Thursday, July 30, 2026
1945 After delivering the atomic bomb across the Pacific, the USS Indianapolis was sunk by the Japanese submarine I-58. 880 of the crew died, many eaten by sharks.
1965 US President Lyndon Johnson signed the Medicare bill.
1967 'Race riot' in Milwaukee (4 killed)
1988 Jordanian King Hussein renounced sovereignty over the West Bank to the PLO, hours after dissolving Jordan's House of Representatives
2025 Canadian prime minister Mark Carney announced that Canada would recognise Palestine as an independent country in September, conditional on the Palestinian Authority committing to certain reforms.
In bed at 7:30 with a nasty back/flank ache, I woke up at 1:10 and was up at 1:25; 0140 203.0 121/68/56 109; 62/84/61, sunny or partly cloudy day ahead. Hoping to get back to sleep . . . Dozed off between 4 and 5, back in bed at 5 until 6:30.
Morning meds at a.m.
Today marks the beginning of a 5th year of journaling, or maintaining this diary/chronicle/logbook/notebook of sorts. It's both a good thing and a bad thing that there are no rules for personal journals; one can do with one whatever one wants. This makes it easier to jot down whatever pops into one's mind at whatever hours one happens to be up and about, without concern over editing, proofing, or very much thought, but it also means the collection of thoughts can be pretty incoherent, not at all thought out. So it goes.
I was still 80 when I started this, about to turn 81, and now I'm about to turn 85. I was still smarting from my sister's death then, while now I live with a dull, mopey emptiness from her absence. She was my daily interlocutor, my daily communicant, to borrow and enlarge an old Catholic expression. Nothing has ever replaced those daily early-morning chats we shared; nothing could. She was the last personal contact with our childhood, living with my Dad's war-related PTSD, my Mom's rape PTSD of her own, in our one-bedroom, three-room basement flat with the cockroaches at 7303 S. Emerald Avenue. The building is long gone, along with the Clausens, the Jenkins, the Bradshaws, the Considines, the Baxters, and its other inhabitants. It's now an empty lot, and I may be the sole survivor of all those who lived there during our tenure. I wonder whether Ralphie Bradshaw, Jeananne Baxter, or either of the Considine girls or the Senrau girls next door is still alive. Perhaps so, perhaps not. In any case, I feel like a creature from Jurassic Park, a survivor from another age, another era, that period at the end of World War II, with Harry Truman in the White House, and Joseph Stalin in the Kremlin, Germany and Japan under American and Allied occupation, and the fear of godless Communism and atomic warfare infecting daily life. How far - or how little - have we moved from those days???
When I started this, the legislatively effective but politically feckless Joe Biden was in the White House, but Donald Trump still dominated national news and everyone's thinking. He's lived in our minds for more than a decade now. The January 6th hearings were still going on. The Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade on June 24th. Inflation exceeded 9% in June, and the price of gasoline averaged over $ 5 per gallon. Political polarization was continuing and probably increasing, as was distrust in institutions. We were coming apart at the seams then, and it's only gotten worse over the last 4 years, primed by Biden's ignominious decision to seek reelection in his dotage and Trump's reelection. After a year and a half in office, he has turned America's name to shit all over the world, effectively destroyed NATO, alienated Europe and even Canada (?!?!), and gotten us involved inextricably in another war which will add to our growing list of wars the almighty, supposedly unbeatable US has lost: Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Iran.
Two years ago, I wrote about the anniversary of the "riot" in Milwaukee in 1967, Medicare's 59th birthday, the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, and the death of William Calley, including these thoughts:
What struck me in reading the story was the similarity between My Lai and Hamas's actions in southern Israel on October 7, 2023. but also what has been happening for the 9 months thereafter in Gaza, i.e.,, the killing of women, children, and elderly noncombatants, although on an industrial scale in Gaza. I was also struck by how, by the beginning of 1968, less than 3 years after the 3rd Marine Division landed in Vietnam, the military was so hard up for leadership. Calley was about 5' 3" tall and 130 pounds, child size. He had to repeat 7th grade. He graduated in the bottom quarter of his high school class. He flunked out of Palm Beach Junior College after which he worked as a hotel bellhop and a restaurant dishwasher. With that background, he was selected for Officer Candidate School where he graduated 120th in his class of 156. What is most striking about Calley and his men and the My Lai massacre is that these American soldiers were ordered to kill hundreds of Asian civilians - women, children, and old men - and they did it. They did it, much like the Hamas "terrorists" did it on October 7th, just like the Russian soldiers did in Bucha, north of Kyiv, in 2022, much like the Marines who killed 24 civilians in Haditha, Iraq.
