Josie leaves Toby comes into Leo’s office and admits his error and that Josie was the wrong face for this. Then he tells Leo exactly why you want the problem front and center, that it’s not about separation of church and state, it’s not abstract. Leo asks what it is about and Toby says one of the most memorable few lines Sorkin’s ever written:

“It’s about the fourth grader who gets beat up because he sat out the voluntary prayer. It’s about a way of making kids different from other kids when they’re legally required to be there. The fourth-grader that’s the prize.”

Leo asks Toby: “What did they do you?” Toby doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to. We know he’s Jewish and that this battle was one in a long line he’s had to fight his whole life. Leo acknowledged. “You’re right about that part. That part should be talked about more often.”

Those two lines of dialogue are why I have included this article in the education series. So many of the battles that are being fought in schools are essentially proxy battles that do not take children into consideration at all. The Republican aides see it that way, and it’s clear that Josie herself has done so. Leo is the White House Chief of Staff and he does have larger political considerations to consider, but when he tells Josie about the photo he makes it clear that he is very aware of the cost of these kinds of stunts. Similarly Toby may be using Josie in order to wage a political vendetta of his, but when he reveals that this isn’t just ‘his problem’ as Leo suggested at one point he cuts to the core of why this is something that needs to be put at the forefront of these battles.

I think that so many of the arguments that are being put forth about education today is posturing and proxy battles. Both sides are willing to arguing at the top of their lungs that this is for the good of the children and never listens to them at all. Leo points this out to Josie when he brings up the photo and I can’t help but think there’s a similar level of posturing when we see, saying, photos of school libraries with empty shelves or arguments about curriculum. I grant you these are bad things for the students but as  Toby puts it “they’re legally required to be there’ and many probably wouldn’t give a damn.

It's why I look at all of the arguments about the ‘threats students’ face from the religious right and the radical left as what it truly is: proxy battles with our children involved in fights they didn’t ask to be in, probably don’t care about and are fundamentally irrelevant to the issues involved. That’s what I’m going to get to when I finally deal with the issue that we are talking about a lot but never from the people of those who it affected the most.

 

 

The Myths and Electoral History of Ronald Reagan, Part 6: His Crowded Campaign for the GOP Nomination In 1980

 

For most of my childhood and well into the 21^st century, Jimmy Carter was viewed as a joke by pop culture, poorly by a history and a cautionary tale by the Democratic Party as to what not to do as President.  That every primary campaign that has followed the path of Carter’s victory in 1976 is something they choose to ignore.

Over the last decade, Carter’s position in history has been reevaluated. When it came to foreign policy, he was clearly one of the better presidents in the 20^th century. His decision to hand over the Panama Canal back to Panama was a smart one, the Camp David Accords were a major triumph and as I mentioned at the beginning of this series, he – not Reagan – began the policies that ended détente.  His decision to create the Department of Energy was revolutionary in the 1970s and he was one of the last Presidents to openly welcome consumer advocates input like Ralph Nader into the government.  As for the problems with inflation and stagflation, they began at the start of the 1970s in the middle of Richard Nixon’s first term (which was one of the reasons Nixon took us off the gold standard). It is unlikely any President could have handled it any better than Carter did.

So why was Carter viewed so poorly not only at the time but well afterwards? The first reason is, ironically, similar to that of Ronald Reagan. Carter had campaigned as an outsider and against the Washington elites. The press had never warmed to him taking a specific position and were annoyed that the public seemed to like this outsider from Georgia over candidates they preferred. Even after he had been elected President, most of the press never warmed to him.

The other problem was of Carter’s own making. Though both houses of Congress had overwhelming Democratic majorities and indeed many Congressman and Senators had been elected over the last two terms also campaign against Washington, Carter spent the entirety of his administration refusing to accept their input. Part of was a clash of values – most of the Congressman were overwhelmingly leftist, while Carter was more of a centrist. But part was also Carter’s refusal to being willing to give a quid pro quo. Throughout his administration he constantly refused to allow any promises to Senators and Congressmen in exchange for their votes on important issues, implying that they should do so because of moral obligations.  That making these decisions might very well cost them reelection did not seem to enter Carter’s thinking, and indeed voting in favor of the treaty on the Panama Canal cost quite a few Democratic Senators their seats both in 1978 and 1980. The cost was not immediately apparent in 1978 – the Democrats lost fifteen seats in the house and three seats in the Senate. But there were troubling signs even then. For the first time since Reconstruction, the Democrats lost seats in Mississippi. Liberal Republican Clifford Case had lost renomination in New Jersey and Bill Bradley had won election in his spot. Democrats had lost seats in Colorado and Iowa.  This was balanced by gains in Michigan and Massachusetts where Paul Tsongas had defeated Edward Brooke, the first popularly elected African-American Senator in history – and the last for 26 years.

