What I learned in Havana talking to ordinary Cubans


By DAVID PAULIN

The secret love affair between left-leaning elites and Cuba goes on no matter what. No sooner had Cuba's aging Fidel Castro resigned, than a common narrative emerged in liberal papers like the New York Times: positive changes could be coming to the hemisphere's last bastion of communism.

On Cuba's northeast coast, meanwhile, 24 ordinary Cubans -- men, women, and children -- boarded a boat under cover of darkness. They set off across the Florida Strait to America -- presumably unaware of the media's upbeat Cuba narrative playing out in the country of their dreams. They landed in South Florida, reported the Miami Herald. They're among tens of thousands of Cubans who have escaped their island in recent years.

Coming when it did, their escape underscored yet again the glaring perception gap regarding Cuba dividing ordinary Cubans and leftist elites in America and abroad. You have to wonder if Cuba's apologists have ever talked with ordinary Cubans, those living in Cuba or who escaped from their island prison to America.

Nearly every night, boat loads of fleeing Cubans cross the Florida Strait -- and even more Cubans now take a longer and safer route through Mexico. That's according to official statistics cited in a New York Times article published a year and a half ago.

Given Raúl Castro's inability to inspire confidence among his subjects back then -- when he was acting president -- it's perplexing that the Times recently described the newly elected president as a "practical" and "no-nonsense" guy who is less wedded to ideology than his brother Fidel. All because of his "decision to begin his tenure by meeting the Vatican's top diplomat, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, a possible go-between with the United States and Europe."

Cuba, however, has played this game before -- inviting Pope John II to Cuba for a historic visit in January, 1998. Back then, many liberals also interpreted this as being a sign of Fidel's good intentions, evidence that positive changes were coming to Cuba.

It never happened.

Within a few years, the government cracked down on peaceful pro-democracy initiatives -- most notably the Valera Project -- by tightening its grip on power and making mass arrests. Kangaroo courts sentenced 30 journalists up to 28 years in prison in April, 2003, provoking international outrage.

So much for the Vatican's influence on Raúl and Fidel.

Why does nobody take Raúl at his word? After the National Assembly voted him president -- unanimously, of course -- he pledged to make no radical changes. And he noted that he'd closely consult with his ailing big brother. Members of Cuba's privileged communist elite must have been happy to hear all that.


Visiting Havana

The media's problematic reporting on the Castro brothers brought to mind a week-long reporting trip I made to Havana in 1996, 12 years ago, in mid-December. While reading recent news reports about Raúl Castro's government -- including cautiously upbeat ones -- I was struck by how things in Cuba today are as bad as when I visited.

Then and now, salaries average about $19 a month, not enough to pay for basic goods such as soap, cooking oil, and medicine. Then and now, Cubans giving interviews to foreign reporters insist that only their first names be used, fearing they'll be punished for speaking their minds. Some won't talk at all, of course.

It has been like this for nearly half a century. Accordingly, if Raúl Castro is indeed a democratic reformer in disguise, he'll face a major challenge in repairing the psychological and social damage that he, his brother, and members of the communist elite have wrought in a state that owns all property, most businesses, and punishes those who dare to exercise civil liberties we take for granted. Some Cubans have bravely protested or fled the island. Others play along with the charade and pay lip service to it.

Take religion, for example. When I asked a Havana school teacher how she'd be spending Christmas, she told me: "Why, there is no Christmas in Cuba!" Pointing to a little girl, she added, "She has never known a Christmas!" It was one of many telling anecdotes I gleaned during my week-long trip to the hemisphere's last bastion of communism. Coming to power in 1959, Fidel Castro eradicated nasty bourgeois influences such as Christmas -- a holiday no longer fit to celebrate under his communist ideology.

I was a Caracas-based journalist when I went to Havana. On assignment for the Dallas Morning News, my subject was what Cubans thought about the historic visit to Cuba being planned for Pope John Paul II.

Traveling alone is no fun. I'd gotten an absurdly low-priced package trip to Havana that was for two people, not one. So I invited along a Venezuelan acquaintance named Fiffy. She had a gift for putting people at ease, and she occasionally helped me out with my not-so-perfect Spanish.

Like more than a few sophisticated and well-educated Venezuelans, Fiffy was not a huge fan of the United States, but nor was she a raving anti-American. Neither of us had ever visited Cuba. The place fascinated us.

It was during our first afternoon stroll in Havana that a cheerful teacher beckoned us inside to visit her classroom, having spotted us looking into the grade school's street-level windows. She introduced us to her charming and smiling class of uniformed students. They greeted us on command. I didn't tell the teacher I was a journalist.

"We're tourists," I said. It seemed like the safe thing to say.

Soon after arriving the previous afternoon, I ran into serious problems with customs at Havana's Jose Marti airport -- all because my well-worn U.S. passport raised eyebrows among Cuban officials. They claimed it was too shabby to be taken seriously. Having traveled for years in the back pocket of my Levis, it was a bit creased around the edges. A tiny corner of my photo was unglued.

"No señor, this is not acceptable!" a man wearing dark military-style fatigues told me. "I don't think they'll let you in." He added, "You'll have to take another flight back to Caracas."

Alternatively, he explained, I could spend a week in a detention facility and then leave on my return flight. "Don't worry. It's not like a prison."

Read the rest of the article at The American Thinker.

The Wacko Journalist Narrative

BY DAVID PAULIN

Are the hard economic times facing the newspaper industry stressing newsroom denizens beyond the breaking point? While willing to entertain stories of wacko-vets, newspapers seem singularly uninterested in exploring the human cost of their own continuing economic troubles. In place of worries about soldiers allegedly returning home and committing suicide and murder in unusually high numbers, liberal papers like the New York Times and Washington Post might look at the nation's newsrooms -- their own included -- for a fascinating new narrative. You could call it the wacko journalist narrative.

No parody is intended here.

Trade magazine Editor & Publisher, considered the bible of the newspaper industry, says many newspaper staffers may be at risk for suicide as their industry faces yet another round of painful downsizing and layoffs, along with other work-related pressures.

In a story last June, E&P warned that newspaper staffers affected by the current shake-out should be "watched for suicidal tendencies" according to two health professionals, whom it quoted. Both are familiar with the newspaper business.

E&P's article and a related one in mid-June concerned the possible suicide of a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News, Richard Ramirez, 44. He was reportedly concerned about impending layoffs at the McClatchy-owned paper; it's now a shadow of the powerhouse it was years ago under its previous owner, the now-defunct Knight Ridder.

Ramirez, according to E&P, had been "troubled just days before his death by personal problems," and his wife was quoted as saying he was worried about impending layoffs. He was found in his backyard with a fatal knife wound. His death was later ruled a suicide.

Putting Ramirez's death into a larger context, E&P interviewed two public health experts. Both raised concerns about the mental health of newsroom staffers in the face of another round of cost-cutting and downsizing.

"All mid-career journalists are now dealing with enormous uncertainty in the future and enormous doubts about what choices they face. This is a time when we can be looking out for each other," according to E&P's interview with Bruce Shapiro, executive director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Dr. Frank Ochberg, a Dart psychiatrist and founder of center, told E&P: "Conditions of employment are not very good right now -- and often it is more upsetting dealing with conditions of employment than vicarious trauma."

According to E&P, both men agreed that if Ramirez's death was indeed a suicide (as it was indeed ruled to have been) it "will be a reminder that anyone affected by the current news industry downsizing must be watched for suicidal tendencies."(Emphasis added.)

