WHERE DID ALL THE GROWN-UPS GO?

By H. N. Burdett

"Grandpa, aren't you scared?" my 16-year-old grandson asked the other day, minutes before we sat down to dinner.

"Of what?" I asked.

"I was watching Boehner and Obama (on television)," he said. "It was like two parents fighting and I'm scared, aren't you?"

"Right, or like a couple of kids squabbling on the playground," I responded. "I'm concerned, but not frightened. It's all political posturing, gamesmanship. What this is really all about is next year's national elections. Opposing parties jockeying for position, each trying to set themselves up as the savior and the other as the villain. But don't worry. A deal will be struck on the debt ceiling. The country is not going to default on its debt."

Later that evening when I thought about that brief colloquy, I wondered if I wasn't whistling past the graveyard. In the end, I remained optimistic.

Impressive as the Republican members in Congress may be in rigidly repeating Frank Luntz's slogans and talking points, the feeling lingers that, with the tea party breathing down their necks, they are intent upon driving a stake through the GOP's heart and taking the country along with it as collateral damage.

Dr. Luntz is the wizard of ooze who came up with the "fair and balanced" tagline for Fox News, though anyone who is not blind, deaf or stupid knows it is neither. An acknowledged master of metaphor, he is the linguistic field general who has devised a brilliant campaign to solidify his valid premise that words matter in politics, business, relationships, and everywhere else.

Luntz has been working at this for years. He is the genius who turned global warming into "climate change" and the mainstream media, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, have swallowed it whole. Never mind that the world is experiencing the highest annual temperatures ever recorded and that a hunk of the Arctic the size of Rhode Island has melted.

Luntz's fingerprints are all over more recent constructions repetitively parroted by GOP congressmen in the debt ceiling debate: "job creators" to redefine and thereby justify corporate welfare in the form of unconscionable tax breaks, and "don't let them write a blank check" to demonize Democrats protecting Social Security and Medicare.

During congressional floor speeches by Republicans, just try counting how many times they use those two terms. Josef Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, was a master of the same strategy. Goebbels said if you keep repeating a lie, it will become conventional wisdom.

On the debt ceiling debacle, Fred Thompson, the movie and television actor and former United States Senator from Tennessee, is among the few actual grown-ups in his party. Thompson, once an aspirant for the GOP presidential nomination, cuts to the chase. Observing that the Republicans are getting most of exacly what they want in the debt ceiling deal, he says they should just shut up, vote and declare victory.

It should be noted that the tea party had not surfaced as the dominant political influence on the Republican party when Thompson was in the political arena. And the tea party is the tail wagging that dog, much to the chagrin of moderate members of the party -- a diminishing breed on the fast track to extinction.

One current U.S. Senator who pushes back at the tea party loonies is none other than the GOP's 2008 presidential nominee, John McCain of Arizona.

No longer harboring illusions of ascending to the presidency, McCain, who famously declined to buckle to torture in the Hanoi Hilton where he was confined during the Vietnam war, is reclaiming his torn and tattered maverick mantle.

He opposes the tea party's insistence that raising the debt ceiling should be linked to a Constitutional amendment mandating a balanced Federal budget. He calls such nonsense in the guise of don't-tread-on-me patriotism "foolish" and "bizarro."

By so doing, the Arizona senator once again becomes the pain in his party's posterior he was when he co-sponsored that long-standing GOP anathema, political campaign reform.

Any business unable to keep its books balanced can start counting the days when its doors must shut permanently. The family designee in charge of monitoring household expenses knows that spending beyond the budget means doing without not only luxuries but necessities. Virtually every state in the union prohibits its lawmakers from spending money that just is not there.

What makes the Federal government unique is that it is the states' banker of last resort. When Hurricane Katrina ravished parts of Louisiana and Mississippi, those states turned to the Federal government for relief. When George W. Bush invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, he did not turn to the private sector to finance his folly; in fact, some portions of the latter profited rather handsomely.

Should Congress be bound by Constitutional fiat to balance the budget -- a key condition exacted by the tea party for a debt ceiling deal -- the United States, arguably the wealthiest and most admired country in the world, would have to throw itself at the mercy of the global community for emergency relief and unforeseeable urgent contingencies.

