Holding public office in America should be an honor and a trust.
For example, the American people elected Kentucky’s Zachary Taylor as president in 1848. They chose Old Rough and Ready (a nickname he got for his guts and his lack of fake polish) not because he was a skillful politician, but because they appreciated his lifetime of service to the nation as a military officer who made good decisions and shared the dangers and deprivations of his men on the frontier and in battle. Taylor was one of the nation’s best military officers in the half-century before the Civil War.
Taylor himself was a kind and honest man who was accused of being an American Indian lover because he was much more fair to them than the average officer. During the Seminole War, Taylor and his men captured a number of blacks who lived with the Seminoles and he allowed them to go to Oklahoma with the Seminoles according to their wishes instead of selling them into slavery, like many speculators and slaveholders wanted him to do.
During the Mexican War, which started when Mexicans crossed the Rio Grande into Texas and killed or captured some of his men, Taylor clamped down on anti-Catholic bigotry in his ranks. Irishmen and Creoles were serving with his army. He told his men the Mexicans were from a fellow Christian land, even if they were Catholics instead of Protestants like he and most of his men were. Taylor punished men in his command who raped or robbed or wrongfully shot Mexican civilians during the Mexican War. (However, he let Mexican officials know he would destroy any town whose people harbored guerillas.) Taylor paid out of his own pocket for the treatment of severely wounded Mexican soldiers when he took Mexican towns they were left behind in because the Mexican government and the War Department refused to do so.
Taylor stood up to the wrongful conduct of his superiors in the Polk Administration during the war. All of the above marked “Old Rough and Ready” as a truly great man.
Taylor’s wife Peggy, instead of sipping juleps on the porch of their plantation, served on the frontier with him. She lived in rude housing, raised their children, sewed uniforms, nursed the sick, and wrote letters home for illiterate soldiers. She turned down the honor of being the First Lady (a term her husband coined when he eulogized Dolley Madison at her funeral) because she made a vow to God to turn down the honors of society if only He would let her Zack come home safe from the Mexican War. Their charming daughter Betty served in her stead as “Hostess of the White House.” No woman of Peggy’s wealth would do these things today. She was a noble woman in the best sense of the word.
Taylor, despite being a slaveholder, saw slavery was tearing the country apart. So he decided to limit slavery with an eye toward ending it. Senator William Seward evidently got him to consider using federal money to buy the slaves their liberty and set them up as sharecroppers or pioneers in the West. (This was also an idea of Congressman Abraham Lincoln.) The Democrats, the party of slavery, opposed Taylor. Taylor’s own Whigs, like the GOP today, were led by Establishment politicians who looked down on him but envied him.
Taylor defied them all. He maneuvered to get gold rushing California and mostly Spanish and Catholic New Mexico into the Union as free states to break the slavery deadlock in the Senate. He threatened secessionist politicians to their faces with hanging if he was to catch them in rebellion. He sent troops to New Mexico to keep Texans from seizing the land. And he believed the Mormons were degenerate polygamists, so he rejected their claims to Nevada, and large parts of Colorado, Arizona, Idaho, and California, and kept them in limbo.
Key senators like Whigs Henry Clay and Daniel Webster and Democrat Stephen Douglas (and most other Democrat senators) wanted to put a stern fugitive slave act on the books. Taylor opposed this as well. Taylor said slaves usually ran away because they were being mistreated. Even though he was outnumbered in votes in the Senate and House, Taylor could veto legislation, order the Army to protect the people of New Mexico from invasion by Texans, and order the Navy to block a slaveholder attempt to invade Cuba and make it a slave state. “Old Rough and Ready” did all three.
Taylor blocked the Democrats and his own party’s senators’ attempt to sell out on the expansion of slavery. Taylor also blocked the demands of speculators to use federal money to cover bonds Texas had issued because it wasn’t the public’s duty to bail out greedy speculators. Taylor, on the verge of victory over the enemies of the Republic, sickened suddenly on the 4th of July, 1850, and died five days later. He served only 16 months as President, all of which were filled with tumult.
The Senate passed the ugly series of bills that made up the Compromise of 1850, which new president Millard Fillmore signed within two months of Taylor’s death. They gave statehood to California, stoned New Mexico, picked up Texas’ debts to make insider speculators richer, and enacted a truly horrible fugitive slave law that endangered the freedom and lives of free blacks as well as runaway slaves.