Part of the University of Washington's Department of Communication, the Dart Center, according to its website, "is a global network of journalists, journalism educators and health professionals dedicated to improving media coverage of trauma, conflict and tragedy." It also says it "addresses the consequences of such coverage for those working in journalism."

E&P deserves credit for covering the newsroom suicide angle. Yet E&P's left-wing editor Greg Mitchell has nevertheless demonstrated far more interest in covering the suicides and emotional problems of veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Along with echoing the agenda of the loony left in his online column, he has exhorted newspaper editors to vigorously cover the suicides of American troops. On the other hand, he's urged no such pile-on in respect to covering journalists who, in increasing numbers, are themselves committing suicide.

Whether journalist suicides are in fact on the rise is hard to say, for no statistics measuring such things are available; at least nothing comparable to the extensive data the U.S. Army keeps on its soldiers -- and that it obligingly shares with the Washington Post.

Even so, there's plenty of anecdotal evidence available on journalist suicides -- and it's troubling. In June 2005, E&P referred to a spate of journalist suicides in a heart-rending story, "In Texas, the death of a reporter."

The in-depth piece (4,646 words) focused on the suicide of a well-respected and award-winning journalist at the Austin-American Statesman, 46-year-old Kevin Carmody. He specialized in investigative and environmental reporting, and, according to E&P's story, was dealing with a number of personal issues and work-related pressures.

Among other things, Carmody was taking the antidepressant Paxil and faced a court date for DUI charges two days before his death, E&P reported. And a week before his death, he brought his will to work: He had two colleagues witness and sign it, and another one notarized it.

Putting the reporter's suicide into a larger context -- that of possible a trend -- E&P writer Joe Strupp wrote:

"Does Carmody's suicide say something about the effect investigative reporting can have on those who may already have emotional problems? In the past year or so, several reporters have taken their lives following stressful assignments.

"Just last December, former San Jose Mercury News reporter Gary Webb shot himself in the head following months of growing depression, much of it caused by his inability to return to daily newspaper reporting (he left the newspaper in the wake of criticism over a 1997 series he wrote on CIA drug connections). Others include former Iraq embed Dennis O'Brien of the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, who hanged himself in February 2004, and author/journalist Iris Chang, who shot herself last fall."

It's a list, to be sure, that is hardly complete, as any Google search will reveal.

Troubled Industry

The current shake-out is nothing new. Over the past few decades, the newspaper industry has undertaken one wave of downsizing after another -- part of an effort to remain profitable amid declining readership and ad revenues. One popular downsizing tool has been "voluntary buyouts" of senior editorial staffers -- usually folks in their 60s, 50s, and even 40s, who earn the highest wages. The Washington Post is now undertaking such an effort.

At the same time, newspapers have gone on a minority-hiring binge (sometimes hiring not-so qualified people) under firm affirmative action/equal opportunity quotas. In today's politically correct newsrooms, the goal is to create the same ethnic and racial composition that exists in the local community, state, or even the nation; whichever criteria news executives feel is appropriate (or feel pressured into using). William McGowan's book Coloring the News dealt with the consequences of such multiculturalism.

Newsroom jobs are even being outsourced to India. Reuters has done that. And recently the Miami Herald was on the verge of doing it but backed down in the face of strong criticism. Interestingly, the Herald's outsourcing initiative was launched under Executive Editor Anders Gyllenhaal -- a man you would not expect to be overseeing such things. After all, he's the former editor of the left-wing Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Newspapers, like liberals, are suffering from high levels of cognitive dissonance these days. They love to run showcase exposes on Wal-Mart -- excoriating the retailer (wildly popular among working folks) for its allegedly cut-throat business practices. Another hate-object is the military, whose members are often portrayed as both killers and victims. Yet neither the New York Times nor Washington Post nor anyone else has ever done any comparable pieces about it own industry, focusing on the heart-rending human costs of another wave of downsizing. And make no mistake about it; there are human costs to such shake-outs: Many middle-aged staffers face a future of joblessness; part-time work; or irregular income working as freelance editors and reporters. And because journalism salaries are paltry in comparison to other fields, many have little savings to fall back on to launch new careers.

Ramirez, of the Mercury News, knew first-hand how bleak things could be. He'd been "looking for a new job for at least a year," according to E&P. 

Lack of Accountability

All in all, some news outlets do a lousy job when it comes to covering scandals within their ranks. Consider how the American-Statesman reported the death of its long-time staffer, Kevin Carmody.

A well-known reporter, Carmody had written some prominent stories -- and some controversial ones. His work had spurred much public discussion. So you'd think the American-Statesman's readers would have wanted to know what led up to his suicide - and how it occurred. His wife found him near a favorite fishing hole by Austin's popular Barton Creek -- a well-traveled public area. He was hanging from a length of rope tied to the branch of a tree.

Yet none of that ran in the newspaper where Carmody had worked; the 522-word piece about his passing focused only on what a talented reporter and wonderful guy he'd been. Indeed, E&P's article pointed out:

When the American-Statesman reported on Carmody's death, the story offered few details about how he died, stating only that his death was "being investigated as a suicide," and it has written nothing more. Although his body was found in a public location, Editor Rich Oppel contends it was not "public" enough to merit more information for readers.

Well, Oppel must know what he's doing; he's a member of the board that awards Pulitzer Prizes, after all. Still, you have to wonder: How would his paper have covered the suicide of a local solider who -- to the shock of his family and colleagues -- hung himself in a public area?

The New York Times, for its part, found very little that was fit to print following the highly public suicide of a senior staffer. Allen R. Myerson, 47, who jumped from the paper's 15^th floor at 10 a.m. on August 22, 2002. Minutes earlier, the business and financial reporter had left a suicide note on his desk.

In the next-day's Times, readers learned only that Myerson "fell from a parapet above the 15th floor." Police suspected a suicide, the paper noted.

Interestingly, a little over two years earlier, the body of reporter Agis Salpukas, 60, was found floating in the Hudson River. He'd reportedly suffered from depression -- a common thread in many suicides.

Could the two deaths be part of a trend at the Times? Well, probably not. Yet imagine if some Times' sleuth had learned that two soldiers at a military base had killed themselves within a number of months of each other? Imagine the next-day's headline: "Amid Iraq turmoil, military investigates another suicide."

Recently, satirist Iowahawk pulled together numerous news reports of journalists who had turned to crime; everything from wife beating to child molestation to murder. It's yet another possible trend that the mainstream media has yet to explore, and to quantify.

If only the Fourth Estate kept as many statistics on its personnel as the military did. Imagine the interesting trends it might dig up pertaining to suicide, crime, and other mayhem.

And who knows: Such stories might even boost circulation -- helping to ward off yet another round of downsizing, buyouts, and the outsourcing of editorial work to India.

Originally published at The American Thinker.

Author's Note: The men in the photo are, of course, two heroes of the mainstream media -- Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Whether these two actually deserve their hero status, however, is another question, as is noted by Stratfor's George Friedman in his article, "The Death of Deep Throat and the Crisis of Journalism." That article echoes some of the points made years ago in a fine article by Edward J. Epstein, "Did the Press Uncover Watergate?" published in his book "Between Fact and Fiction: The Problem of Journalism."

The Return of the Wacko Vet Media Narrative


BY DAVID PAULIN

As the troop build-up in Iraq produces positive results, many media outlets have seized upon a new anti-war narrative. It's right out of the Vietnam War-era: wacko and self-destructive vets running amok on the home front.