By early 1979 many Democrats thought Carter was unelectable and were starting to lean for Ted Kennedy. Many Republicans smelled blood in the water and began their own campaigns. While Ronald Reagan spent a lot of time shadow campaign, several other Republicans began maneuvers.

Gerald Ford spent 1979 and early 1980 considering whether to throw his hat in the ring – he was constitutionally eligible and he still loathed Reagan enough not to want him to be the eventual nominee.

Phil Crane, a far right Illinois Congressman and Bob Dole, Senator from Kansas and Ford’s defeated running mate in 1976 spent time and energy running but were never taking serious as candidates. More seriously considered by professionals were John Connally, Nixon’s long held favorite for the President and Senate Minority Leader Howard Baker of Tennessee.

Ironically the two men who would stay in the race the longest were considered non-starters by both the GOP and the press in 1979. The first was John Anderson. Anderson had been in the house for ten terms but had always been a Liberal Republican, a direction the party had been moving away from ever since he had taken office. Anderson was popular with young voters and the press but no one really thought he would get anywhere.

People thought even less of George H.W. Bush. Bush was the son of Connecticut Senator Prescott Bush. He had been elected to a Texas House seat in 1964 and had served until 1970 when he ran for the Senate. He would lose to Lloyd Bentsen. He had served as head of the RNC, had been head of the CIA and Ambassador to China in both the Nixon and Ford administrations. But he was considered essentially a dilletante and a lightweight as well as too moderate for the increasingly conservative base.  He had been a contender for the Vice Presidency when Ford had taken office but as much as the conservatives hated Nelson Rockefeller, he was considered ‘too incompetent’ to be Vice President, much less President.  Bush was not even considered for the ticket in 1976.

He declared his candidacy in the fall of 1979 and was still considered by most of the base of having no realistic chance. Even the most generous pollsters thought Connally or Baker had a better chance of getting the nomination than Bush did.  Reagan barely considered him worth the time of day.

The problem that dogged the Reagan campaign throughout most of the 1979 was that of overconfidence. John Sears, once again the campaign manager, thought that Reagan had the nomination basically locked up and that the candidate should fundamentally stay away from the campaign trail until at least New Hampshire. Many of Reagan’s advisers questioned that strategy, well into November of 1979 when both the Iran hostage crisis began and Ted Kennedy’s disastrous interview with Roger Mudd took place. The finances were a disaster by that time, morale was dropping, old hands were being thrown aside.

In November of 1979 the Maine straw poll took place which many expected Howard Baker to win easily. Bush ended up the surprise victor 35 percent to Baker’s 33 percent. Reagan had not even shown up. By this point Bush had already won two straw polls in Iowa. Reagan still barely campaigned or debated in Iowa.  Then on January 21, 1980 Bush managed to upset Reagan at the Iowa caucus with 32 percent of the vote to Reagan’s 29.5 percent. Reagan was now trailing Bush by more than sixteen percent in the New Hampshire polls.

What helped Reagan was that there was nearly five weeks between the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary.  Had their been less time, Reagan’s campaign might not have recovered from this blow. As it was, it took a lot of luck for him to turn things around. Bush was getting large crowds in New Hampshire. Reagan, who had sat out all the previous GOP debates to this point, agreed to attend all the debates in New Hampshire. He was going to need the support: in a straw poll in Mississippi, Reagan managed to win with 37 percent but Bush managed a strong second with 29  percent.

On February 20^th all seven candidates debated in Manchester. Reagan did not perform badly but he did not perform well.  Bush had decided to debate Reagan one on one in a debate in Nashua, which upset the other candidates who were beginning to fall out of contention. At that point Sears – now almost certainly about to be fired  - played one last card for Reagan.

He planned to embarrass Bush into letting Dole, Crane, Baker and Anderson onto the sage while making Reagan look magnanimous. Sears tracked down all of the other candidates. John Connally was the only one who couldn’t make it. He knew that Sears was using him and his fellow candidates as props but he liked the idea of sticking it to Bush, who he loathed. “Brilliant idea, but I ain’t coming,” he told Sears. “F--- him over for me.”

