On This Day In History President Abraham Lincoln Delivered The Gettysburg Address

As History.com notes, on this day in 1863 President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address.

You can read about the great historical event and one of the world's most memorable speeches via the below link:

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/lincoln-delivers-gettysburg-address?cmpid=email-hist-tdih-2016-1119-11192016&om_rid=de5e4076c942a595dbda53f758321d197499484f6d117f61b6ac5c08e0d6f0aa&om_mid=111944069&kx_EmailCampaignID=8168&kx_EmailCampaignName=email-hist-tdih-2016-1119-11192016&kx_EmailRecipientID=de5e4076c942a595dbda53f758321d197499484f6d117f61b6ac5c08e0d6f0aa%20&os_ehash=44@experian:de5e4076c942a595dbda53f758321d197499484f6d117f61b6ac5c08e0d6f0aa  

Photos, Journals Explore Hemingway’s Early Life

Wayne Catan at the Idaho Statesman offers a review of Hidden Hemingway: Inside the Ernest Hemingway Archives of Oak Park. 

“My favorite authors are Kipling, O. Henry and Stewart Edward White. … I intend to travel and write,” Ernest Hemingway states, prophetically, in a journal featured in “Hidden Hemingway: Inside The Ernest Hemingway Archives of Oak Park.”

This journal entry and 300 never-before published photos, memorabilia, movie poster replications and ephemera are available to scholars, collectors and Hemingway fans as they celebrate the life of one of America’s most decorated man of letters.

The four-color (and cloth-bound) book started as an article in Oak Leaves — the longtime community newspaper of the Oak Park, Ill., area — but expanded to a 230-page volume when author Robert K. Elder realized that Hemingway “saved every scrap of paper he ever touched.”

It is important to note that the chief reason this tome is essential for fans of American literature is that Hemingway never dramatized Oak Park, his hometown. It was sacred ground for the Nobel and Pulitzer-prize winner. In fact, when a journalist pushed for an interview with his mother about the city, Hemingway told him that he would stop financially supporting his own mother if the journalist kept prying for information. Hemingway did not like his privacy disrespected.

Read more here: http://www.idahostatesman.com/entertainment/books/article115826933.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.idahostatesman.com/entertainment/books/article115826933.html#storylink=cpy

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.idahostatesman.com/entertainment/books/article115826933.html

Retired U.S. Navy Captain Becomes Latest Officer To Admit Taking Bribes And Prostitutes From ‘Fat Leonard’

Craig Whitlock at the Washington Post offers a piece on the latest U.S. naval officer to plead guilty in the massive Navy "Fat Leonard" bribery and fraud scandal.

A retired Navy captain who also served as the U.S. naval attache in the Philippines pleaded guilty to corruption in federal court Tuesday, admitting that he secretly worked as an agent for an Asian defense contractor in exchange for gifts, travel and the services of prostitutes.

Michael George Brooks, 57, of Fairfax Station, Va., pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in San Diego to a charge of conspiracy to commit bribery. He faces a sentence of up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

In his plea agreement, Brooks acknowledged that he and his family members accepted fine wines, hotel rooms, electronics, luxury watches and prostitutes on dozens of occasions from Leonard Glenn Francis, a Singapore-based contractor known as “Fat Leonard” in Navy circles. Francis’s firm, Glenn Defense Marine Asia, held contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars to resupply and refuel U.S. Navy ships at ports throughout Asia.

Francis pleaded guilty to bribery charges last year in the case, which has erupted into the worst corruption case in the history of the Navy. Seventeen people have been charged with crimes in federal court, including an admiral and eight other officers. Another defendant has been charged in Singapore. About two thirds of those facing charges have pleaded guilty.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2016/11/15/retired-navy-captain-becomes-latest-officer-to-admit-taking-bribes-and-prostitutes-from-fat-leonard/?wpisrc=nl_check&wpmm=1

Defense Secretary Carter Praises Special Operations, Criticizes Continuing Resolution

Karen Parrish at the DoD News offers the below piece:

WASHINGTON, Nov. 18, 2016 — America’s special operations forces are a potent part of the “Force of the Future,” Defense Secretary Ash Carter told reporters yesterday in Florida.