"Soldier Suicides at Record Levels," trumpeted a 1,500-word front-page piece in the Washington Post this week. And for three recent Sundays, the New York Times has dished up a front-page series of more than 10,000-words called "War Torn." It's about veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who have returned home -- only to kill again.

According to the Times' series:

"Town by town across the country, headlines have been telling similar stories. Taken together they paint the patchwork picture of a quiet phenomenon, tracing a cross-country trail of death and heartbreak."

The story is flawed, however. Commenting on "War Torn" in his column last Sunday, Times public editor Clark Hoyt wrote that the series "tangled itself in numbers right from the start." It was "analytically shaky" and relied upon "questionable statistics." His analysis followed howls from conservative bloggers, who were all over "War Torn" long before Hoyt's piece came out.

But give the Times credit for creating the position of public editor, a decision designed to restore its credibility after the Jayson Blair scandal and other problems.

Who is responsible for such agenda-driven reporting at the Times and other media outlets? Mostly senior reporters and editors who are in their 50s and 60s, folks who came of age during the 1960s.

For the rest of this article, visit The American Thinker.

After 50 Years: An Air Force Pilot's Bravery Outshines His Public Humiliation



(This was originally published at The American Thinker. For more on the case of Lt. David Steeves, see another post at this website: "Shooting Star: The Last Flight of Lt. David Steeves."


By DAVID PAULIN

Fifty years ago this month, President Eisenhower and Sputnik were in the news – and so were the marital travails of an Air Force pilot named David Steeves. The 23-year-old 1st lieutenant – once a national hero – was now under a cloud of innuendo and suspicion stirred up by the nation's news media.

Decades before media abuse became a hotly debated topic, Lt. Steeves was a victim of it, suffering a public humiliation he did not deserve. The Air Force, for its part, may have contributed to this guilt by innuendo. But ultimately it was the mainstream media that put the pilot's head in a noose in the court of public opinion.

In its watchdog role, the media should have endeavored to get to the bottom of the case of Lt. Steeves and his missing T-33 jet trainer. Instead, it played up the sensational aspects of the case, thereby helping to destroy an Air Force officer's reputation.

Lt. Steeves captivated the nation that previous July 1, 1957 when he wandered out of California's Sierra Nevada. Weeks earlier, the Air Force had declared him dead after he disappeared on a cross-country flight. Yet 54 days after ejecting from his disabled jet over ice and snow-covered mountains, he hobbled out of the wilderness with a heavy beard and tattered flight suit. In a hastily arranged news conference at Castle Air Force Base in Merced, California, he told a harrowing story of survival.

Lt. Steeves was front-page news for days, a media darling. And his photogenic 21-year-old wife, Rita, quickly became part of the story. There were TV and radio appearances, even talk of a book deal. But six weeks later, the story of Lt. Steeves, the hero, fell apart after the Saturday Evening Post claimed to have found “discrepancies” in his survival story. The weekly magazine's claims were not fully explained at first, and when they were explained months later, they proved baseless. But no matter. Thereafter, there was a media pile on.

The Steeves-as-hero narrative was quickly scrapped, and recast. Now he was a man telling tall tales – perhaps even perpetrating a hoax (though for what purpose was never explained).

And though not apart of their official narrative, some reporters may have heard wild rumors said to be floating about, or that were perhaps slipped to them by conspiracy-minded Cold Warriors in the Air Force or Pentagon: Steeves flew his jet to Mexico, then sold it to the Russians or some other malevolent nation.

None of this ever proved true. And in 1957 there was no evidence that it might be true. Yet this was of no consequence to the vast majority of media outlets. Putting on their brass knuckles, they went on a journalistic gang bang, trampling facts and decency as they infused story after story about Lt. Steeves with suspicion and reckless innuendo. And no matter that top officials in the U.S. Park Service and U.S. Air Force (those speaking on the record) supported Steeves' story. A close reading of newspaper archives, primarily from 1957 and 1958, makes all of this crystal clear.

Just a few years earlier, ironically, crusading members of the high-minded Fourth Estate told themselves they'd saved the country from Wisconsin's irresponsible senator, Joe McCarthy. Yet now they engaged in what amounted to McCarthy-style reporting on Lt. Steeves and his wife, Rita. Both eventually moved on with their lives, perhaps owing to their faith and resilient spirits, though the media's glare may have complicated their already troubled marriage.

The story of Lt. David Steeves started on a clear and sunny day on May 9, 1957 as he soared over the High Sierras at 33,500 feet. As he later related, an explosion ripped through his T-33 jet. He blacked out, regained consciousness and then ejected over some of America's roughest terrain. After a few weeks, the Air Force sent his wife a death certificate, believing nobody could have survived in the icy and snowy mountains.

“I was officially a widow. I had to start a new life,” she related. Determined to be strong and positive, she enrolled in a local university near her husband's hometown of Trumbull, Connecticut to become a school teacher. “I knew I must now be the head of my family — families, I know, can fall apart when there's a death. I resolved this would not happen to us.”

Survival Story

Yet her husband was alive, and fighting for his life.

In published accounts, Lt. Steeves' wilderness ordeal reads like a Hollywood script. One top Air Force officer called it a “remarkable feat.”

Two of Lt. Steeves' parachute panels were burned out, so he landed hard at the 11,000-foot level, badly twisting his ankles as he hit snow and ice. He had no survival kit or warm clothes to protect himself against temperatures that, according to an accident report obtained for this article, ranged between 25 to 60 degrees Fahrenheit. Bundling himself in his parachute, he huddled against giant boulders to stay out of the wind for four days. Then he gave up that a rescue party would be coming.

Setting off down the mountain, he told of crawling, sliding, and hobbling for 15 days, consuming only melted snow, until coming upon an empty ranger's cabin 15 miles away. There he found enough food to regain his strength. He told of then living on dandelions, grass snakes, and fish caught with some rusty hooks he found. Utilizing a snare rigged to his revolver, he even killed a deer.

Park rangers estimated he wandered 20 to 40 miles in attempting to hike out of the wildest part of the Sierra Nevada, where imposing peaks, canyons, and raging streams would challenge even an experienced mountaineer. He shed about 40 pounds from his fit 6-foot 195 pound frame, and his wife later commented that he felt “skinny.” Hunger, however, was the least of Steeves' worries, according to a lengthy article by noted journalist William E. Peters in the January 1958 issue of Redbook, the woman's magazine.

He wrote, “There were times when he told himself he had gone mad, that he was dead and this was some form of icy hell. In waves of panic he felt he was being punished for his sins; he prayed for forgiveness, despaired, then prayed some again."Although raised in a church-going family, Lt. Steeves said he didn't consider himself deeply religious, though he enjoyed Billy Graham's sermons. Later, he admitted to shortcomings as a father and husband. Yet in the wilderness, it was thoughts of “God, my wife, and my baby daughter” that pulled him through, he always maintained.

'Incoherent with Joy'

Lt. Steeves came upon four campers (two married couples) in Kings Canyon National Park on July 1, 1957. The next day, Steeves and one camper rode on horseback to a ranger's station. Steeves promptly phoned home.

Describing the call from her once-dead son, his mother told reporters that he'd “felt every prayer” said for him. His wife Rita, no longer a window, was too “incoherent with joy” to make much sense according to a reporter who tried to interview her. But she later described her feelings with a burst of eloquence: “I'm afraid at this point the experience is taking its effect, it's true. It's marvelously true. That's all I can say. I don't know what to do. I'm usually a pretty rational person but this thing is beyond the bounds of rationalization. I don't know what bounds it's beyond but it certainly is marvelous.”