That afternoon Sears announced that Reagan was opening the debate to the other candidates. Bush took the bait and refused to include them, saying he had agreed to a two-man debate and played by the rules.

The debate was scheduled to begin at 7:30 pm, but by 8:15 there were still no candidates on stage. There was a private war backstage, with Reagan angry and Bust acting like a petulant child. Reagan had second thoughts and planned to walk out with the other candidates, but Senator Gordon Humphrey protested, saying if he did Reagan would lose the primary. Influenced by his wife, he decided to walk to the stage with the other candidates. Bush came out with the moderator, reporter Jon Breen to subdued cheers. Reagan came out livid. The other candidates came to the stage.

Reagan asked to address the crowd. Breen rudely refused. Breen and Reagan got into an onstage spat and Breen ordered Reagan’s microphone to be turned off. An enraged Reagan shouted out: “I am paying for this microphone, Mr. Green!”

The ‘Nashua Four’ came on stage were photographed with Reagan and shook hands with him…but not with Bush. It has been forgotten by history that the four candidates then left the stage and Reagan and Bush did have a two man debate as agreed at the start. All that mattered were the optics of Bush standing stock still on the stage  giving the perception, as Jules Witcover wrote later, that he had the backbone of a jellyfish.

It also helped that all of the other candidates in the back room, who already hated Bush, spent the aftermath of the debate tearing him apart. All had their own reason to loathe Bush: Dole had humble origins and considered Bush a man of privilege. Connally was a Texan who thought Bush a carpetbagger. Baker was angry because Bush had taken the position of the moderate from him.

On primary day Reagan crushed Bush 50 percent to 23 percent. That day Reagan cut loose three critical members of the Reagan entourage including John Sears. Sears would never work again in national politics. Charlie Blake and Jim Lake would take it hard but eventually work back in Reagan’s good graces, helping him on his reelection campaign. Sears’ never even spoke to the Reagans again. It was a sad end to the career of the man who had done the most to launch Reagan to national prominence.

Bob Dole got out of the race not long after. John Connally would gamble everything on South Carolina. The next primary day of consequence was on March 4^th,  Massachusetts and Vermont. There was a chance to stop or at least slow Reagan’s momentum there and indeed it very nearly happened. Bush managed to win Massachusetts narrowly beating John Anderson by just 1200 votes. Reagan narrowly beat Anderson in Vermont, by 31 percent to 30.  Had Anderson managed to win in Vermont, Reagan would have had a poor day by his standards: finishing second in one state and third in another.  As it was at the end of the day Bush had 36 delegates to Reagan’s 37. There were now people in the media writing Ford to get into the race.

The campaign moved to the South and Reagan would dominate, crushing Connally in South Carolina, forcing him out of the race. Reagan swept through Alabama, Georgia and Florida. Baker would get out soon after and Phil Crane was basically done. It was down to Anderson, Bush and Reagan. Anderson was counting on Illinois to revive his campaign. He would lose to Reagan with 37 percent to Reagan’s 50 and got 26 delegates to Reagan’s 39. Bush only got 2 delegates.

However Bush managed to revive his chances by winning in Connecticut. He lost badly in New York, however, and was overshadowed by Ted Kennedy’s revival of his campaign in which he had swept both primaries over Jimmy Carter.

Bush would continue his campaign until the end of the season but the proportions of so many of the GOP state primaries kept working against him. In Wisconsin, he received 31 percent of the vote but only got three delegates to Reagan’s 25.  He swamped Reagan with 53 percent of the vote in Pennsylvania but only got thirty-three delegates. He narrowly lost to Reagan in Texas with 47 percent to Reagan’s 51, but he only received 18 delegates of the eighty at stake. Even when he routed Reagan in Michigan with 57 percent of the vote, the media almost as a man declared that Reagan had gotten the nomination. Bush spent several days refusing to accept reality before finally dropping out on May 26^th. None of this did anything to improve his position in the eyes of the party.

Still by the beginning of June Reagan was finally the Republican nominee for President. They were eying the carnage between Ted Kennedy and President Carter with delight. Kennedy was well behind in the delegates for the DNC nomination but was refusing to withdraw from the race.  Given Carter’s low approval rating, it looked it would be a cakewalk for the Presidency Reagan had spent twelve years trying to win. But there were still quite a few obstacles to overcome.