A balanced budget as a guiding principle of our Federal government would turn the United States into a virtual Third World country. Those six or seven of every 10 Americans who believe this is a great idea should go back to their high school civics texts and try reading and understanding them.

Better yet, the tea party and its conservative sheep should exert special effort to comprehend the Constitution they claim to revere. The tea party cult would sooner rather than later learn that a balanced budget amendment would be on a one-way collision course with that document's general welfare clause. They would not only lose the argument, but have no recourse but to fold their leaky tents and close shop.

Amid the bickering, back-biting and bombast that has turned the U.S. Congress into an object of contempt by the very electorate that puts its members into office, I remain confident that an eleventh-hour agreement will be reached. More than likely it will be a jerrybuilt mess, full of flaws, a patchwork quilt that will be of little more use than applying Band-aids to cancer.

But it will somehow squeeze us through our current debt dilemma. The Triple-A bond rating of the planet's most admired nation will remain in grave jeopardy and the global economy will feel our pain.

All Americans should vehemently resent allowing our country to become beholden to no-nothing, tea party mania. We should resent frightening the next generation into glimpsing into their future and seeing only bleak, cold darkness -- a future that will find it worse off than the preceding generation for the first time in American history.

To paraphrase the come-uppance for that notorious bull in the national china shop, Sen. Joe McCarthy, we must ask our elected officials on Capitol Hill: Has it come to this gentlemen? Have you no decency? Have you no shame?

REQUIEM FOR A PATRIOT

By H. N. Burdett

Among the more ironic idiosyncrasies of American history is the fact that two of the greatest founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, passionate rivals who never lost their mutual respect passed away on the same day: July 4, 1826.

One hundred and eighty-five years later to the day, a far less known but no less a patriot breathed her last. Her name was Selma Goldberg and she lived in Crofton, Maryland. She was my friend and, at times, a burr in my saddle.

Selma was a liberal firebrand who never pulled a punch. Her causticity was usually aimed at Republicans and conservatives. But she was never shy about calling out fellow Democrats and progressives when she felt they had strayed from their ideals.

A staunch, steadfast civil rights advocate, Selma was a co-founder of the Anne Arundel County chapter of the National Organization for Women. Equal pay for equal work was her cause in the early 1970s when our paths first crossed. But she was no one-trick pony. Her curiosity and intelligence, her drive to know more about everything inspired her to research and study virtually every issue headlined on the front page and a few that seldom or never even get into the paper.

Her weapons of choice were her pen and, later, her computer. Her opinions were expressed with considerable thoughtfulness and enviable clarity in letters to the editor. More than once I had heard her grumble about what she felt was her local newspaper's absurd policy of limiting individuals to one or two letters a month. "If you have something to say, they ought to let you say it," she once told me. As an erstwhile editorial page editor who had wrestled daily with the problem of so many letters, so little space, I understood the newspaper's policy and tried to explain it to her. She sort of understood, but never seemed quite satisfied with my explanation. Yet when I urged her to use Potomac Digest as a forum, she declined on the grounds that she felt she did not write well enough. "You write well enough for me to offer you space," I replied. "It's not your writing, it's your thinking that readers will care about." She still respectfully declined. I was crestfallen.

In addition to reading Selma's letters to the editor, I was privileged to have been the recipient of a few of her thoughts via e-mail and telephone. Her phone conversations would typically begin with something like: "I'm angry with Obama today because. . ." She never shrieked or screamed. Her tone was always as controled as the evidence she had harnessed to make her point.

Though Selma and I did not always agree, I invariably respected her opinions because they invariably seemed so confounded rational. You could waterboard me forever, but there would be no possible way I would consent to debate her publicly. I know that if I had the audience overwhelmingly on my side at the outset, before it was over they would be with her.

We agreed more than we disagreed. Sometimes we both agreed and disagreed on the same issue. An example: We both felt that so-called "Obamacare" was health care restructuring rather than health care reform. We were both strong supporters of single payer insurance. But we parted on her belief that the President's bill was unworthy of the paper on which it was written. I argued that the measure had value in that it mandated coverage for at least 16 million previously uninsured Americans and virtually eliminate pre-existing conditions as a reason to deny insurance. She said that I had a point, but never indicated she agreed with me.