After these initial stories, the media shifted its attention to Lt. Steeves' family in Trumbull. In the next days, newspaper stories focused on their immediate reactions; and after that on the joyous reunion days later, when the young pilot came home.

“Wife Refused to Let Hope Dwindle,” declared the front-page headline in the Reno Evening Gazette on July 3, 1957. The story of Lt. Steeves dominated the upper half of the page. “I don't think a wife, deep down, ever really gives up hope,” Mrs. Steeves was quoted as saying in an Associated Press story. A photo of the remarkably attractive Air Force wife, holding her infant daughter, ran next to one of her heavily bearded husband in his flight suit.

Elsewhere on the Evening Gazette's front page were indications of the mood of the times. A banner headline shouted: “U.S. May Share H-Bomb Data.” And over the right-hand column another, quieter headline explained: “Advisers Suggest Providing Reds Fallout Prevention.” According to the AP story, “President Eisenhower said today some advisers have told him Russia should be given the secret of how to make 'clean' hydrogen bombs — if the United States itself finally figures out how to do it.” And a news item from “Nevada's Atomic Test Site” was placed inconspicuously in the middle left-hand column, below a more important story about a local rodeo, and above a less important one about a wind storm in the Midwest. Its small headline advised: “July 4 Atomic Test Postponed.”

All in all, Lt. Steeves and his heroic story of survival – one man with courage against the elements -- was surely an uplifting antidote for the unease of the times, when nuclear bombs seemed to render battlefield heroics and self-sacrifice meaningless, and perhaps unnecessary. And the previous year, Sloan Wilson's bestseller “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” was a hit movie, revolving around a WW-2 combat veteran (Gregory Peck) -- now a suburban family man and public relations executive on the unsatisfying corporate treadmill.

Days after returning to Trumbull, Lt. Steeves made radio and TV appearances, including on the popular Art Linkletter, Dave Garaway, and Arthur Godfrey shows. Writing about a news conference in New York, a reporter observed that Lt. Steeves responded to every question “patiently, earnestly, and with good humor, giving every indication that he understood his incredible experience was something to be shared.”

Parade magazine called the story of Lt. Steeves one of the year's “most inspiring.” And in its story on Mrs. Steeves in early August, editors said she had a “message for the woman of America.”

As for Lt. Steeves' future plans, his mother had summed them up when she described that wonderful phone call from her once-dead son. She asked him if he'd be “going back to flying,” according to a newspaper account.

"I sure am,” he said.

"Oh, he loves it,” she explained. “All the Air Force boys love it. He wanted to be a pilot since he was a child."


'McCarthy'-style Reporting

Then came the Saturday Evening Post's announcement in mid-August that it had withdrawn a $10,000 offer for the lieutenant's exclusive story – all after associate editor Clay Blair Jr., a noted military writer and former WW-2 submariner, claimed to have found many “discrepancies” in it.

Whether Blair came to his own conclusions, or got them on “background” from military contacts, is not known. But after getting a whiff of conflict and scandal, the media piled on. Never again was anything said by Lt. Steeves and his supporters taken at face value. Now, every story about him was injected with skepticism and innuendo, as the Air Force watched him twist in the wind.

By this time, the story of Lt. Steeves was a wire service story -- one being told by the Associated Press and several other wire services that no longer exist. Most big metropolitan papers had written all they would about Lt. Steeves after a week.

Wire service reporting is highly competitive. Reporters must crank out a steady stream of copy for their clients -- news-hungry newspapers and broadcast stations. And when perceiving a seemingly legitimate controversy or difference of opinion, they fancy themselves as being impartial "truth-seekers" and referees, writing “balanced” stories that give equal weight to all viewpoints – all so that the public can make up its own mind. Such a journalistic formula, together with a certain mindset, produces news that today's political conservatives criticize as reflecting a philosophy of "moral equivalence."

Above all, wire service reporters must put out attention-grabbing stories -- stories that get published. Often this involves putting “fresh angels” and interesting new twists on old stories. And after the Saturday Evening Post's claims of “discrepancies,” there were plenty of opportunities to do that. Now, Lt. Steeves was on the defensive: It was his word against the Saturday Evening Post's. “AF Lieutenant Stands By Story; Magazine Doubts 54-Day Ordeal” blared the headline of an AP story in The News of Newport, Rhode Island that ran August 15, 1957.

The story continued in that vein, pitting Lt. Steeves' word against Clay Blair's. But ultimately, it was probably the story's controversial headline that readers remembered -- not remarks from Supt. Thomas J. Allen of Kings Canyon National Park. He was quoted as saying that rangers found evidence that Lt. Steeves had hiked some 25 miles through "very, very rough country."

By late summer, marital troubles were known to exist between Lt. Steeves and his wife, with papers reporting about Rita Steeves' plans to seek a divorce. No explanation was given, only that it had to do with problem's preceding her husband's wilderness ordeal.

But no matter.

Connecting the dots, the headline of one wire service story declared: “Magazine Cancels Story, Wife Plans Divorce of Pilot.” The innuendo had been created: Steeves was lying about his Sierra story -- and now his wife was walking out on him.

Rita Steeves from the start had been part of the Steeves-as-hero narrative. They were a very photogenic couple: Lt. Steeves cut a dashing figure in his beard; and he continued to wear it for a while, to his wife's dismay. Rita Steeves was often described, in the journalistic fashion of the day, as an “attractive blond” or “Steeves' blond wife.”

One reporter even wrote of the “blond and beautiful” Rita Steeves, when describing her and the lively scene at New York's LaGuardia Field, as her husband disembarked a commercial flight and walked quickly into her arms. “Kiss him!” shouted reporters and photographers, according the reporter's account. “Don't know where!” she shouted, referring to the bushy beard.

She kissed him anyway.

Whether she wanted to be or not, Rita Steeves was drawn into the journalistic glare as it changed from the upbeat to the tawdry. “Wife of Pilot Who Survived in Wilds 'Mum,'” declared a headline. According to the wire story from Fairfield, Connecticut, “The wife of Air Force Lt. David A. Steeves, 23, who told a tale of remarkable survival after an airplane crash, declined today to discuss his literary or marital troubles.”

Connecting the dots, other stories played up the Steeves' marital troubles, while simultaneously casting doubt on Lt. Steeves' wilderness story. “Wife won't go back to 'lost' Airman,” declared an AP story published December 27, 1957. The parenthesis around “lost,” of course, suggested Lt. Steeves was never lost at all.

Yet another angle involved raising false suspicions about what the Air Force was calling a routine investigation. “Post Kills Story of Lost Airman/AF PROBE 'ROUTINE,'” declared one headline. Of course, words like “probe” along with those tiny but incriminating parenthesis around “routine” left little doubt that Lt. Steeves had some explaining to do. Referring to Blair's allegations of “discrepancies,” the headline of an article by United Press, a wire service, stated: “True or False: Air Force Searches to Find Answers.”

And so it went.

Soon enough, two of America's most influential news magazines, Time and Life, joined the pile on. “Certain Discrepancies” was the title of a condescending piece Time ran on August 26, 1957, written in the breezy pseudo-literary style invented by Time’s Ivy League editors.

Suggesting Lt. Steeves was hiding something, it mentioned his marital troubles, subtly derided his survival story, and implied he was improperly cashing in on his fame.

