All posts by Kevin Brewer

About Kevin Brewer

I am Kevin Terral Brewer, a history and government teacher in the Benton County, Tennessee public school system. I have taught history, United States government, and other social studies for over twenty years, and I hold three college degrees: a B.A. in political science and an M.S. in education curriculum and instruction, both from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, and an M.S. in history from Murray State University in Murray, Kentucky. I have a deep and abiding interest in United States political and cultural history, particularly the history of institutions, such as the presidency and the Supreme Court. I am an active follower of, and commentator on, conservative and libertarian causes. I am married, nearly fifty years old, and am the father of three children, one of whom is grown and is the mother of my only grandchild. I can also be found on Facebook.

Your Guide to the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution

Miscellany

I published this as a Facebook note in 2017, when impeachment and related topics were in the air. That was early in the Trump administration and before anyone had ever heard of covid-19. Now, a few people are asking me about the Twenty-Fifth Amendment again, so I have decided to post it to my blog (Facebook is discontinuing “notes”) and republish.

With President Trump’s various difficulties and the realization that removing a president of the United States from office through impeachment is both difficult and unprecedented, there has been a flurry of discussion about the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

Several people have asked me about the particulars of this amendment, so here I will attempt to explain it in plain language the way I would explain it to students.

Serious discussion about what became the Twenty-Fifth Amendment began after President Eisenhower’s three major illnesses, one of them a heart attack, in the 1950s. When the aging Eisenhower left the office to a man in his forties, in 1961, interest in the topic died away somewhat, though not completely. After the Kennedy assassination, Congress and the executive branch had to confront a troubling question: what if Kennedy had survived his massive head wound? Already, the country had endured several instances of serious presidential disability, most notably President Garfield’s 80 day decline after his shooting in 1881, President Wilson’s 1919 stroke and its 18-month aftermath, and President Eisenhower’s illnesses. The original constitutional provisions for presidential disability were inadequate and ambiguous, leaving it unclear whether or how the vice president was to intervene. Accordingly, Vice President Arthur refused to do anything at all as Garfield lay dying, and Vice President Marshall followed suit while Wilson was ill. Vice President Nixon met with Eisenhower’s cabinet during the latter’s illnesses and was widely praised for his low-key but effective efforts. In the dangerous Cold War period, though, it was clear that some kind of formal arrangement was necessary, one that would settle all questions of presidential succession and disability.

In 1965, Congress proposed the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. In 1967, the 38th state legislature ratified the amendment, and it became part of the Constitution.

The Twenty-Fifth Amendment has four sections: The first section simply states that if the president dies, resigns, or is removed from office, the vice president becomes president. This was what had been done since the first presidential vacancy in 1841, but the Constitution was actually ambiguous as to whether the vice president was to become president or was somehow to merely act as president. This section settled the question once and for all. It is assumed that it also settled the question of the presidential oath. It is now clear that the vice president becomes president instantly if there is no president; the oath is not an impediment to his carrying out his duties, though a new president would presumably take the oath anyway, for appearances’ sake, as soon as he could do so. Presumably, the congressional framers of the amendment wanted no repeats of November 22, 1963, when an ostensibly leaderless nation lived in danger for two hours while people chased down the presidential oath and a federal judge.

The second section provided a means of filling a vacancy in the vice presidency. Throughout history, there had been 16 such vacancies (there have been 18 to the current date). Eight vice presidents had acceded to the presidency, leaving the vice presidency vacant, seven others had died while vice president, and one had resigned. In total, about 40 years had passed with no vice president—about 22% of the period since the beginning of the American presidency.

After the ratification of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, the president of the United States was empowered to appoint a new vice president whenever that office was vacant; the appointment would require the approval of both houses of Congress. This was the procedure President Nixon used to appoint Vice President Ford in 1973, after the resignation of Vice President Agnew. When Ford became president the following year, he used the same procedure to appoint Vice President Rockefeller.

The third section of the amendment provides a way for the president of the United States to declare, of his own volition, that he is temporarily unable to fulfill the duties of his office. Though the amendment does not specify, this section is understood to address cases of incapacitating but presumably temporary illness of which the president, himself, is aware; surgery; or some kind of family trauma (the loss of a spouse or a child, for instance) requiring that the president have time to grieve and recover emotionally.