In the final article in these series, I will deal with Reagan’s turmoil to choose his running mate, the obstacles he faced in the fall campaign (some of which were his own making) and the multiple errors that Carter made throughout his run to help ensure his victory.

The 1940s St. Louis Cardinals, The Greatest Baseball Dynasty You've Never Heard of, Part 1: 1941

 

Ever since they upset the New York Yankees in the 1926 World Series, The St. Louis Cardinals have been the most successful franchise in the National League. Their eleven World Championships are second only to the Yankees in baseball history and with the possible exception of the Dodgers, more legendary players have worn Cardinal uniforms than any other National Leage Franchise.

They have ranged from some of the greatest hitters of all time from Rogers Hornsby to Albert Pujols, some of the most incredible pitchers, including Dizzy Dean and Bob Gibson, some of the greatest defensive legends of all time such as Ozzie Smith, some of the greatest base stealers in history like Lou Brock, and some of the most brilliant managers of all time, including Whitey Herzog and Tony Larussa. Some of the greatest moments in World Series history have come when the Cardinals have been playing – from Grover Clevland Alexander striking out Tony Lazzeri in the 1926 Series to win them their first championship to Bob Gibson’s striking out a record seventeen Detroit Tigers in Game 1 of the 1968 World Series.

And ever since their first pennant in 1926, it is rare for the Cardinals to go more than a few years without a pennant or World Series. Their biggest gaps came between their 1946 World Series victory over the Red Sox to their triumph over the Yankees in 1964, that officially ended the Yankees dominance in baseball. They did not contend in the 1970s but won three pennants and a World Series in the 1980s.  And while the Braves became the most dominant team in baseball starting in 1991, with the coming of the new millennium they would win their first division title in nearly fifteen years in 2002, starting a period of dominance that would lead first to a pennant in 2004 and two subsequent World Championships. While they have not won a World Series since 2011, they have always been a postseason contender, and it is only this year that they have finally dropped out of contention for the first time in more than twenty years.

Yet for all the immense success this franchise has enjoyed, the period where they enjoyed arguably the greatest dominance over the National League and baseball has rarely gotten the credit it deserves, despite the fact that arguably the greatest player in their history was part of that same dynasty and one of the most successful managers of all time was at the helm. That said, given the context of that period, it is understandable why so many historians have chosen not to rank it as highly as the Cardinal dynasties of the 1960s and 1980s even though this team was not only more consistent but more dominant.

From 1942 to 1946, the St. Louis Cardinals won four National League Pennants and three World Championships.  Only a handful of National League Teams have enjoyed a similar level of dominance since then: the 1952-1956 Brooklyn Dodgers won four pennants and the 1972-1976 Big Red Machine won four division titles, three pennants and two World Series in that span. Yet while their have countless books written about the latter two teams of that era, very few have ever been written about the Cardinals of that period.

Of course, there’s a reason many students would hang a giant asterisk on that dynasty: during the heights of it the country was engaged in World War II, the nation was not concentrating on baseball the same way it did, and as we shall see the Cardinals had a distinct advantage during that period that few other teams in the majors had.  Still considering that between 1942-1944, the Cardinals record went 316-146, a three year record that is the fourth greatest in Major League history for that period (only the Cubs of 1906-1908, the 1929-1931 Philadelphia Athletics and the 1901-1903 Pittsburgh Pirates have better three year histories) you’d think they’d be more written about.

So in this series of articles I will give a history of the Cardinals of the 1940s, how they were built, the story of their dominance during the war years and the rivalry they had with what would be the next great dynasty in baseball: the Brooklyn Dodgers. (Some students of the game might know that they have an obvious connection.)

 

In 1934 the ‘Gashouse Gang’ managed by Hall-of-Famer Frankie Frisch, with legends like Joe Medwick, Leo Durocher and 30 game winner Dizzy Dean, upset the Detroit Tigers in seven games.  It was the fifth pennant and third World Series the Cardinals had won in eight years, another in a long line of triumphs for General manager Branch Rickey.

Ever since he had moved to St. Louis, Rickey had created the farm system, a huge network of minor league clubs designed to develop stars for the Cardinals.  At its peak in 1940, 32 minor league clubs would either be owned or affiliated with the Cardinal system. The 1934 team had been the pinnacle of the first field of those teams.