It concluded with a literary flourish that portrayed him as something of a cad:

“...Steeves waved emptily at the brand new grey (sic) Jaguar he bought shortly before his famed adventure.'Look. I've lost everything in the world—my wife. What have I got with all this publicity? I've got a nice car. I'm lonesome as hell.'"

Life gave new meaning to the word “hatchet job” with a two-page spread published September 2, 1957: “The Strange Case of the Sierra Survivor; Pilot's tale of mountain ordeal arouses some strong suspicions.” Amply illustrated with eleven photos and a map, its brief main story summed up previously published suspicions and innuendos – and created some of its own. It noted that not “a trace” of Lt. Steeves' jet had been found. In addition, Life claimed the pilot's wife, “who is planning to divorce him for reasons that antedate this adventure, does not know what to believe.”

Life published three different photos of Lt. Steeves -- including one of the nattily dressed pilot leaning against his prized Jaguar sports car, and smoking his pipe. The article raised a troubling issue: How could Lt. Steeves possibly afford the car on his meager Air Force pay? However, no response from the pilot was published; and there was no indication Life even asked for one. Readers were left to ponder the innuendo.

Another incriminating photo was taken near the ranger's cabin where Lt. Steeves stayed: It was a mug shot of a big deer with enormous antlers. In the photo, the seemingly calm animal stares blankly at the photographer as it stands just feet away. According to Life: Such “tame deer...easily approachable by man, raised suspicions of Steeves' claim he had to set up (an) elaborate trap to lure and kill deer.”

Several grizzled locals were interviewed by Life, and they had their pictures published; all were all men in the 50s and 60s. A local sheriff elaborated on how the Air Force pilot might have indeed staged a hoax. And Life interviewed Supt. Thomas Allen, of Kings Canyon National Park. Months earlier, he'd told the AP about evidence of Steeves' heroic wilderness ordeal. But Life put a different spin on those remarks, saying Allen thought the escape “was extremely difficult but possible.”

Redbook's January article, however, rose above such inane pack journalism. Peters, the author, a WW-2 pilot who'd been shot down, observed that "what had been for more than a month the heroic story of a pilot's winning battle against the Sierra became, overnight, a front-page story of a possible hoax.” He quoted Steeves as saying that “to be the subject of hero worship for having saved my own skin was strange enough, but to lose everything I loved – my wife and child – and then be thought a liar...well it was rough.”

Most significantly, the article provided the first comprehensive account of Steeves' wilderness ordeal (the story the Saturday Evening Post turned down); and it explained some of the “discrepancies” the magazine had alleged. Peters also took the trouble to interview Steeves' commanding officer at Craig Air Force Base in Alabama, Col. Leo F. Dusard Jr. A decorated WW-2 pilot, he was quoted as saying:

"All office of security investigation reports are classified. I cannot reveal the content of this one. As for my personal opinion, I do not doubt Lt. Steeves' integrity. I believe he bailed out of his plane where he said he bailed out. I accept his statement as to the explosion (which prompted him to parachute). "I believe Steeves was in the mountains for 54 days, survived and walked out, and I consider it a remarkable feat.

Reacting to the Redbook piece, several newspapers across the country ran stories about it – writing their own pieces for a change, rather than letting the wires do the work. But some still gravitated toward the sensational, playing up revelations of Lt. Steeves' marital infidelity. A piece the Modesto Bee ran on December 27, 1957, played up Lt. Steeves' romantic life -- and Col. Dusard's comments were cited in the last few paragraphs. Similarly, the front-page headline in the Big Spring Daily Herald (Texas) on December 31, 1957 announced: “Steeves Tells of Love Life in Current Magazine Article.

Redbook was not stooping to tabloid journalism to discuss such things. By now, details of the Steeves' private life had become relevant in light of wire service stories that had for months implied a connection between Steeves' wilderness ordeal and his marital troubles.

Even as Redbook's article appeared, the wire services were still cranking out copy about Lt. Steeves. Two items ran on the “jump page” of the Modesto Bee's Redbook piece. “Wife Sees No Chance of Future Together,” declared a headline. Another announced: “Steeves Plans to Sue Magazine On Lost Contract.” Steeves ended up wining that legal action, apparently recovering the $10,000 he'd been promised for his exclusive story.

Along with its Redbook piece, the Reno Evening Gazette on December 26, 1957 published a wire service item: “Steeves Released By US Air Force.” According to the AP story, Steeves had “been returned to civilian life at his own request.” Citing an Air Force spokesman, the article said the Air Force “is under orders to trim its active officer rolls by about 2,500 during the year ending June 30. The spokesman cited this circumstance and said acceptance of requests like Steeves' is routine.”

Lt. Steeves remained in the reserves, however. The news item quoted an unnamed “former associate” of Steeves as saying the lieutenant's resignation may have had something to do with a “reconciliation” he'd had with his wife.

Before it was published, Steeves was shown the Redbook article, which portrayed his complicated personal life in a negative light. He was quoted as saying, “If Mr. Peters has been harsh with me as a human being, he has also been fair. He has told the truth."

A year and a half later, Rita Steeves was granted a divorce -- though not before suffering the indignity of having private details of her marriage described in local papers. She later married an accountant. Today, a phone number listed under her name in Connecticut is unlisted.

Steeves eventually remarried, but the scandal that enveloped him haunted him until his death. Indeed, a former airman in the squadron that searched for Steeves said in a 1997 interview: “(W)e heard that he faked the whole thing. If he'd have walked into our squad, we'd have killed him." Redbook, with its limited circulation, could not restore Steeves' reputation.

In defending himself against skeptics in 1957, Steeves always faced a major hurdle. No trace of his jet was found -- not until 20 years later in 1977. Some Boy Scouts hiking in Kings Canyon National Park came across an airplane's bubble canopy: Its serial number showed it had come off Steeves' T-33. AP put out a story, but not many papers ran it. A bittersweet headline ran in Pacific Stars & Strips: “Discovery Backs Story of Disgraced Pilot of '50s.”

The discovery was of no help to Steeves. Twelve years earlier, he and a passenger were killed in Idaho during a take-off mishap involving a light plane, reportedly a Stinson Mule. Then 31, Steeves reportedly had modified the single-engine plane and was demonstrating it to his passenger. At the time, he owned an aviation firm in Fresno, California. He had remarried, and with his new wife had two children, a daughter and a son who was born ten days earlier. According to some accounts, Steeves had rented planes over the years and gone out to look for his lost jet.

'Kangaroo Court'

In their reporting, the wire services fancied themselves to be producing balanced stories on Lt. Steeves. It was their job to tell the truth, and let the public decide, based on an even-handed presentation of all viewpoints. But in the case of Lt. David Steeves, the court of public opinion was Kangaroo Court, a court so named because of the “leaps and bounds” in reasoning it takes in coming to a guilty verdict.

Interestingly, Lt. Steeves was not the first Air Force officer to be enveloped in scandal in the 1950s. In 1953, Lt. Milo Radulovich was discharged from the Air Force after being deemed a security risk for his alleged communist ties. Liberals rushed to his defense, with legendary CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow his most visible defender. Murrow's efforts were portrayed in the 2005 movie about the newsman, “Good Night, and Good Luck.”