Selma never lost her sense of humor. We both felt that constructing a costly fence across the United States-Mexico border was an exercise in futility and stupidity, to say nothing of profligacy. She laughed when I told her that if a 10-foot high fence was built, undocumented immigrants would bring an 11-foot ladder. She laughed again when I told her the fence would probably be built by the only available labor: immigrants, perhaps undocumented.

It is her delightful laugh that I will miss most about her, I think.

It is fitting that Selma, the passionate soldier in the trenches defending social justice, died on the anniversary of American independence. Her core belief was that disagreement with your government is not unpatriotic; silence when your government is wrong is unpatriotic. In this conviction, Selma Goldberg's life is one that would please the ghosts of those two old rivals, Jefferson and Adams.

THE WORLD'S DYING OCEANS

By H. N. Burdett

Amid the political ping-pong between a dysfunctional Congress and the desperate Obama administration over the August 2 debt limit deadline, the New York Times, in its wisdom, recently relegated to the penultimate of four editorials a new report that the world's oceans are "approaching irreversible, potentially catastrophic change."

That the moment of truth draws ever closer when "a self-inflicted wound," as Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke termed it, could trigger economic chaos is undeniably a grave concern.

Underlying the current stalemate over how to best remedy the nation's deficit woes, however, is a struggle between the two major U.S. political parties to extract at the eleventh hour a bunny from a fedora, each intent upon not only declaring itself the savior but also portraying the other as the villain of the tragicomedy.

As serious as the debt crisis may be, it is nowhere close to rivaling in severity the portentous consequences of the acceleration of ocean degradation resulting in mass extinctions.

The findings of experts from the International Program on the State of the Oceans and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature reveal that the world's oceans have warmed and become more acidic as they absorb human-generated carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Agriculture runoff and other anthropogenic causes have further increased the deprivation of the ocean's oxygen.

"The oceans' natural resilience has been seriously compromised," the Times editorial warns. "Pollution, habitat loss and overfishing are dangerous threats on their own. But when these factors converge, they can destroy marine ecosystems."

The naysayers can be counted upon to vigorously argue that the authors of the study are nothing more than a thundering horde of Cassandras making much ado over very little, shrug off the report and hire their own "independent" scientists to furnish contrary data.

Meanwhile, the list of marine life either vulnerable to extinction, endangered or critically endangered grows. They now include seven commercially important species, among them mackerel, marlin and three species of tuna.

Reversal of the ominous conditions underscored in the report requires immediate reduction in carbon dioxide systems, establishment of a system of marine conservation areas and protection of ocean life that extends beyond national jurisdictions.

Conventional wisdom is virtually always slow to accept negative environmental findings as factual -- a reaction spurred by industrial polluters willing to debunk any and all evidence that might cut into their profit margins.

A concerted effort by the international community is necessary to head off destruction of marine ecosystems by reining in carbon emissions, thereby stabilizing the health of the world's oceans and preventing further significant changes therein that could further accelerate climate change.

With global markets wobbling on their shaky foundations and a U.S. national election 16 months away, the ramifications of future devastating weather systems and the kind of world the next generation will inherit somehow evades our attention much less our concern.

THE JOYS OF CEREBRAL FERVOR

By H. N. Burdett

I would have to reach well back into the past, more than three decades, to remember the last time I encountered Severna Park, Maryland schoolteacher Jim Hoage. But he left an indelible impression.

Jim is among those rare birds one both enjoys and respects for their clear-headed, yet passionate cut-to-the-chase worldview. Not only can he dish it out eloquently and concisely, he can back it up with legitimate facts, figures and citations for anyone who might demand such and is willing to read, listen and learn.

Let me hasten to add that while Jim has always worn his progressivism proudly as well as gracefully, I have friends from the opposite end of the political spectrum who share his ability to communicate which, for lack of a more precise term I can only characterize as cerebral fervor.

Though the cheap alibi of time and circumstance has precluded Citizen Hoage and me from having even a single phone conversation in all too many years, I am delighted to report that 30 or more years have neither mellowed his progressive allegiance or drained his ink well.