The latest polls show at least 60% of Americans disapprove of the war against Iran. Some polls run as high as 72%. Even higher numbers disapprove of Trump's performance as president generally, including on the economy (inflation, tariffs, cost of living) and immigration (ICE arrests, detentions, and deportations). Yet we see no significant movement from Trump and Stephen Miller. I think back to the 60s and early 70s, when LBJ decided not to seek reelection, and the electorate voted in Richard Nixon. What's different between now and then? Then our college campuses were in turmoil, Sterling Hall in Madison was blown up, students were shot down at Kent State, and demonstrations against the war (and the draft) drew tens of thousands of Americans to the streets and the Pentagon. Now we have occasional "No Kings" rallies and demonstrations, populated mostly by older women, but little more in the way of public protest, all while Trump and his co-conspirators publicly and secretly lay the groundwork for controlling the outcomes of the mid-term and 2028 elections.
Anniversary Note: My memoir's treatment of Milwaukee's "race riot" in 1967:
By 1966, Father Groppi had been appointed advisor the Youth Council of the Wisconsin chapter of the NAACP. The focus of demonstrations shifted for some reason from the segregationist school board to the most powerful fraternal organization in Milwaukee, the Milwaukee Aerie of the Fraternal Order of Eagles. The Eagles excluded blacks from membership but included within its membership 17 county and circuit judges, 10 county supervisors, the district attorney, the county treasurer, the circuit court clerk, half of the city aldermen, the city attorney, the city treasurer, the city comptroller, the city clerk and so on. Youth Council members started out picketing the Eagles Club on Wisconsin Avenue, but soon were picketing the homes of targeted public officials who were members of the club, starting with the Wauwatosa home of Judge Robert Cannon, a Catholic, a member of St. Jude parish, and the father of my later friend, former Marine, Vietnam vet and faculty member at the law school, Tom Cannon. As you might expect, the picketing of the homes of public officials, some in Milwaukee, some in the suburbs, caused tremendous tension in the community. Picketing at the Eagles Club or at City Hall or the County Courthouse was one thing; picketing in front of homes is Wauwatosa was quite another.
Approaching the summer of 1967, the picketing of school sites and homes of public officials continued, with anger and frustration and vituperation increasing in both the white community and black community. Father Groppi, Mayor Maier, and Police Chief Brier were, of course, the principal lightening rods during this period, and each one of them was an in-your-face fighter.
Milwaukee’s Uprising
. On Monday morning, July 31st, your mother and I were sleeping in the bedroom of our new home, a fifth floor apartment in the northernmost Juneau Village building at 1129 N. Jackson Street. The phone rang between 5 and 5:30. Half-asleep, I dragged myself out of bed to get to the kitchen and answer it. It was my father who responded to my croaky “Hello?” with a worried “Are you alright?” I said “We’re fine. What’s wrong?” (My Dad is an early riser, but he was not in the habit of calling at daybreak simply to inquire about our general well-being.) “There’s a riot up there and they’ve closed off the city.” That was how I learned that Milwaukee had joined the list of the other cities in having what was called either a “civil disturbance” or a “race riot,” depending on one’s purpose, one’s level of excitability and one’s tendency to look at the world through race-tinted lenses. I woke up your mother and turned on the Channel 6 news which confirmed my father’s report.