Carter visited Hurlburt Field and Eglin Air Force Base as part of a four-day trip that also included stops in California and Texas. Both Florida installations are critical to national security, he said, adding that he’s grateful to the local communities for the support they provide to service members.
Carter noted that Hurlburt Field is home to some of the nation’s most elite warfighters.

“Very specifically, today we were looking at a number of the special operations forces’ assault capabilities,” he said. “This is a kind of capability that we use nearly every day, somewhere in the world.”

Carter said his most important responsibility as defense secretary “is to approve those operations, and obviously I do that with the greatest care, because there’s risk associated with them -- but we do them with professionalism and skill unrivaled anywhere else in the world.”

Counter-ISIL Campaign

Carter said special operators play a key role in the campaign against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. He added that he is encouraged at “all the cities in Iraq and Syria that have already been seized from ISIL” and the envelopment of Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria “with motivated and capable local partners.”

“We will have a victory that sticks,” he said. “ … We’re obviously trying to accomplish that as quickly as possible, and the forces I was visiting with today are an essential part of that. … We’re working them very hard; their op-tempo is extremely hard. That is necessary, but it’s also difficult for them and their families.”

Carter said he wanted service members and their families “particularly to know that we were thinking of them … at this holiday time.”

Carter said Eglin is important as home to platforms like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and “the most lethal, the most precise” advanced munitions capabilities.

“That is one of the themes in our investments in both our 2017 budget and our 2018 budget,” he said. “It was important to see the progress that those programs are making, and they’re doing very well. But they’re absolutely necessary.”

Concerns on Budget Stability

The secretary responded strongly to a reporter’s question about the prospect of a continuing budget resolution.

“It’s not an efficient way to run the Department of Defense,” he said. “ … This is the eighth consecutive year in which the Department of Defense has not had an appropriations bill at the end of the fiscal year.”

Stop-gap funding under continuing resolutions is an inefficient use of taxpayer dollars and is unfair to troops, the secretary said.

“They deserve budget stability and the knowledge that Congress is supporting them with the funding that they need,” Carter said.

Advanced programs and defense industry partners are also adversely affected by continuing resolutions, the secretary said.

“There’s nothing good to say about the absence of a budget,” he said. “And the troops deserve better.”

Note: In the above photo by Army Sgt. Amber I. Smith, Defense Secretary Ash Carter speaks with Air Force special operators during a visit to Eglin Air Force Base in Florida on November 17, 2016.

Writers To Debate Whether Ian Fleming Or John Le Carre Is The Better Spy Novelist

Some years ago actor George C. Scott refused to accept an Oscar for his great portrayal of General Patton in the film Patton.

I agreed with what he said at the time, which was that art should not a competition. You simply can not hold up two great paintings and say, "And the winner is..."

So I can't say I like the idea of a debate on whether the late Ian Fleming (seen in the above photo) or John le Carre (seen in the below photo) is the better spy novelist, which, as the The Spy Command noted, will soon take place.

Intelligence Squared, which stages debates and presentations on various topics, will hold a debate this month whether Ian Fleming or John Le Carre is the better spy novelist.

Representing Fleming (1908-64) will be Anthony Horowitz, author of the James Bond continuation novel Trigger Mortis, according to the group’s website.

Advocating for LeCarre (real name David Cornwell, b. 1931) will be David Farr, who adapted LeCarre’s The Night Manager for the BBC. The debate is scheduled for Nov. 29 at Emmanuel Centre in London.

And yet...

Ian Fleming served as a British naval intelligence officer and assistant to the Royal Navy's Director of Naval Intelligence in WWII. He later wrote admittedly highly romanticized novels that featured a character by the name of Bond, James Bond. He said he wrote the books unabashedly for his own and the public's entertainment.