Jim still writes provocative letters to the editor: a perfect forum for someone of his bent who worships at the lonely but hallowed altar of brevity. After encouraging a few friends to glance at Jim's most recent offering in my hometown newspaper, the Annapolis Capital, I was pleased to learn that most had already seen it. Moreover, and this pleased me even more, more than a few assured me they look forward to reading any editorial page letter bearing the signature of James Hoage, Severna Park.

I will not go so far as to suggest that there is a Jim Hoage Cult alive and well in Anne Arundel County, but I certainly hope so. I also have a strong hunch that not all of Jim's fans have met him personally. Over the past few days I've heard his name mispronounced at least three different ways, no easy feat for a two-syllable name which often enough is botched into one. I won't bother to present the correct pronunciation here, instead choosing to enthusiastically reprint his Monday, June 27 letter to the editor in its entirety:

Cut the Fat

House Speaker John Boehner wants $2 trillion in (federal budget) cuts. But he and other Republicans want them to be in what middle class and poor people need. Instead, the GOP should look across the river (toward the Pentagon) and feast their eyes on pork and the corporate welfare. They should:

1. Trim five of the 11 aircraft carriers. The Chinese will soon have DF-21 missiles that can easily blow a carrier out of the water along with its 5,000-man crew. Save $75 billion.

2. Cut all the F-35 fighters. The F-15's, F-16's and F-18's we now have are fine. Use more drones. Build one new sub a year, not two. Save a whopping $676 billion.

3. Cut the Reagan relics, the Cold War missiles/nuclear weapons. Save $80 billion.

4. Trim troops to 0.7 million from 1.3, bases to 300 from 500, generals/admirals to 500 from 952. Stop 57 K "re-up" bonuses. Make it "25 and out," not 20. Save an admirable $487 billion!

5. Trim our 17 spy groups who gather more "intelligence" than they can study. Save $152 billion.

6. Bring home now the 100,000 troops in Afghanistan. Avoid quagmire. Save $350 billion.

7. Zero-base the whole Pentagon budget: justify each item each year. Save $180+ billion.

There's your $2 trillion. But if a little pork/corporate welfare is a must, compensate: Axe the Bush tax cuts for the rich and impose a minimum corporate income tax.

Ordinary Americans are wising up. A respectable poll finds 55 percent favor military cuts but only 21 percent Medicare cuts and only 13 percent Social Security cuts.

On Aug. 3, if Republicans prove pigheaded, Reggie Retiree may find no Social Security check in his mailbox. But Reggie shouldn't have to fear doomsday; it should be the pork chasers and corporate welfare queens who feed at the Pentagon trough.

JAMES HOAGE
Severna Park, MD

VIETNAM GHOSTS HAUNT WHITE HOUSE

By H. N. Burdett

"Every president has had to deal with it," journalist Deborah Kalb said, setting the theme for a recent colloquim at Washington's National Press Club. "It doesn't go away."

Her reference was to the nine-year Vietnam War that concluded in 1975 with more than 47,000 American service personnel killed, over 153,000 wounded, and which continues to be the 800-pound invisible gorilla that for nearly 40 years since has been just over the shoulders of every U.S. President from Gerald R. Ford to Barack H. Obama.

It is both a cliche and an understatement to claim that Vietnam changed everything in the United States. For that war resulted in not only an unprecedented self-examination of the American character, but perhaps how the rest of the world will view the United States for generations to come.

If U.S. foreign policy is a study in incoherence - a diplomat's nightmare - blame it on Vietnam.

If the U.S. population is sharply divided whenever the drums beat for military intervention, blame it on Vietnam.

If the U.S. Department of Defense budget exceeds $700 billion, dwarfing defense spending of the nine nations behind it, Vietnam paranoia cannot be discounted.

If countless U.S. citizens have chosen to re-examine Stephen Decatur's gold standard dictum for patriotism - "Our country!. . .may she always be right, but right or wrong, our country" - Vietnam is without doubt the provocation.