The procedures for activating Section 3 of the amendment are specific and relatively straightforward. If the president decides that he is, or will be, temporarily unable to perform his duties, he signs two identical letters to that effect, and “transmits” one to the speaker of the House of Representatives and one to the president pro tempore of the Senate. At that moment, all the president’s powers are transferred to the vice president of the United States, who becomes acting president of the United States. This arrangement remains in place until the now powerless president sends new letters to the speaker of the House and the president pro tempore of the Senate, declaring his inability over, at which time he resumes the powers of the presidency.

The first person ever to serve as acting president of the United States, pursuant to Section 3 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, was George H. W. Bush. He was acting president for several hours during President Ronald Reagan’s colon cancer surgery in 1985. Vice President Dick Cheney served twice as acting president, for a few hours each time, during minor surgical procedures performed on President George W. Bush.

The provision of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment that is currently generating discussion is Section 4, which provides a way for other officials to declare the president of the United States unable to perform his duties. Section 4 anticipates a situation in which an unconscious or severely physically (or perhaps mentally) compromised president is unable to recognize his incapacity and/or unable to carry out the procedures outlined in Section 3.

Section 4 empowers the vice president and a majority of the “principle heads of the executive departments” (the Cabinet members), or some other group of people that Congress might appoint for such a purpose, to transmit to the speaker of the House of Representatives and the president pro tempore of the Senate, letters declaring that the president is unable to perform the duties of his office. In such an event, the president’s powers would immediately devolve on the vice president, who would become acting president of the United States, just as outlined in Section 3. The president would remain in his position but would be shorn of his powers.

The writers of Section 4 anticipated the obvious: that such a procedure might be used for nefarious purposes, and that the president of the United States might challenge the loss of his powers. The section states that the president can easily regain his powers by simply challenging their transfer, and waiting. To do so, the president need only sign letters to the speaker of the House and the president pro tempore of the Senate, stating “that no inability exists.” After a waiting period of four days, during which the vice president continues as acting president, if no further action is taken by the vice president and the Cabinet (or the vice president and the oft-cited “other body”), the president regains his powers.

When the president signs and transmits the letters declaring that he is not disabled, the vice president and the cabinet (or Congress’s “other body” if it has created one) would have a complex choice to make. They would have to decide whether to “go to the wall” in their insistence that the president is unable to perform his duties. From the time of the president’s challenge to their actions, they would have four days in which to sign yet another pair of letters to the speaker and the president pro tempore, insisting that the president, contrary to his claims, is, indeed, unable to perform the duties of his office. At that point, the dispute would move to Congress.

Section 4 states that if the vice president and his allies challenge the president’s resumption of his powers, Congress is to assemble within 48 hours if it is not already in session, to resolve the question—obviously a grave constitutional crisis. Congress has up to 21 days, during which the vice president will continue as acting president, to determine, by a two-thirds vote of both houses, that the president is unable to perform his duties. If they so decide within the 21 days, the vice president will continue to act as president for an indefinite period (the remainder of the term, or perhaps until Congress agrees with the president in some future challenge—the amendment is unclear). If Congress does not affirmatively declare (by a two-thirds vote of both houses), within 21 day of the president’s adversaries’ written rebuttal to his counterclaim, that the president is, indeed, unable to perform the duties of his office, then the president shall resume his powers.

Discussion of Section 4:

  • In the current hyper-partisan context, note that the impeachment process (which is for instances of presidential criminality) requires a simple majority of the House for impeachment and a two-thirds vote of the Senate for conviction and removal. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment’s Section 4 provisions to strip the president of his powers but not his office, on the other hand, require, in their final phases, two-thirds majority votes in both houses, if the transfer of the president’s powers to the vice president is to be made permanent or even semi-permanent. Therefore, if the ultimate goal is the cynical one of simply depriving Donald Trump of power—getting him out of the way—the notoriously difficult impeachment route is effectively easier than the Twenty-Fifth Amendment route.
  • Unlike the vice president, who cannot be fired by the president or anyone, the cabinet members serve at the pleasure of the president. Therefore, any collusion between them and the vice president would have to be planned in extreme secrecy, or they could easily be purged by the president before it comes to fruition.
  • In the final analysis, the Section 4 provisions of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, though complex and disruptive if carried to their legal extremes, ultimately favor the word of the duly-installed president of the United States over that of the people trying to strip him of his powers. Any attempt to invoke these provisions simply to “get rid” of an unpopular president would probably be met with enough cold feet in Congress to cause it to fail, given the historical difficulty of achieving two-thirds majorities in both houses.
  • Though there is obviously no precedent for such a thing, it is always possible that the federal courts could intervene to stop or reverse any perceived “misuse” of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, or even of the Constitution’s impeachment provisions. This is speculation, of course, but neither procedure was intended to remove or impede a merely controversial or unpopular president. While the courts might invoke the Political Question Doctrine, in effect saying it is none of the judicial branch’s business how Congress deals with President Trump, there is at least a theoretical possibility that the judges could seek to protect the Constitution by halting or reversing Congress’s actions. There is simply no way to know how it might go.