After Taylor’s death, a series of career politician punk presidents (Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan) and cowardly congresses made the Civil War inevitable. It remained for Taylor’s followers Abraham Lincoln and U.S. Grant to deal with this horrible disaster.
Some speculated Taylor was poisoned to make it possible for Millard Fillmore and Congress to roll over for the slaveholding interests and those who held Texas bonds who wanted big money. The coroner of Jefferson County, Kentucky, at the request of more than 100 descendants of Zachary Taylor, exhumed Taylor in 1991. Since all that remained of Taylor were his bones, hair, and nails, the only poison forensic scientists could check him for that caused the symptoms he suffered was arsenic. Taylor had an arsenic level in him average for men of his era. They could not rule out poisoning by another method (one type of poisonous mushroom causes symptoms like Taylor suffered as he lay dying), so Taylor’s death remains an unsolved mystery.
I was privileged to talk with two of the figures in the autopsy of Zachary Taylor. One, a prominent Taylor relative, does not believe he met with foul play. The other, a medical science professional who helped the Taylor relatives who came to Louisville for the exhumation, believes just as strongly Taylor was a murder victim.
Taylor looked for adult solutions to a terrible problem. He would use force to preserve the Union. He evidently leaned toward using federal money to pay slaveholders for the liberty of their slaves. Had he lived, the Civil War might have not occurred, or only a few states would have broken with the Union. if Taylor was still alive, most of the key generals who would later lead the Confederacy in war (like Lee, Jackson, and Longstreet) would have listened to his counsel and would not have broken with the Union, because they served under him and admired his courage under fire and his judgment.
Taylor, by his service for the nation, and by his courage, honesty, and common sense, won the public’s trust, and proved himself worthy of it in the final mission of his life. He dared to confront the slavery issue which threatened the nation’s life, and died while doing so. Taylor’s death made it possible for lesser men to defile the office and ensure a civil war that cost about 650,000 men their lives, hundreds of thousands of more men their limbs or sanity or eyesight or health or some combination of the above, millions of moms and dads and wives and sweethearts and siblings and children endless grief, and hundreds of thousands their homes and their livelihoods. Not to mention all the racial hatred that followed, the results of which persist to this day. Zachary Taylor’s death was a national calamity every bit as big as the murder of his legendary supporter (and subordinate in the Black Hawk War) Abraham Lincoln.
Sadly, honorable men like Zachary Taylor or Abraham Lincoln or George Washington or Grover Cleveland or Theodore Roosevelt or Al Smith or Ronald Reagan are virtually nonexistent in the public offices of today.
The average politician is not someone who has lived a life of greatness in his or her chosen field and has stepped into public life out of a sense of duty, like Zachary Taylor. The average politician views holding public office as a plum that comes with a salary and perks, and a chance to advance …. while telling people what to do and maybe not having to do a lot himself or herself except to tell most people what they want to hear. In short, it’s not public service, but the public trough and a career of not having to do honest labor to become well-to-do that these politicians seek. It’s an advancement from being a teacher or a union steward or a low-grade lawyer or a government clerk for these pushy but not-so-talented people.
Politicians (and IRS agents) might perform artificial respiration on people who can’t breathe so they can suck the gold and silver from victims’ teeth. Many politicians routinely violate the Ten Commandments with selfishness so blatant and spirit so mean they are a key reason there deserves to be a Hell.
My brother Bryan (God rest his soul) said the reason the lawyers and politicians outlawed the display of the Ten Commandments from public buildings was that the commandments against lying, coveting others sexually, coveting things, stealing, adultery, and idolatry would create a hostile work environment for the scum who draw paychecks in those buildings.
Criticism comes with the job of being a public official. Sadly, much of it is earned. But if you buck the tide, like a Zachary Taylor or an Abraham Lincoln, or a Theodore Roosevelt, or a Ronald Reagan, or a Donald Trump, expect the Establishment to really unite against you.
President Trump just got criticized for donating a million dollars to Hurricane Harvey relief. That’s sign of how open the Establishment is in their hatred and envy.
That’s not quite as bad as those who claim the planet or the Earth Goddess or maybe the Tooth Fairy is punishing states whose people voted for Trump with hurricanes. These Mensas forgot to consider Hurricane Irma also hit the atheist socialist worker’s paradise of Cuba, and that a tropical storm and a major earthquake just hit anticlerical Mexico. But then, being evil, stupid, and/or inbred means never having to say you’re sorry.
