43: Sunset

On January 7, 1977, while many Americans were coping with one of the worst winters in U.S. history, an 80-year-old Miami Beach resident, whose fortune had been made off the public’s desire for refuge from the cold, composed a note in his Sunset Island home. Then he lifted a pistol to his chest and fired a bullet into his heart.1 

He was still alive when the ambulance arrived, “but died a short time later” according to the Miami police who told reporters William Pawley “had been in failing health.”2 His death came as Frank Sinatra fans mourned the death of his mother, Dolly Sinatra, in a plane crash that also claimed the life of her close friend from New Jersey, Ann Carboni, coincidentally the wife of the former China National Aviation Corporation dentist in Calcutta.3

That night, the national broadcast of CBS Evening News devoted less than half-a- minute to reporting that William Douglas Pawley, a former Ambassador to Brazil, had committed suicide. 4

The Washington Post two days later referred to him as an aviation expert and devoted 309 words to his life.5

The New York Post announced “‘Flying Tigers’ Founder Dies” and noted that Pawley had raised over $250,000 for the election campaign of President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956 and another $100,000 for Vice President Nixon's unsuccessful race against John F. Kennedy in 1960.6

Time magazine noted William Pawley’s passing in its customary inch of coverage which stated that in 1958 President Eisenhower had dispatched Pawley to Cuba on a secret mission to persuade President Fulgencio Batista that a caretaker government should be installed to prevent revolutionaries from taking control of the island.7 Batista refused to step down, and three weeks later Fidel Castro took power. The underpinnings and aftermath of the incident would lead to animosity between Pawley, State Department members and the next President, John F. Kennedy.8

Pawley’s life as a world financier, envoy and philanthropist merited 15 inches in The New York Times.9

Down in South Carolina, where an island is named for the Pawley family, The Florence Morning News obituary pointed out that General James Doolittle had “once served as a test pilot for Pawley” when he sold planes to China.

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50: Cold War Replay

In September 2022, General Michael Minihan, head of the Air Mobility Command, told a military conference that the U.S. Air Force was responsible for more enemy deaths than any of the other U.S. military organizations. Three months later he predicted that China would invade Taiwan where Pawley's friend Chiang Kai-Shek and thousands of nationalists made their home after communists had seized the mainland seven decades earlier. In anticipation, the U.S. Air Force increased its presence in the Philippines.

General Minihan also shared with conference attendees a personal orgasmic pleasure— with the killing of “‘your enemy, every part of your life is better. Your food tastes better. Your marriage is stronger.’”1 

I disagree. In the early 1970s, a decade after the Kennedy assassination, I wrote this song called "Inhumanity."

I am the madness

That makes men want to kill. 

I am the taste of blood

That gives them the thrill.

I am the feeling

That drives a mother wild, 

Until she beats to death

Her helpless baby child.

I am the fist

Raised in anger.

I am the cry

Let’s gang bang her!

I am the daggers

Seen in many eyes.

I am the voices

Of a thousand million lies.

I am the crowd 

Full of faces 

Chanting names 

At other races.

I am the soul of hypocrisy 

Making a shambles

Of this democracy.

I have razed civilizations,

Destroyed powerful men, 

Ruined the lives of many, 

And I’ll do it once again. 

For I am fear and trouble, 

Terror and death at my best, 

And if I get a hold of you

I will never, never ever let you rest.

For I am insanity.

And there’s a little bit of me,

To a moral-less degree,

In all humanity.

I am in humanity.

~ Inhumanity. Lyrics & Music: David Price Cannon (1973)

On January 30, 2023, Spencer Ackerman, a 2014 Pulitzer Prize-winning national security journalist, wrote about General Minihan and concluded “anyone who's read Stanley Karnow's excellent book In Our Image will recognize as a retread of both Cold War and pre-Cold War imperial form ... Trump is Truman, Biden is Eisenhower, Mattis is Forrestal, McMaster is Acheson, Campbell is, I guess, John Foster Dulles, and this guy Minihan seems to think he’s Curtis LeMay.”2

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