However, in 1935 after leading the National League most of the season, the Chicago Cubs went on a 21 game winning streak and won the pennant over the Cardinals by four games.  While the Cardinals didn’t exactly collapse over the next four years – they remained in contention – they never got close to winning the pennant either.

It didn’t help the Cardinals that owner Sam Breadon was a temperamental man who could not tolerate losing. In 1928, after the Cardinals in four games to the Yankees he fired Cardinal manager Bill McKechnie. He was never quite as horrendous as future owners George Steinbrenner or Charles O. Finley, but he could be just as impatient. Gabby Street, who won the World Series for the Cardinals in 1931, was gone before the 1933 season ended. Frisch lasted until the middle of 1938 when we disposed of for interim manager Mike Gonzalez.  Ray Blades got the Cardinals took second place in 1939, but when they got off to a poor start in 1940, he was fired.  Breadon eventually summoned Billy Southworth from the minors to take over.

Southworth had been a mediocre outfielder in the National League, who’d play with the 1926 Championship Cardinals.   He’d gone to the minors to manage and after McKechnie was fired, Southworth got his first chance to manage the club in 1929. He managed half a season before being replaced with McKechnie and being sent back to the minors. He managed for a bit in the minors, ended up coaching with the Giants in 1933, and was out of baseball by 1934. Rickey gave him another chance and he spent the next five seasons managing in the minors. Breadon overrode Rickey and put him in charge of the Cardinals in June of 1940.

The Cardinals were in seventh place when Southworth took over but he led them to a 69-40 finish, which landing them in third place behind the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Cincinnati Reds. The Reds had won their second consecutive N.L.  pennant and would go on to win the World Series in seven games over Detroit.

The 1940 Cardinals had many players who would be critical to St. Louis’ success for the next decade.  Mort Cooper, who would be one of the best pitchers of the 1940s, went 11-12 his first year in the rotation. Enos Slaughter hit .308 and Terry Moore considered one of the greatest defensive outfielders in history his seventeen home runs.  Marty Marion was on his way to becoming one of the greatest defensive shortstops of the decade. But the man who brought the most thrills to St. Louis was Johnny Mize, the Big Cat. That year he hit 43 home runs and drove in 137. 

Going into the 1941 season everyone thought the Cardinals were the team to beat. In addition to the talent in their lineup, Walker Cooper, Mort’s brother was brought up and expected to be the regular catcher. Johnny Hopp was in the lineup at first base and they had a superb rotation, including veteran starter Lon Warneke, rookie Howie Krist and Max Lanier.

But almost from the start of the 1941 season, the Cardinals would be plagued by a devastating series of injuries. Mize would break a finger and suffered from a sore shoulder; he would hit only seventeen home runs all season. Walker Cooper broke his collarbone and missed a few weeks. Mort Cooper was out of action for six weeks in order to have bone spurs removed from his elbow; he had to chew aspirin on the mound to deal with the pain. On August 10^th Slaughter collided with Moore in the outfield and would be out for nearly five weeks. And late that same month Moore would be struck in the head with a fastball and had to be hospitalized. Lanier would suffer from an inflamed tendon, outfielder Clyde Shoun from a sore shoulder, third baseman Jimmy Brown, a broken hand.

And yet for all that the Cardinals spent almost all of 1941 in one of the greatest pennant races of all time with the Brooklyn Dodgers, basically spending every day trading first place.

The Dodgers had spent the last three years being rebuilt by another front office genius Larry MacPhail. MacPhail had been an innovator at Cincinnati, pioneering night baseball and radio broadcasting, and building his team into a pennant winner. However in 1938, he went to Brooklyn and helped build a team that had been a joke for more than eighteen years into a contender. He named Leo Durocher as the manager in 1939. Famously the two had a relationship where MacPhail would fire Durocher, then hire him back the next day. But the two of them were smart and began trade for great players, including former Cardinals Mickey Owen and Joe Medwick, rescuing from obscurity pitchers like Kirby Higbe and Whitlow Wyatt, and claiming on waivers an outfielder named Dixie Walker. He paid $100,000 for a shortstop named Pee Wee Reese from Boston, which caused the Brooklyn shareholders to question his sanity. He got a centerfielder named Pete Reiser for $100, and Reiser would lead the National League in hitting his rookie year. The critical moment for the Dodgers in 1941 came when he traded for Billy Herman, who’d been the second baseman for the Cubs on three N.L Pennant winners in May of 1941.  The day after they acquired Herman, the Dodgers took over first place.