For self-congratulatory journalists, the defense of Lt. Milo Radulovich was considered one of journalism's finest hours. An innocent man was saved -- and the country was saved from McCarthyism. Yet curiously, no such journalistic crusade came to the support of Lt. Steeves. Neither Murrow nor anybody of his stature came forward to evoke the most famous line attacking Wisconsin's irresponsible senator: “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”

Perhaps Lt. Steeves would have been a more interesting and sympathetic figure if he'd been accused of harboring communist sympathies and had some complicated ethnic background. But, alas, he was merely a 23-year-old Air Force pilot eager to grab his piece of the American dream -- earn a good living and move his family out of the trailer homes and garage apartments they'd been living in on his Air Force salary. And he wanted as well to enjoy his prized Jaguar that, to the outrage of Life's editors, he apparently could not afford.

'Possible Causes'

The media played a major role in the public humiliation of Lt. Steeves. But the Air Force played a role too. In newspaper articles, Air Force spokesmen were quoted as saying there was no reason to believe that Steeves “was a phony.” But the Air Force undertook no pro-active effort to defend him, and a look at the Air Force's accident report makes it clear way.

Recently, this author obtained some 50 pages of the 1957 report from Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico. No testimony or statements are included, which is reflected in scores of missing pages. There's page after page of mostly dry technical details, which include a number of blacked out sentences and spaces -- from Lt. Steeves' year of birth to potentially interesting remarks here and there.

Lacking a wrecked airplane, investigators obviously had a tough time reaching a conclusion; and so the accident's cause was undetermined. Or as the board stated: It was “able to come to no conclusion as to the probable causes of the accident.”

Yet three “possible causes” were listed, and the first was tantalizing. Contradicting the Air Force's official and public positions, the No. 1 possible cause stated: “That Lt. Steeves perpetrated a disappearance and ejected from a normally functioning aircraft.”

No media outlet appears to have ever reported that; it appears a Freedom of Information request for the accident report was only made recently. Yet it's a bombshell on several fronts. First, Lt. Steeves was never charged with anything; the Air Force publicly maintained he was cleared in a routine investigation. He supposedly resigned voluntarily, then remained in the reserves.

Yet some Air Force brass privately doubted him all along. Their doubts never made it into news reports, to be sure; not officially anyway. But they certainly could have been talking privately with reporters, giving “background only” interviews that politely suggested how to spin the story of Lt. Steeves and his missing T-33.

How the accident board reached this “hoaxer” conclusion cannot be known for sure. Under the Air Force's usual guidelines, all statements and testimony were stricken from the material made public. But those familiar with the case contend Lt. Steeves never would have come under such suspicion if his T-33 had been found. "If they had found the wreck, they would have know it was not a hoax, because the whole case of it being a hoax was they thought he had sold it to the Russians,” observed Allen J. Schuh, 67, a retired psychology professor at California State University (Hayward), who taught in the School of Business and Economics. For years, Schuh has been piecing together the puzzle of Lt. Steeves and his missing T-33, a case that has fascinated him since he was a boy.

“I always felt he (Lt. Steeves) suffered a terrible injustice,” he said, during a telephone interview.

A Proper Search?

While suggesting that Lt. Steeves absconded with his jet, Air Force brass overlooked an interesting detail: It appears that only a half-hearted effort was made to find Lt. Steeves and his downed jet.

In its “mission statement,” the 41st Air Rescue Squadron admits that rescue units failed to search promising areas -- where the jet might have crashed -- due to low clouds, fog, and treacherous terrain. There's no indication rescue units later visited these areas, once the weather cleared up.

One excuse after another is mentioned in the mission report of June 6, 1957. “Extended area search commenced at daylight on 10 May by all participants in the mission. Weather left much to be desired.”

“On several days during this mission, it was impossible to dispatch any aircraft because of weather," it noted, elsewhere. "Ground parties were sent out at these times, but their efforts were often nullified due to inability to negotiate the mountainous terrain under the weather conditions which prevailed.”

Most incredibly, the statement admitted no visits were made to two sites where aircraft wreckage was spotted – wreckage that was “not in the Air Rescue Squadron Crash Locater Index. Ground parties were dispatched to check both of these leads, but they were unsuccessful due to weather which at times limited visibility to 25 feet in fog, rain and snow.”

Eventually, Lt. Steeves was declared dead.

The Air Force briefly faced some pointed questions about the hasty issuance of a death certificate, after Lt. Steeves turned out to be very much alive. Responding to a reporter, a Pentagon spokesman said a death certificate was issued only after "a thorough search was made and no trace was found of the pilot."

Apparently, Lt. Steeves' father had his doubts about the Air Force's search effort, a point he mentioned when telling a newspaper reporter about the phone call from his once-dead son. When Lt. Steeves asked if he'd been given up for dead, his father replied: “I told him 'no'. I said I was just getting ready to come out to see if I could do something.”

“The accident board and 41st Air Rescue Squadron didn't do their jobs,” Schuh says.

The 'Hoaxer' Narrative

The discovery of the jet's bubble canopy in 1977 was the final coup de grace for conspiracy theorists, both in the Air Force and news media. They destroyed a man's reputation, yet none of them ever answered a simple question: What did the young lieutenant hope to achieve?

Even back in 1957, there were obvious holes in the narrative casting Lt. Steeves as a hoaxer. For one thing, he never took along a survival kit, which suggested he anticipated a routine flight. And when ejecting over some of America's roughest terrain, he carried only a .32 caliber handgun and knife. Left in the cockpit were a Bible (New Testament) and can of pipe tobacco.

That he never planned a trip lasting 54 days also is underscored by the precarious state in which he left his personal life, as Redbook revealed. Before his ill-fated flight, he'd fessed up to his wife that he'd been having an affair with a San Francisco woman, and he promised to end it. His wife had expected him to do that before his jet vanished on a training flight, en route from San Francisco to Craig Air Force Base near Selma, his home base. But while Lt. Steeves was in the wilderness, munching on grass snacks and raw deer meat, the “other woman” contracted his wife. Very quickly, she realized her husband had not ended the affair. She told Redbook, “After that, I couldn't even cry. I felt robbed even of a widow's natural grief.”

Somehow, Lt. Steeves patched things up, but only for a while. The couple would have an on-and-off again relationship, making for entertaining wire service copy and helping to nourish conspiracy theories.

Other Possible Causes

According to the accident board, the second “possible cause” of the jet crash was: “That an explosive decompression occurred, filling the cockpit with vapor, and the pilot panicked and ejected as a result of believing that the explosive decompression was an explosion and the vapor was smoke.”
If that indeed happened, Lt. Steeves would certainly not be the first military pilot to eject prematurely from an airplane in an emergency. However, he would be the first military pilot to suffer nationwide humiliation for such an error.

Readers who are pilots will find it interesting that Lt. Steeves had logged a total of 922 flight hours, including 540 in the T-33; and within the last 90 days he'd logged 87 hours. One newspaper described him as a “rookie” pilot, yet he was doing quite a lot of flying during his Air Force career, after graduating from a college in Connecticut where he attended ROTC. With all those hours, he must have felt confident as he leveled off at 33,500 feet on the day of his ill-fated flight. How likely is it that a well-trained and level-headed pilot would eject in a “panic” over mountainous terrain -- unless he had very good reason to believe his jet was uncontrollable, in flames, or breaking up?

When discussing the pilot's temperament, his father described a son who was “resourceful,” deliberative in his thinking, and “afraid of nothing or nobody,” according to a newspaper account. He also was in good physical shape. If he safety ejected, his father had figured he had a “50-50” chance of survival.


Aviation Mystery Solved?

Lastly, there is “possible cause” No. 3: “That a combustion explosion did occur and disabled the aircraft.”