It took some imagination to characterize the trouble in Milwaukee as a “riot.” The disturbance was pretty much restricted to a 5 hour period on the night of July 30-31. Starting at about 9:45 p.m. on Sunday, the 30th, a group of young blacks went on a vandalism rampage on North 3rd Street, starting north of State Street and proceeding up to Center Street, Burleigh Avenue area, breaking windows and raising hell, but without gunfire or arson or significant looting. As the vandalism on Third Street raged, Father Matthew left the St. Francis rectory at 4th and Brown and tried to calm down th. e vandals. He came close to getting beaten by one of the participants, but others protected Matthew, whose peacemaking efforts however proved inadequate to the challenge of what was occurring.
A few blocks north, on Center Street, a white yahoo drove up and down the street, calling the on-looking residents “niggers” and, according to witnesses, shooting a weapon out the car window. One of the residents was a 55 year old man of limited mental capacity named John Oraa Tucker, a janitor at Shorewood High School. Tucker went into his house at 134 West Center Street, grabbed his shotgun, came back outside and shot at the white provocateur, who drove away. A short time later, however, another car with 4 white men pulled up and, when the riders started to get out of the car, Tucker believed them to be threatening troublemakers. He discharged his shotgun at them. As it turned out, those men were plainclothes detectives. In what quickly became a shootout between Tucker and responding police officers, one officer was killed by a shotgun blast, 6 others were wounded, and a bystander was killed by a police bullet. Two of the injured officers were to become my law students later: John Carter, who was blinded, and LeRoy Jones, whose torso was peppered with shotgun pellets.
Mayor Maier got governor Warren Knowles to call out the Wisconsin National Guard, who set up their headquarters at Garfield Avenue School at 4th and Brown. Chief Brier established his tactical headquarters in the Gimbel’s-Shusters building kiddy-corner from the school. Maier declared a state of emergency and put the entire city under curfew. None of us was permitted to leave his or her home on either Monday the 31st or Tuesday, August 1st. On August 2nd, the curfew was eased to 7 p.m. to 5:30 a.m. It stayed in place through August 8th. In the days immediately after the disturbance, Maier also quarantined the city, permitting no one in or out. (This was to keep those ubiquitous fomenters of urban uprisings, the “outside agitators,” i.e., Chicago blacks.)
The Aftermath
Milwaukee has yet to recover from that one night of vandalism and violence four decades ago. The black uprising was followed by open housing marches led by the increasingly-in-your-face Father Jim (I’m No Martin Luther King) Groppi and his NAACP Youth Council “Commandos.” I haven’t checked the census data, but I suspect that white flight increased after the uprising, and spiked after the school desegregation decree in 1976. The 3rd Street shopping area, the North Side equivalent of the once- thriving Mitchell Street area on the South Side, has never regained the vitality it had before the uprising.
The uprising, the state of emergency, the curfew, the National Guard troops patrolling the city, the quarantine or blockade: such was our welcome back to Milwaukee. It would be too much to compare it to life on the airbase in Danang, of course, but there we were, confined to close quarters at night for fear of encountering hostile forces, with the area occupied by armed troops (the equivalent of about 2 ½ Marine infantry battalions), access controlled at check points, and a sense of fear and anger and resentment and distrust and suspicion afoot throughout the city. It wasn’t all that different from Vietnam. So much for gemeutlichkeit!
As I was starting law school, the open housing marches led by Father Groppi and his Commandos started with a warm-up on Monday, August 28th followed by a big one – about 1,000 marchers – on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, September 2nd. Predictably, there were hecklers and worse taunting the marchers as they crossed Milwaukee’s Mason-Dixon line, the 16th Street viaduct. Also predictably, with all the drama of an Italian American Catholic priest leading a cadre of young blacks calling themselves “commandos” and with other marchers elbow to elbow for three city blocks, there was national press coverage. Mayor Henry Maier and Police Chief Harold Brier were both pugnacious and stubborn, traditional German Milwaukeeans whose personal qualities ensured that there would be no real peace between the black community and the white governmental establishment in Milwaukee as long as they were in office. Unfortunately, both remained in office a long time, Maier from 1960 till 1988, Brier from 1964 until 1984.
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