Ms. Kalb and her father, Marvin Kalb, a 30-year award-winning correspondent for CBS and NBC News, have co-authored a book titled, Haunting Legacy: Vietnam and the American Presidency from Ford to Obama. To discuss their tome for which they have conducted "hundreds of interviews" over a five-year period, they shared the NPC stage with Ted Koppel, the former 25-year anchor of NBC's Nightline and current senior news analyst at National Public Radio.

Marvin Kalb cited Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush as examples of how post-Vietnam presidents responded to crises on their watch with that one defeat in U.S. military history not far from their consciousness.

When 241 U.S. Marines participating in a peacekeeping force in Beirut, Lebanon were killed in a suicide bombing on October 23, 1983, "Ronald Reagan decided to do nothing," Kalb recalls. In fact, Marines were pulled out of Beirut and put on a waiting ship offshore. "Ronald Reagan did not want the U.S. to be, as he said, 'spooked' again as it was in Vietnam."

When President George H. W. Bush launched Operation Desert Storm on August 20, 1990, responding to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, he dispatched 200,00o U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia. In the following year, Operation Desert Storm quickly and decisively drove Iraq's armed forces from Kuwait in some 100 hours. Bush 41's decision was to "overload the circuit - go in, do it fast, and get out," Kalb said.

Throughout the U.S. military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan that President Obama inherited from his predecessor, Vietnam has not been far from his mind.

While campaigning in 2008, Obama was accompanied by Senators Jack Reed, D-Rhode Island, and Chuck Hagel, R-Nebraska, both Vietnam veterans, whom he questioned incessantly about that war during the 14-hour flight from Washington to the Middle East. Kalb further noted that when Obama made the decision to double down on Afghanistan, he told his National Security Council: "Afghanistan is not Vietnam."

The so-called Powell Doctrine is frequently used to compare the Vietnam War, the Gulf War and the Iraq War. As its namesake, former Secretary of State Colin Powell said in an interview on The Rachel Maddow Show on April 1, 2009, that doctrine denotes exhausting all "political, economic and diplomatic means" before a nation resorts to military force.

More specifically, the following must be in place: A vital national security interest threatened; a clear and attainable objective; full and frank analysis of the risks and costs; exhaustion of all other non-vi0lent policy options; a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement; full consideration of policy consequences; support of the American people; genuine broad international support.

The closing lines of Barbara Tuchman's masterful 1984 treatise, The March of Folly, cite Michigan Congressman Don Reigle and they bear repeating here:

In talking to a couple from his constituency who had lost a son in Vietnam, he faced the stark recognition that he could find no words to justify the boy's death: 'There was no way I could say that what had happened was in their interest or in the national interest or in anyone's interest.'

TWO NONPAREIL MARYLAND NEWSMEN

By H. N. Burdett

Two legendary Maryland newsmen died last month, but their obituaries failed to do them justice.

It was not the fault of the authors. The bare bones of the careers of Herbert L. Thompson and Philip M. Evans certainly could be compressed into the normal 300-400 word obit format. But what these two men meant to the craft of news gathering in their state, and most particularly to those fortunate enough to have been their colleagues, might not be adequately conveyed in 300,000-400,000 words.

Herb Thompson was an Associated Press reporter and editor for 18 years, starting in Huntington, West Virginia, the final 12 years as AP's Annapolis bureau chief. In 1967he was named press secretary and principal staff assistant to Maryland Governor Spiro T. Agnew. After Agnew was elected Vice President of the United States, Thompson went to Washington as his press secretary and later served as his chief speech writer. Thompson left the White House to join the U.S. Agency for International Development, serving as the Deputy Director of the USAID mission in Tunisia from 1973-1975 and Deputy Director of Public Affairs in USAID headquarters in Washington from 1975-1977. From 1978 until his retirement in 1986, Thompson was Director of Information Services for the International Crops Research Institute for Semi-Arid Tropics at Hyderabad, India.