At the All-Star break, Brooklyn had a four game lead when St. Louis came to Brooklyn for a two-game series. They were confident they could win; Wyatt and Higbe, who would share the National League with 22 wins apiece were their starters. St. Louis won both games.

The critical game of the pennant race came on September 13 in St. Louis, in the rubber game of three game series. The Cardinals were one game out. Mort Cooper was on the mound for St. Louis, Whit Wyatt for the Dodgers.

For seven innings the game was scoreless. Cooper was throwing a no-hitter. At the top of the inning, Dixie Walker hit a double. On second base, Walker stole the sign from the St. Louis catcher Gus Mancuso. Herman hit the next pitch – a curveball – off the rightfield fence. The Dodgers were ahead 1-0. Wyatt held the lead and ended the game by striking out Enos Slaughter on three pitches. The Cardinals were two games out.

The next day the Cardinals moved to within one and a half games on a double header sweep of the Giants. That day went down in St. Louis history for another reason, because three minor league farmhands were brought up to the majors: pitcher Johnny Beazley, Whitey Kurowski and a twenty year outfielder named Stan Musial.

Musial had been signed as a left-handed pitcher in 1940, but during his 1941 season he had hit .379 with 26 homers and 94 runs with a Class C Cardinal team. He was promoted to Rochester, where he hit .326 in fifty four games before the team was eliminated from the minor league playoffs. He returned to his home town of Donora, Pennsylvania to find a telegram from Rickey telling him to report to St. Louis.

Batting against Boston Brave pitcher Jim Tobin, a knuckleballer, he popped up in his first at-bat. His second time up, he hit a double that drove in 2 runs. The Cardinals won 3-2. In his first twelve games in the majors, Musial would bat .425 with four doubles, a home run and drive in seven runs. In a double header against the Braves, he would get six hits. Casey Stengel, the Braves manager told the press that day: “You’ll be looking at (Musial) for a long time. Ten, fifteen, maybe 20 years.” Stengel was dead on in his prediction.

Musial believed with every fiber of his being if he had been brought up earlier, the Cardinals would have won the pennant.  When they saw him play, many Cardinals would think the same, particularly during August when Rickey had told them that he had no one in the minors to help the injury deprived Cardinals.

But despite the best efforts of Musial, the Cardinals could not overcome the Dodgers. They would end up winning the National League pennant by two and a half games.  Nevertheless, considering that the Cardinals had managed to win 97 games and finish this close despite all the injuries, Billy Southworth was named N.L. Manager of the Year by the Sporting News for 1941.

Two months after the Dodgers would lose to the Yankees in five games, the Japanese would bomb Pearl Harbor.  Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis told FDR that baseball ‘was yours to command.” FDR gave baseball a green light, saying that it would be the best thing for America to keep the National game going.

But he gave no exemptions for major league players from the draft. Before the 1941 season had even begun Hank Greenberg, the Detroit Tigers slugging start had been one of the first players drafted. His term ended on December 5. When the war began he reenlisted and would miss four and a half seasons of baseball. 350 major leaguers and over 3000 minor leaguers would end up being drafted. They would include some of the greatest players of all time, among them Ted Williams, Bob Feller and Warren Spahn.

However, the full effects of the war on baseball would not be felt in the 1942 season. In the next article I will deal with the 1942 pennant race, one so remarkable it makes 1941 seem like a warm-up.

Lost Rewatch on VHS: One of Us

 

At the end of the first act of this episode Sawyer spots Jack. It’s the first time he’s seen him in the flesh since Kate, Jack and he were kidnapped at the end of Season 2 and it’s the first time the rest of the camp has since the failed rescue mission for Walt.

Everyone reacts with joy. There are embraces from everybody.  Just like at the cookout in Lef Behind, for a moment everybody has forgotten how hopelessly screwed they all are.  Everyone is clearly just as happy to see Kate and Sayid back.

(Interestingly not only does no one notice Locke isn’t here, but it is not until that evening that anyone even asks where he is. Notably, that person is Desmond, who knows Locke the least well and who saved his life when the hatch imploded. After Jack tells them what Locke did, none of them mention him again and the camp basically forgets him until the end of the season. The castaways have often shown bad short-term memory when one of their own disappears but this is particularly harsh. )

 There is clearly happiness. Sawyer even hugs Jack. And then Sawyer sees Juliet. And everyone becomes hostile. Not just to Juliet but to Jack.