Was Zachary Taylor murdered? We don’t know for sure.
But four presidents have been murdered in office.
Abraham Lincoln was the victim of secessionist Democrat John Wilkes Booth, who shot him at Ford’s Theater on Holy Thursday 1865. Lincoln died the morning of Good Friday, a martyr to the cause of preserving the Union and ending slavery. Seward, his Secretary of State, was the stabbing victim of Booth accomplice Lewis Powell.
James Garfield was the victim of a shyster lawyer and a plagiarizing “theologian” (a precursor to the Clintons and to Hillary’s pastor) federal office seeker named Charles Guiteau. Guiteau shot Garfield at a D.C. train station in 1881. He was hanged a year later.
William McKinley was the victim of anarchist Leon Czolgosz, who shot him at a fair in Buffalo in 1901. Czolgosz was electrocuted shortly afterward.
Anarchists are kind of like the Occupy movement, but with more initiative and results. Anarchists in that era also murdered the prime ministers of France and Spain, King Umberto of Italy, Empress Elisabeth (Sissi) of Austria-Hungary, and hundreds of Russian officials. Theodore Roosevelt, who succeeded McKinley, had Congress enact a law banning anarchists from emigrating to the United States. This is a good precedent for banning jihadists.
Lee Harvey Oswald, a Communist, murdered JFK in 1963. However many believe, on credible evidence, LBJ and elements of the Deep State were responsible and Oswald was a patsy. The Warren Commission’s members covered up a lot of the truth about Kennedy’s murder (starting with the fact that someone from in front of JFK shot him and someone from behind JFK shot him). Some accused the Cubans; some accused the Mob. My Grandpa Charlie, a former Chicago police detective and a JFK delegate to the 1960 Democratic Convention, blamed LBJ. He and many others believed LBJ was evil enough to order a hit on JFK, who as a war hero, considered LBJ a conniving coward and intended to dump him as VP when he ran for re-election in 1964. (Lincoln had done something similar in 1864, replacing Hannibal Hamlin with Andrew Johnson on a ticket of national unity as Andrew was a Southern Democrat loyal to the Union.)
John Hinckley, whose family were close friends of VP George H.W. Bush, shot Ronald Reagan in 1981. Some would say outsider Reagan was a victim of a RINO.
Later on, elements of the CIA nearly toppled Reagan by organizing a gunrunning, drugrunning, money laundering, and murder operation based in Arkansas with the evident cover of then governor Bill Clinton and the evident encouragement of VP Bush. According to Terry Reed, a CIA operative whose book “Compromised: Clinton, Bush, and the CIA” is one of the most ugly crime books ever written, Oliver North and other CIA people mocked President Reagan and were respectful of former CIA chief Bush. One said, in a meeting with Clinton, Bush personally wanted their operation to succeed. Reed also said CIA operative William Barr (later Barr was Bush’s Attorney General) told Clinton in Reed’s presence that the CIA appreciated much of what Clinton did for them, and that Clinton had a shot of getting CIA help for a run at the White House.
That operation was part of what became known as the Iran-Contra Affair.
Reed was also a friend of Barry Seal, the freebooting drugrunner who had the stones to photograph Colombian drug cartel leaders in Daniel Ortega’s Nicaragua while his plane was there for repairs. Seal, a U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency spy, passed these thru channels. Seal also reportedly knew about the drug habits of Bill Clinton and one or more of George Bush’s sons, according to Reed. Soon the photos Seal took while spying were made public due to a SNAFU or by design, and Seal knew he had been exposed by his own government. Colombians shot Seal to death at a halfway house in Louisiana in 1986. Since Seal was working off a short sentence for drugrunning, the killers knew his routine because the federal judge who sentenced him made it public.
Disgraced former FBI chief James Comey was caught reportedly deciding Hillary Clinton was not to be pursued on her problems with obeying federal laws weeks before his people interviewed her and key witnesses to her activities. Disgraced former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied about the National Security Agency not spying on the American public. Disgraced former CIA chief John Brennan had to admit, after denying it earlier, that the CIA spied on U.S. Senators. All are all open enemies of President Trump who tried to harm his chances of winning the 2016 election, and have resorted to unethical means to interfere with his work.