Curiously, there is no elaboration; and below the statement are blacked out sentences. Presumably, this is the possible cause to which investigators attached the least weight. Yet today this is the cause that's most widely accepted among those familiar with the accident report, according to Schuh, the retired professor.

Through a Freedom of Information request, the 1960's Navy veteran obtained a more complete accident report than this author obtained directly from Kirtland Air Force Base. Recently, he published a fascinating analysis about the jet's final moments in The Forensic Examiner, a professional journal.

Not only does Schuh provide a new twist on the jet's final moments, he pinpoints its probable location. During certain times of the year, he says, he's even obtained Google satellite images of what he thinks may be a straight-wing jet among the rocks and bush, not far from where Boy Scouts found its bubble canopy.

What triggered the explosion?

According to his article, the jet had a history of “ maintenance problems” so problematic that the U.S. Navy, which had flown it previously, stopped using it. One problem was that the “aircraft's fuel cap, which was behind the (back) ejection seat, occasionally leaked.”

The smell of jet fuel in the cockpit, however, would not have been noticed by Lt. Steeves: He was breathing through his oxygen mask. This would have been standard operating procedure, and Schuh's article noted the lieutenant was regarded as a good pilot. This is contrary to Life magazine's article in September 1957, which described him as merely “average” -- a claim that failed to cite any sources.

Most who read the accident report believe a spark from an electrical source ignited the fuel-air mixture. It ripped through the cockpit, knocking Lt. Steeves unconscious, and burning part of his parachute. He said he quickly came to, and ejected upon finding “the flight surfaces and controls had been fatally damaged.”

In his article, however, Schuh recasts this scenario with some intriguing twists. Drawing on information from the accident report, he contends that Lt. Steeves touched off the explosion when he set his autopilot. In Schuh's account, though, things happen slightly differently after that.

Lt. Steeves did not black out for seconds, but for minutes – and perhaps for a number of minutes. Waking up, he suddenly found himself in a smoke-filed cockpit and seemingly life-or-death situation. Schuh wrote: “He said the aircraft was spinning, but perhaps his head was spinning and the aircraft was still flying straight and level.” Lt. Steeves began fighting the controls -- forgetting he'd just set the autopilot – but the controls seemed unresponsive to him, his article explained.

So he ejected.

Yet the jet's controls were in fact “not damaged...there was nothing wrong with the flight surfaces,” Schuh explained; and while the jet flew off on autopilot, it did not maintain it's programmed course. Lacking a canopy, pilot, and ejection seat, it now possessed different flight characteristics.

When the explosion occurred, moreover, Schuh thinks Lt. Steeves had his hand on the rudder trim tab. This “could have caused his hand to put in too much left rudder (input) as he was knocked unconsciousness.” As a result, the jet went into a wide left turn.

Interestingly, Schuh's article notes that Lt. Steeves did not report seeing his jet while descending under his parachute. He neither saw it crash into the ground or a lake, suggesting it did indeed fly off on its own.

Convinced the unmanned jet entered a wide left turn after Lt. Steeves ejected, Schuh wrote: “By calculation, this turn would have a diameter of about 70 miles and could take him in a loop from his initial south heading, first east and then north, eventually over Kings Canyon,” he wrote. “The aircraft continued the wide circle until fuel exhaustion.”

Schuh, speaking on the phone, also held out the possibility that a spark from another source ignited the fuel-air mixture; and he said the T-33 could have flown off in stable configuration without its autopilot being engaged.

With this hypothesis, Schuh set out to pinpoint the jet's location. He established points on a map that included Lt. Steeves' landing spot near Lake Helen; his last radio transmission; and its bubble canopy that some Boy Scouts discovered.

The T-33, he concluded, rests at a site where rescue units spotted wreckage, yet never checked due to poor weather and difficult terrain. Elaborating on the thinking of rescue personnel, Schuh's article note this site was “far east of Steeves' expected flight path, with no indication of recent fire or explosion or the presence of a sign of life.” It was presumed to be another of the many wrecks dotting the mountainous. A Google image he took, however, showed what he thinks may be the missing T-33.

He forwarded the photo to Air Force officials, telling them: “'You've got a straight-wing jet down on the rock.'”

“All they responded was that it made sense,” he said.

Even after 50 years, Schuh said the case of Lt. Steeves is an embarrassment to the Air Force. “I think the Air Force would rather have the whole thing just go away,” he said.

That Lt. Steeves was cast as a possible hoaxster by the accident board probably occurred because of what Schuh described as a certain military mindset: Once a determined senior officer makes up his mind, lower-ranking ones tend to follow along. Faced with a lost jet, Schuh said “it became easy to blame a junior officers, and to accuse him of a hoax.”

Schuh fine-tuned the Air Force's coordinates for the aircraft wreck that air rescue units never checked out, and that may well be the missing T-33's resting place. It's located in Kings Canyon at these coordinates: 36.2333N...118.6833W.

“If I was 20 years younger, I would have gone there last summer,” Schuh said.

The site is not far from a campground. Had he gone, he says, he would have looked for the tail number of Lt. Steeves missing T-33: 52-9232A. Verifying that, he knows what he'd have found in the cockpit of the long-dead pilot who “suffered a terrible travesty” -- his can of pipe tobacco and a New Testament Bible.


POSTSCRIPT: The Crash Site

Allen J. Schuh explained in an e-mail message how to find the site where Lt. Steeves' T-33A might be found:

“From the mission report of the 41st Air Rescue Squadron, as mentioned in the accident report, I got 36 14 N...118 41 W which was converted by one of the Internet photograph viewers to be 36.2333N...118.6833W.

“I looked at a few of the Internet viewers and realized rather quickly that if you input those coordinates you don't always get the same picture. So I looked for a feature and found Frasier Mill Campground on TopoZone (a satellite image website) to get a look at the topology. Hedrick Pond Campground is Southeast. Draw a line between the two and look very carefully about half way between. Follow the 6400 grid line.

“I saw an anomaly, printed it, and asked my wife what it looked like. She independently thought it was a straight-winged jet with drop tanks attached. This was with nothing sophisticated optically, just the viewer on the PC. I wondered if I could get better pictures historically before and after May 1957 but stopped when I thought I had enough. There is no substitute for the check on the ground. You are looking for tail number 52-9232A.”

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Hugo’s ‘Socialist’ Folly

Venezuela’s economic controls make the rich, richer – and poor, poorer

By David Paulin
Months into his presidency, Hugo Chavez tested the patience of Venezuelans with his frequent weeknight television addresses. Long and rambling, the impromptu talks provoked a common gripe that Venezuela’s press soon reported on: People were missing their favorite telenovelas.

Venezuelans rebelled after ten months.

Minutes after Chavez began yet another address, they went to their windows holding kitchen spoons and pots. In a traditional Venezuelan protest, they banged them furiously as Chavez recounted his first 300 days in office. The first such protest against El Presidente occurred amid a paralyzed economy and record-low oil prices.

From my apartment in eastern Caracas, the pot-banging protest was so loud that, when I phoned fellow journalists, they could clearly hear the clanging over the telephone receiver I held out the window. Like a slow-moving grass fire, the protest in early December, 1999, spread from one apartment building and city block to another, mainly in middle and lower-middle class areas. Some TV reports showed people in slum areas engaging in the protest, apparently upset over soaring crime.

People were growing impatient. Chavez had won a landslide election because Venezuelans from all socio-economic classes – and not merely the poor, as is so often claimed – trusted the anti-establishment figure to clean up corruption and reduce declining living standards in the oil-rich but impoverished South American nation. But Chavez had yet to undertake meaningful democratic reforms.