Early in his newspaper career, Phil Evans was also with AP in West Virginia until joining the Baltimore Evening Sun as a reporter and later was named city editor before he left to become executive editor of the Annapolis Capital. He subsequently served in managing editor posts at the Washington Evening Star, the Philadelphia Bulletin and the Washington Times. Evans returned to Annapolis, purchased the pocket-sized, black and white Annapolitan magazine, and was its editor as well as president and publisher. He expanded the publication into a full-sized, full-color magazine reflecting the spirit of the state capital with wit, charm and intelligence that mirrored his own personality and temperament. Evans left journalism to serve as a consultant in 1980 to the presidential campaign of environmentalist Barry Commoner, and in 1998 to Ralph Neas, a liberal Democrat, in his effort to unseat longtime Republican Rep. Connie Morella.

In many respects, Herb Thompson, the model family man, and Phil Evans, the bon vivant who seemed driven to living each day as though it was to be his last, could not have been more different.

Following the daily annual sessions of the Maryland General Assembly, most reporters filed their stories, ambled off to dinner, then caught up with lawmakers at various saloons scattered about the capital city. Phil Evans seldom entered a watering hole he did not like and rarely encountered a woman he could not charm. On those same nights , Herb Thompson was having a late family dinner at home with his wife and daughters, scanning a newspaper or two, watching some television and he was in his own bed fast asleep before the serious imbibation was even beginning elsewhere in town.

What Phil and Herb mostly shared was an abiding commitment to the news as the first drafts of history and, considering that initial impressions tend to endure, were fixated on these being as accurate and thorough as time and circumstance permitted.

Additional traits Evans and Thompson men had in common were a steely calmness in the pervasive chaos that frequently attends breaking news under deadline pressure, epitomizing the Hemingwayesque characterization of courage as grace under fire.

Of at least equal significance, no matter how frenetic the singular madness of staying on top of a breaking major story became, neither Herb or Phil was ever too distracted to offer solace and encouragement to a colleague who had lost the way either professionally or personally. Each had such remarkable self-confidence and control over his emotions that if anyone had ever witnessed either of them seething with anger or frustration, that experience has been one of the better kept secrets in the annals of Maryland journalism. At Phil's memorial service in Washington's National Press Club, a reporter who had been on his staff at the Evening Star recalled that he once told her: "I may not always be right, but I'm never in doubt."

I had the good fortune to meet Herb and Ann Thompson during the six months between completion of graduate school and reporting to active military duty. As the editor of the Maryland Gazette, a 28 to 32-page weekly with a fulltime staff of two -- a "society page" editor and a photographer -- I spent three days of every week covering the news and rewriting press releases in the newspaper's Glen Burnie office, and the remaining two days writing headlines and making up the paper in Annapolis, where the Gazette was printed.

Back in those days, I met Herb and soon afterward he invited me to his home for dinner. I accepted the invitation and began lamenting how I would have to decline his offer to become his assistant in the Annapolis AP bureau, which I was morally certain was in the offing. Under ordinary circumstances, it would have been a dream job for a fledgling news reporter, but I had a two-year obligation to Uncle Sam.

As it happened, after dinner I went home without the expected job offer but with the adorable and charming Felicia, to whom I was introduced by my host and hostess following dessert. It was love at first sight. Felicia was a black and white kitten, the runt of the latest litter of the Thompsons' famously fertile feline who, to hear some tell it, had birthed a sizable portion of Annapolis's four-legged population.

Upon my discharge from the service some two years later, I became reacquainted with Herb. Only now I was covering state government and the legislature for the old Baltimore News Post. I found him to be a trusted fount of facts and figures concering Maryland government. My own coverage of the Maryland General Assembly for the News Post, later renamed the News American, was immeasurably bolstered by the reliable and ready resource of the AP bureau chief, whom I came to regard as a human clip service with a warm demeanor and a wry sense of humor.

Herb and I amused ourselves during lulls in the hurly-burly of legislative activity by collecting the more outrageous gaffes of state lawmakers on the floors of the House of Delegates and Senate chambers, to wit: "Let's stop beating this dead horse to death," "Correct me if I'm right," "For obvious reasons unknown to me." My personal favorite was pompously proclaimed by a portly bundle of self-importance packaged in a three-piece suit with a Phi Beta Kappa key dangling from a gold vest chain. "This debate is degenerating," he thundered, "into a matter of principle."

I clearly recall Herb waxing poetic about the newly opened franchise restaurant where he could treat his wife and two daughters to burgers, fries and shakes, all for ten bucks and he got back change. He was praising Annapolis's first MacDonald's.