Jack’s attitude towards Juliet throughout the last several episodes has understandably been scrutinized ever since. Jack not only spends the entire episode defending bringing Juliet’s presence, he openly defends her from having to answer any questions.  Similarly when Kate demands to know what happened the week he was with the Others, he gives the bare bones explanation. Kate clearly doesn’t buy it, with good reason: we’ve know Jack well enough by now to know that just keeping his head down and doing what he was told is not something we associate with him. When he tries to defend his actions to the group by telling him that he made a deal with Ben to get on the sub, he makes the situation worse: everyone knows enough about Ben to know that you couldn’t believe a word he says and Jack’s decision to believe him doesn’t help his credibility.  When he tells Charlie to let Juliet help Claire and Charlie acts with incredulity, he tells him just to trust him which is ironic. Jack may not have blood on his hands the way that Juliet says Sayid and Sawyer do but his moral authority is just as suspect. We all know that the people Jack trusts are few and far between.

So why does Jack seem so willing to trust Juliet without question? The theory at the time and for the next season was that Jack and Juliet were having an affair. He certainly spends the rest of Season 3 and much of Season 4 clearly trusting Juliet more than he ever did Kate.  Ben ‘revealed’ that he planned to use Juliet to get invested and perhaps he did.  I think the connection is that of kindred spirits. Before Claire’s condition is resolved Jack tells Juliet that if this doesn’t work, she’ll be on her own. Juliet says: “I’ve always been on my own,” and while she is lying about practically everything else, in this she is being completely truthful. When we remember what Jack’s tattoo said, we can understand why Jack would feel a kindred spirit.

Elizabeth Mitchell’s work in Season 3 is a master class but in this episode she takes it to a whole other level.  In ‘Not in Portland’, we had trouble trying to conflate the broken and fragile woman who we saw trying to find her freedom with the ruthless Other who can coolly tell Tom to kill Sawyer and Kate and shoot Danny Pickett in cold blood. In ‘One of Us’, Mitchell keeps us guessing trying to figure out which part of her personality is the true face of Juliet.  We know that, emotionally, she is an honest person but like everybody else, she is an Other and we have no reason to trust her. When Sayid demands to know who she was, Juliet tells him point-blank that if he knew the truth, he would kill her. Sayid is non-plussed but then asks quite simply: “What makes you think I won’t anyway?”  Juliet may be telling the truth about the nature of what’s she done, but she’s gambling on Jack being able to take fire for her.

When she gets back to the camp, Hurley goes out to see her, and he is as close to being passive aggressive as we’ve ever seen him be. For him, he bluntly reminds her of what the Others did to them, does not seem embarrassed that he’s been sent to watch Juliet and when he tells her what happened to Ethan, he could either be apologizing for what happened to her friend – or gently reminding her of what happened to the first person the camp learned was an Other. That’s pretty cold for Hurley.

The rest of the camp doesn’t bother to hide its hostility. Even Jin’s attitude when Juliet asks about Claire’s condition is pretty cold. (Maybe even he can pick up this an act.) Kate clearly doesn’t believe the story that Juliet tells her about what happened to Claire. (Then again, given the way she looks at Sun when she learns what happens to pregnant women on the island, she has a reason to be.) When Sawyer and Sayid confront Juliet at the drop point, Juliet shows the part of her that’s an Other by choosing to shame them for being bad people rather than admitting they might have a point.  It’s actually frustrating that neither man choosing to call Juliet for using the party line the Others have been using since the survivors showed up: that none of them have the moral authority to demand information. Considering that Juliet spent the entirety of the last episode lying to Kate about what happened to her, they have enough to call her on it already.

The reason that the viewer spends all of One of Us still on Juliet’s side is because of the flashbacks. We already knew at the end of Not In Portland that Juliet had been promised that she could go home. Now we see the backstory behind it and it is as heartbreaking as anything we’ve seen the survivors go through. In a way, it’s worse because while none of them had a choice but to come to the island, Juliet made the decision to come. It may have been under false pretenses but as we see just before she drinks the orange juice, Juliet had countless opportunities to turn back and she kept pushing them away. Indeed Richard actually asks her this before she finds herself on the sub. (In hindsight what we learn about her transport to the island is a foreshadowing of a major part of Season 4.)