Chavez no longer commands the popularity he did. Massive street protests are common. But whether they’re for Chavez or against him, Venezuelans over the past four years have furtively engaged in another kind of protest, one that has attracted much less media attention than massive street demonstrations. Whenever they can, they’re circumventing two of the cornerstones of Chavez’s command-and-control economy – draconian currency exchange and price controls.

The controls underscore an old joke about socialist states: they offer socialism for the masses, and capitalism for the classes. Like Cuba’s dollar-based tourism economy, Venezuela’s has a parallel economy because of the controls. Rather than delivering Bolivarian social justice, they’re making the rich, richer – and poor, poorer. They’re also producing “periodic” food shortages that mainly affect the poor.

Nearly four years ago, a crippling three-month oil worker strike prompted Chavez to introduce the controls to stop capital flight. Price controls were put on some 400 items to combat soaring inflation, now the highest in Latin America at 16 percent. As in the past, record-high oil prices have driven inflation, thanks to a flood of petro-dollars that has produced a government and consumer spending spree.

Like earlier Venezuelan leaders who implemented similar controls, Chavez has been bedeviled be a force more powerful than his edicts – the market. The economic controls have widened the gap between government-regulated prices and the cost of getting goods to consumers; and hence the periodic food shortages.

In typical leftist fashion, Chavez has blamed the food shortages on the usual scapegoats – “speculators” and “hoarders.” Retailers, however, answer to Adam Smith, not the utopian Marxist ideals that enthrall Chavez. They must sell at a profit, not a loss.

For their part, well-off Venezuelans find ways around the shortages, either buying goods on the black market or from retailers who discretely sell above regulated prices. That’s not the case with the poor.

Just ask Ana Diaz, a 70-year-old housewife, who recently discovered that Chavez’s famous food markets – which sell at below-market prices – are not immune from market forces. "They say there are no shortages, but I'm not finding anything in the stores," she told an Associated Press reporter last February. Nor is Bolivarian socialism very customer-oriented. Diaz said she waited in line for eight hours – all for a bag of chicken, milk, vegetable oil and sugar.

The article’s headline announced: “Meat, Sugar Scarce in Venezuela Stores.”

According to its opening paragraph:

“Meat cuts vanished from Venezuelan supermarkets this week, leaving only unsavory bits like chicken feet, while costly artificial sweeteners have increasingly replaced sugar, and many staples sell far above government-fixed prices.”

Chavez is not the first Venezuelan president to undertake price and exchange controls. His predecessor, Rafael Caldera, implemented similarly draconian exchange and price controls in an effort to halt falling living standards. But amid an increasingly deteriorating economy and record-low oil prices, Caldera eventually saw the light. Going against his populists and leftist ideological instincts, he inaugurated a series of painful economic reforms backed by the International Monitory Fund.

When reporting on Caldera’s about face, I wrote the kind of story editors want – one describing the short-term pain felt by ordinary people thanks to Caldera’s IMF-backed reforms. “Things are tough. We're eating less meat and lots more pasta, rice and beans,” I quoted Dila Ferreira, a 57-year-old maid, as saying in articles published in several major newspaper. Her comment was reflected by marketing surveys showing that low-income Venezuelans were indeed changing their eating habits.

I wonder how Ferreira is doing today. Under Caldera’s painful free-market reforms, she was eating less meat. Now, she may not be eating any meat at all.

Chavez claims his anti-poverty programs have reduced Venezuela’s poverty rate. But poverty experts say they are not serious programs that will produce lasting changes, and their impact has been marginal at best.

Ironically, the market has probably produced greater reductions in poverty than Bolivarian socialism and earlier anti-poverty programs. Traditionally, Venezuela has seen poverty decrease during earlier oil booms. In the oil-based economy, the market’s trickle-down effect tended to lift everyone’s boat in spite of Venezuela having some of the world’s worst corruption and inept governance. By all accounts, these scourges have soared to epic levels under Chavez.

A Party for the rich

Despite Chavez’s socialist pretensions, the go-go days of “Saudi Venezuela” – as Venezuela was called in the 1970s – have returned. The rich and merely well off are having a party, which is reflected in a surge of bourgeoisie imports such as expensive whiskey, high demand for plastic surgery, and an overseas travel binge.

Sales of expensive cars are booming, too, just as during the Caldera’s era of soaring inflation and economic controls. Unable to buy U.S. dollars as a hedge against soaring inflation, people instead buy durable goods such as cars.

Living hand to mouth, the poor have no such options in the face of accumulated inflation that has soared past 80 percent the past four years. And they’ll soon suffer more when Chavez devalues the currency, as he’s poised to do, to pay for his spending spree at home and abroad. The bolivar’s official rate is 2,150 to $1, but on the black market a dollar is worth twice that amount.

Chavez’s Bolivarian socialism and exchange controls are making for odd bedfellows, too. They controls are frightening off potential investors, hindering the repatriation of profits, and impeding local businesses that depend on imports. The constantly complain about an inability to obtain an adequate supply of dollars.

Corruption under the controls is another problem. Under Chavez and previous administrations that implemented exchange controls, officials have regularly been accused of accepting bribes to authorize or speed up requests to buy dollars.

Ironically, the controls are producing handsome profits on the Caracas Stock Exchange, the workplace of some of those “oligarchs” whom Chavez so often vilifies. Companies have been utilizing the stock exchange’s dollar-denominated bond market to meet their need for dollars.

The controls are not the only example of Bolivarian socialism’s contradictions. After a hard day at the office, those bond traders can fill up their Hummers for about $1.50. Catering to the notion that cheap gasoline is a Venezuelan birthright, Chavez’s administration, like earlier ones, spends billions of dollars to sell gasoline at unprofitable prices, about 7 cents per gallon. The gasoline subsidy exceeds what Chavez spends on his social programs, say economists.

When writing about the exchange controls during Caldera’s era, I also noted they were proving to be a boon for Colombian counterfeiting gangs. They were doing a brisk business selling fake U.S. $100 greenbacks to unsuspecting Venezuelans.

In the scramble to obtain dollars, the real wheeling and dealing occurs on the black market. Some Venezuelans have been buying U.S. dollars at the official rate, claiming they need them for a trip. Then they sell them on the black market for twice their value.

Recently, Bloomberg described one scheme:

“Some Venezuelans travel to nearby Curaçao, where they buy $5,000 of casino poker chips with their credit cards, exchange the chips for cash and then sell the dollars on the black market back in Caracas.”

Chavez has vowed to crack down on such schemes. But he’s unlikely to eliminate untold numbers of less conspicuous black market transactions involving willing buyers and sellers.

During Caldera’s exchange controls, I regularly visited a good-natured Spaniard who had a retail outlet that depended on U.S. imports. I wrote him checks from a Miami bank, which he then sent to his U.S. bank. He gladly paid me a good black market rate. I was one popular gringo. They were good days for people who earned decent salaries and got paid in U.S. dollars.

Under Chavez, those days are back with a vengeance. Under the banner of socialism and anti-Americanism, he has repackaged bad ideas from Venezuela’s past – statism, authoritarianism, and populism – and taken them to new extremes. Blessed with record-high oil prices, he has created a new class of elites. The poor majority, meanwhile, gets bread-and-circus populism.

In the end, Bolivarian socialism in the 21st Century looks a lot like earlier variants that ended in failure.

Author's Note: This article was originally published at FrontPage Magazine.