When I first met Phil Evans I was covering state government for the Baltimore News Post and he had the civil rights beat for the opposition newspaper, the Evening Sun. My impression was of a guy about my own age who dressed a little better than I did, had an easy smile and exuded class and breeding. From his obituary in the Washington Post, I learned that his father had worked in finance in New York; I already knew that his mother had been an opera singer. They, along with young Phil and his brother Dick, relocated to Dorchester County on Maryland's Eastern Shore where, according to the Post obituary, "his parents wanted to work as truck farmers."

What most impressed me about Phil was that he was among those rare Sunpapers reporters who actually did not appear to be using those venerable newspapers as mere stepping stones towards the acknowledged pinnacle of American journalism, the Great Gray Lady, as the New York Times was then known. A few of those obsessively ambitious young Sun reporters, like Tony Lukas and Adam Clymer, actually completed the ascent.

As time passed, Phil was anointed city editor of the Evening Sun, an event that I mark as a seminal moment. He was the first of my generation to nail down a major editorship at a Baltimore daily newspaper. Moreover, I was favorably impressed with the way Phil and his extremely competent assistant city editor, Mike Naver, led that newspaper's formidable news staff. It helped that Phil and Mike had inherited an awesome array of talent, worthy of the legacy established in the 1930s, '40s and '50s when the legendary Henry Louis Mencken attracted national attention to the gem of a newspaper that shone through the drabness of the Queen City of the Patapsco Drainage Area.

After leaving the News American to obey one of my periodic impulses to write the Great American Novel, I one day found myself married and back working for a newspaper. This time it was as the editorial page editor and columnist of the Annapolis Evening Capital. Some three years later, I felt another novel churning in my gut. Meanwhile, the newspaper was sold to a group headed by Philip Merrill, one of Kennedy Administration Under Secretary of State Chester Bowles's whiz kids at the U.S. Department of State.

Intriguing as the prospective sea change of improvement to the paper appeared, it was a mild distraction rather than a deterrent. I continued to work on my model resignation letter, intent upon expressing both my gratitude to the Capital for providing a forum to regain my journalism chops and my unwavering resolve to follow my heart. But before I could deliver my farewell epistle to the new publisher, Phil Evans, who had been on the abysmally slow track to the managing editorship of the Evening Sun, jumped ship and signed on as the executive editor of the Capital, a newspaper with a circulation well south of 30,000.

In a one-on-one meeting with Phil Evans, he outlined his grand plan for transforming the small Annapolis daily into a first-rate newspaper that would cover the burgeoning territory between Baltimore and Washington -- focusing on, in addition to the state capital, the new and growing towns of Crofton and Columbia.

Now it became clear to me why Evans had abandoned his quest to become the managing editor of one of the nation's most heralded cathedrals of journalism to cast his lot with a smaller newspaper seemingly unworthy of his sharply-honed and obvious skills. He concluded our meeting by assuring me that the Capital would be "the most exciting newspaper on the East Coast" and encouraging me to help build it into just that. He was a visionary, who saw the world through a prism of unlimited possibility: a dreamer who disdained the security of a top job at a quality newspaper and was wagering his own future on a journey through a potential minefield of headaches and heartaches where timid souls and even most angels feared to tread. I swallowed his Kool-Aid in one large gulp, promptly tore up my swan song masterpiece, rolled up my sleeves and began pounding my Underwood in earnest.

My newspaper days in Baltimore under City Editor Eddie Ballard, easily the planet's best field general on a breaking news story, were nothing short of wondrous. They provided me with a post-graduate course in my chosen field that no J-school could possibly match, and with a cast of flesh-and-blood colorful characters far too fantastic to populate a novel that might be accepted by any self-respecting literary agent, let alone any publishing house fiction editor hung up on realism. But my most satisfying years spent writing for newspapers and magazines were those in which Phil Evans was my editor at the Evening Capital and later at Annapolitan magazine.