These top intelligence community officials didn’t try very hard to hide their enmity to President Trump. At least on Secret Service member said she would not try to protect this president if scheduled to defend him. One policeman did give his life in defense of Harry Truman when Puerto Rican extremists tried to murder him in 1950. Truman was living at the much more vulnerable Blair House during the renovation of the White House; that’s where the attack took place.
Trump, despite or maybe because of his personality, has exposed and brought to the surface the sad fact that many leaders and underlings in the national intelligence complex are outlaws.
It is not too hard to believe anymore that the intelligence community, the enforcement arm of the Deep State, is capable of a coup against the American public. So maybe some of those who the Establishment mocked as JFK conspiracy theorists are due an apology.
Harry Truman is also due a posthumous apology. He started the CIA, and complained it went rogue in public statements he made after the murder of JFK. Terry Reed, like Truman, a Missourian, said he had the honor of meeting President Truman as a JROTC kid, and said the CIA deserved Truman’s criticism. Truman, of course, made the hard but necessary and justifiable decision to nuke Japan to end World War Two. This kept my Dad and my Uncle Chuck and my Uncle Rusty, and millions of other men in uniform in the Pacific Theater from further harm.
I ran through the government agency wrongdoing from the early 1960s to the present to let you know there are a lot of evil people with power entrenched in the federal government. They and their predecessors have been there awhile, at least since the buildup of the federal government that started in earnest with FDR.
That is why we push for a more honorable class of government employee than what we have now. Part of being your own detective is knowing the good and the bad of America’s history, and the backgrounds and the ties of the people who seek to run your nation, your state, and your community. Part of being a good parent is leaving a good society to live in to your children.
One last thought: Those who seek public office must be able to do the right thing despite criticism. President Trump has the enmity of the five living presidents – Carter, the Bushes, Obama, and the Clintons. He also has the enmity of virtually the entire Democratic Party, all the media, most entertainment figures, most college profs and administrators, most multinational corporate and Chamber of Commerce types (who want cheap labor and not American jobs), and many in the GOP who depend upon globalist money.
Zachary Taylor was mocked as “an ignorant frontier colonel” by Daniel Webster and Henry Clay, the top two senators in his own Whig Party. The opposition Democrats, except for Unionists Thomas Hart Benton and Sam Houston, by and large were even more insulting toward Old Rough and Ready. Yet it was Taylor and not any of them who had the courage and judgment to look to solve the slavery issue in as unbloody a way as possible. Benton, and reluctantly, Houston, stood with President Taylor for the Union.
Taylor didn’t have the respect of the pygmies of the Senate. But he had the respect of the people and the devotion of perhaps our greatest president, who also died in office. Zachary Taylor is not remembered today because he died before he could succeed.
One other president also had the disdain of all five of his living predecessors. Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan were all opponents of Abraham Lincoln. None of them had a kind word for how Honest Abe did his job. Of course, like the five guys I named three paragraphs earlier, none of them did well by the American public during their terms in office.
When Taylor died in office, Honest Abe summed up Old Zack when he gave his eulogy. Lincoln said, “Along our frontier, in summer and winter, in sunshine and storm, like a sleepless sentinel, Zachary Taylor has watched while we have slept for 40 years. The fruits of his labor, his name, his memory and example, have verified the great truth that he who humbles himself shall be exalted.”
Would that all or at least the majority of our public officials could merit such a eulogy.
God bless all of you, every day, for as long as you shall live.
SHERLOCK JUSTICE
WE CAN SHOW YOU HOW TO BE YOUR OWN DETECTIVE.
END NOTES
The definitive Zachary Taylor biographies are by Indiana historian Holman Hamilton. A great and moving source on the exhumation of Taylor appears in Florida pathologist William Maples’ book “Dead Men Do Tell Tales.” I borrowed the title of this column from his chapter on Taylor’s exhumation, of which he was a participant.
I’ve mentioned Terry Reed’s and John Cummings’ book.
Info on Comey comes frm a 9/1/2017 CNN article. Info on Brennan comes from a 4/19/2017 American Spectator article and a 5/23/2017 CNN article. Info on Clapper comes from a 11/16/2016 article in the British paper The Guardian.
Hillary’s pastor Bill Shillady saw his book get pulled for massive plagiarism, noted the Washington Post 9/5/2017.