The scenes between Michael Emerson and Elizabeth Mitchell are among the highpoints of the season and show Emerson doing some of his best work. After Sabine dies Juliet is upset but becomes sadder when Ben makes it clear that he won’t accommodate her demand. I have never truly believed when Ben tells Juliet that Rachel’s cancer has returned; I’ve always suspected that this is just another one of his mind games. He knows that Juliet would do anything for Rachel, and he knows that by promising her a cure that he can get her to follow him. We don’t know if Juliet believes in Jacob the same way everyone else on the island does, but her faith is unselfish: she’ll do it to save someone she loves.

Then (after learning that Juliet and Goodwin have been having an affair!) comes an even better scene where Juliet tells Ben that he has cancer.  This is the first time we’ve seen Ben look truly afraid all season, with good reason. It’s not just the fact that he might be dying; it’s the fact that he got sick in the first place.  Juliet turns on him with a righteous fury and Ben is unnerved. He knows that his control over his people has never been ironclad, and this is clearly another sign of weakness.

Then there is a repeat of the opening scene of Season 3…except it continues. Ben takes Juliet to the Flame where Mikhail is waiting. Ben’s reaction when it becomes clear Mikhail doesn’t have his walkie on is hysterical. (And it raises a question: was what we saw when Sayid approached the station in Enter 77 completely an act?) It’s also pretty clear that the Flame is how the Others have all of the information on the survivors: the satellites did work and Mikhail was using them the whole time.  Then Juliet gets to see her sister (after, of course, Ben shames her for calling him a liar). Juliet is so grateful to see that her sister is still alive and that she has a nephew that she is willing to forgive Ben his sins for the moment. (Sadly, this is as close as she will ever get to going home.)

By the end of the last flashback, we are still in Juliet’s corner despite her behavior in the camp. She’s been lured to this island under false pretenses, the groundbreaking research she did has been a failure (we will learn in two episodes the extent of the horror show). She was promised she’d been in a facility near Portland in six months; she’s been trapped on an island for three years.  She has been emotionally manipulated by Ben for all that time. She has tried to do her best to live something of a normal life – again we see her listening to CDs and trying to have a book club – but its clear that, with the exception of Goodwin, she is fundamentally an outsider here.  The writers constantly denounced the theory the island was purgatory during its original run. Juliet has no reason to think it is anything other than Hell.  Jack is right when he says that Juliet wants to leave as badly as the rest of them.

Except…that isn’t the last flashback. The last two minutes we see Juliet settling into the camp intercut with her last meeting with Ben, and undercuts everything we’ve seen in the flashbacks.  She has done everything Ben has told her to do.  And she has no real problem when discussing the use of Claire as a chip to get her in with the camp.  We don’t yet know the purpose of her infiltration, but when Ben says at the end of the episode: “See you in a week”, we know that he’s planning something far worse than a few abductions.

If there is a flaw in the episode, it is that we don’t understand why Juliet would go along with another of Ben’s plans, particularly after her opportunity to go home blew up. Even if we accept the theory the submarine wasn’t destroyed, Juliet has no reason to take Ben at his word: she knows better than anyone how much of a liar he is. Another flaw is one that may not have been one the writers were planning at the time: the scene between Ben and Juliet have is the last one they will ever share together in the present.  I honestly would have liked one sometime in Season 4 if there had been at least one scene in the aftermath of Ben’s plan. (Of course that doesn’t mean we won’t see them together again…and not just in Juliet’s past.)

In another sense, perhaps the most telling scene in the final moments comes when Juliet is looking at the survivors in the camp when she fixes her tent.  She looks at all of them with recognition even though she hasn’t met them. She’s read their files, after all. Then her eyes fix on Desmond…and there’s no recognition. For the first time we wonder if Desmond is on the Others’ radar at all.  Ben knew the Swan existed but he never knew who was pushing the button; Desmond was gone by the time we saw him and Juliet looking in the monitors in the Pearl.  During their conversations we never heard even a mention of Desmond. There’s no sign Mikhail knows who he was, and if he did he never got a chance to pass the information on to Ben (though their paths will be crossing again very soon).

The teaser of the next week’s episode shows that Desmond has seen a flash of a series of events. These events will be critical to the final stretch of Season 3 and indeed for much of the next half of the series.