As city editor of the Evening Sun, Phil had inherited a crackerjack editorial staff. But in Annapolis he was challenged to utilize his rare gift for spotting untapped talent that doubtless would have been overlooked by even the best of newspaper editors. He built the Capital news staff virtually from the ground up. His reconstruction project made the magician's stunt of commanding the Empire State Building to vanish look like a routine trick.

Examples: The print was not yet dry on the college diploma of a young woman Phil hired on the basis of a letter she had written home to her family and she prematurely blossomed into an exceptional education writer. He dispatched one of his reporters weekly to a state mental facility to pick up hand-written copy from one of his staff members who was briefly confined therein, with Capital readers having every reason to believe the dispatches were filed from the paper's West Street offices. He hired a Vietnam war combat veteran who frankly admits that at the time Phil gave him his job he wasn't qualified to be a copy boy, and watched him become a White House correspondent, Nieman Fellow and deputy bureau chief of a major U.S. newspaper.

E-mails from Phil Evans's colleagues I've received in the weeks since his passing validate my personal assessment: he was quite simply the best editor most of us have ever had. And Tom Stuckey, who was Herb Thompson's successor as AP Annapolis bureau chief wrote: "(Herb) was an outsanding journalist, an outstanding person, an honest man and a good person to work for. Long after he left Agnew's vice presidential office. . .he told me he quit because he had begun to have serious doubts about Agnew's honesty and could not continue to work for him." These words from those who knew Phil and Herb best are worth a thousand pictures.

THE OSAMA BIN LADEN AFTERMATH

By H. N. Burdett

Mark these words. Indeed, it may already have happened, though thus far unreported: ideologue wags will rush to be the first to slam President Obama for procrastinating for nine months before giving the order to storm the Abbottabad compound and kill Osama Bin Laden.

The euphoria of patriotic fervor sweeping the United States from sea to shining sea in celebration of the death of Bin Laden at the hands of a special forces team on the 66th anniversary of the suicide of Adolf Hitler will not have quelled before the derision of the president, who had known of the al-Qaeda leader's whereabouts since last August, begins.

There will doubtless be about as much sympathy for capital punishment advocacy over the demise of Bin Laden as there was for Iraq's leader, Sadam Hussein. No contract on the life of anyone has ever been more in order than it was on the man who perpetrated the horrific events of 9/11 ending the slaughter of some 3,000 Americans.

Osama Bin Laden is gone, but there is an enormous question mark over the proposition of whether or not the world is a safer place than it was before this celebratory event.

The news of Bin Laden's death can come as little comfort to Moumar Qadaffi and other tyrants in country after country in the Middle East where people have taken to the streets demanding change that hopefully translates as a long overdue outcry for democratic government.

At very least, it is a safe wager that there will now emerge a clamoring for replications of the special forces operation that has rid the planet of a homicidal maniac to take down a few others. Call it human nature, but the thirst for the blood of other madmen is destined to go viral.

When the killing of Bin Laden was announced, many of us had many different thoughts, reflecting appropriate retribution or cold vengeance.

The daughter of a man whose life ended in the World Trade Center attack had it right when she was interviewed by a television network reporter about her feelings after learning of Bin Laden's death. She said, in effect, that it would not bring her father back, that she personally felt the same as she did before she heard the news and that she expected to feel the day after: the only difference is that Bin Laden is no more, and her life goes on. She had it exactly right.

My own thoughts centered on Andrew Bacevich, the former army colonel who had once been characterized as a Pentagon intellectual and now heads the international relations program at Boston Univeristy.

Bacevich repeatedly criticized United States intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan as unnecessary, without denigrating the loss of lives of American soldiers who fought in these wars. One of the lives lost was his own son.

Bacevich is convinced that there cannot be a war against terrorism because wars, by definition, are hostilities between nations, not against "isms." He believes the hunt for Bin Laden and the effort to obliterate al-Qaeda should, from the beginning, have been an international police operation. This might well have held together the so-called "coalition of the willing" and Bin Laden may have been killed or captured long earlier than he was.

Announcing the death of Osama Bin Laden from the White House, President Obama said: "Justice has been done."

The woman interviewed by network TV had it right. President Obama had it right. And, in my mind, Andrew Bacevich had it right. But back to the more relevant question: Is the world today a safer place? The question looms large and it is one that only time can answer.