The novels are highly entertaining and they are far darker and more complex than the films, and some of them, like From Russia With Love, Goldfinger and On Her Majesty's Secret Service, are first-rate thrillers.

John le Carre, who, like Fleming, was a British intelligence officer, having served in both MI5 and MI6 as a young man, considers himself to be a much more serious novelist than Fleming, which means he is a much duller thriller writer.

As I wrote in my Philadelphia Inquirer review of le Carre's novel Our Kind of Traitor, le Carre wrote a talky thriller that unfolds mostly through dialogue. And he offers some very good, smart writing.

Le Carre has written, in my view, some fine spy novels, such as the "Karla" trilogy that featured a character by the name of George Smiley; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Smiley's People, and The Honorable Schoolboy. I can't say I care much for his later novels, which are marred, as I wrote in my Washington Times review of John le Carre: The Biography, with his shrill leftist and anti-American views.      

The two novelists are very different, and I like them both, and they should not, like Scott said, be compared or be in competition.

And yet, I'm interested in this debate, because le Carre is often presented as the "realistic" antidote to Fleming's "fantasies," and le Carre has been highly critical of Fleming in the past.

You can read about the upcoming debate via the below link:

https://hmssweblog.wordpress.com/2016/11/16/writers-to-debate-whether-fleming-lecarre-is-better/

You can also read my Philadelphia Inquirer review of le Carre's Our Kind of Traitor via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2010/10/russian-crooks-corrupt-brits-at-large.html

And you can read my Washington Times review of John le Carre: The Biography via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2015/12/my-washington-times-review-of-john-le.html

And you can read my Crime Beat column, Spy Writer Vs. Spy Writer, via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2010/08/spy-writer-vs-spy-writer-john-le-carre.html

Note: Below are photos of Sean Connery as James Bond and Alec Guinness as George Smiley:

A Bronx Tale: Chazz Palminteri’s Move From Mean Streets To A Tuscan-Style Villa

Writer, actor and producer Chazz Palminteri talks about his life, his art and his move from the Bronx to a villa in up-state New York in a piece in the Wall Street Journal.

Chazz Palminteri, 64, is an actor, screenwriter and producer. The 
musical version of his “A Bronx Tale,” co-directed by Robert De Niro and Jerry Zaks with music by Alan Menken, opens Dec. 1 at Broadway’s Longacre Theatre. He spoke with Marc Myers.

Only the wiseguys had money when I was a kid. I grew up in the Belmont section of the Bronx, a great Italian neighborhood. Most parents there didn’t have much. They worked hard to make a better life for their families. For me and my friends, it was paradise. I saw a guy kill a man when I was 9. Other than that, we had fun.

I was blessed with Ozzie and Harriet parents. My father was a city bus driver. All he cared about was making sure his son and two daughters graduated from high school. We all went on to college.

To protect your space, you had to learn how to fight. Fortunately, my father, Lorenzo, trained boxers in the neighborhood. He taught me how to box when I was 4. By the time I was 11, I could hold my own.

... At one point we had to read Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and write what we felt about the book. I got an A. The teacher asked how I saw all of the things I wrote about. That’s when I realized I was a writer.

In 1986, I moved to Los Angeles to become an actor. But things didn’t work out as planned. One day, I was sitting in my dumpy apartment on Vineland Avenue and said to myself, “If I can’t get a part, I’ll write one for myself.”

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/chazz-palminteri-moves-from-mean-streets-to-a-tuscan-style-villa-1479225315 

You can also read my Philadelphia Inquirer Q&A with Chazz Palminteri via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2016/10/my-philadelphia-inquirer-q-with-chazz_4.html 

Moon Sets Behind Aircraft Carrier

In the above U.S. Navy photo the brightest moon in almost 60 years sets behind the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71) on November 14, 2016 in Coronado, California.

The photo was taken by Petty Officer 2nd Class Abe McNatt.

Note: You can click on the photo to enlarge.