As always, the ancient Chinese curse seems relevant: May you live in interesting times.

On the Impending Public Release of the Warren G. Harding-Carrie Phillips Love Letters

Miscellany

I originally published this piece as a Facebook “note” in 2014. Facebook is discontinuing notes, so I am now moving it to American Pathos.

On Tuesday, the Library of Congress will release, to considerable fanfare, one of the most contested, yet somehow least known, presidential document collections in American history: the long-suppressed love letters of Warren G. Harding to his mistress, Carrie Phillips.

The letters have a complex history.

Jim and Carrie (Fulton) Phillips were neighbors of Warren and Florence Harding’s in the first decade of the twentieth century. The two couples became friends, even touring Europe together. In 1904, the Phillipses’ young son died. Warren had never particularly loved Florence, who was older than he, sickly, and something of a scold, and in the emotional aftermath of the child’s death he and Carrie fell in love. For several years, the friendship between the two couples continued, but eventually Florence caught on and shut Carrie out of her life. Warren, though, was an increasingly busy and important man, first in Ohio politics and then nationally, and he was always on the road, so the affair continued and deepened.

In the early 1910s, the Phillipses traveled to Germany, which was at the height of its power and glory. Carrie fell in love, to the point of obsession, with all things German and remained there for some time. Meanwhile, Warren was elected to the United States Senate from Ohio. Carrie returned to America, but her new love of German culture, and Warren’s position in the Senate, set the two up for a clash when World War I broke out in the summer of 1914. The United States struggled to remain neutral, but U.S.-German relations deteriorated quickly after mid-1915. Warren continued to pour out his heart to Carrie, but his passionate letters were tinged with near-panic as Carrie refused to moderate her outspoken pro-German sentiments. She even began to openly threaten Warren should he vote for a war declaration against her adopted homeland.

In April 1917, the United States declared war against Germany, and Warren, who voted for the war, soon realized that the Wilson administration’s intelligence agencies were investigating Carrie. Worse, there was much to investigate. Carrie and Jim’s daughter was openly courting the cousin of a German heiress who was a known spy. Federal agents arrested the heiress in a Chattanooga hotel room while she was plying her feminine charms to extract troop movement information from a young American soldier stationed at Fort Oglethorpe.

Despite all of this, Warren, and even Carrie, somehow stayed out of trouble, and they continued to see one another at times, but Carrie never recovered, emotionally, from Germany’s loss in the war. For the first weeks after the Armistice, most people assumed that former president Theodore Roosevelt would be the Republican nominee in 1920. Roosevelt died suddenly in January 1919, however, and Warren’s star began to rise in what was certain to be a Republican campaign cycle. Carrie did not want Warren to be president, and it is at that point that the letters begin to suggest that Carrie was blackmailing Warren. In 1920, the Phillipses took a tour around the world, allegedly financed by the Republican National Committee (there is some dispute on this point), and Warren was elected president in a popular and electoral landslide over James M. Cox.

There is little evidence of correspondence between Warren and Carrie after Harding assumed the presidency in March 1921. He died suddenly only two and a half years later. Carrie remained in Marion, Ohio, but became estranged from Jim, who took to the bottle. She was again investigated for disloyalty during World War II. By the mid 1950s Carrie was an eccentric recluse. Her home fell into disrepair and her dogs—German shepherds—were poorly cared for. Eventually she was placed in a retirement home. The lawyer in charge of her estate, Don Williamson, found a sealed closet, and in it a box of letters, nearly a thousand pages, from Warren G. Harding. The letters were scattered, disjointed, undated, and thus wildly confusing. They were also shot through with florid expressions of love, and some were sexually explicit.

For several years, rumors circulated around town that Williamson had the letters. By 1963, the Harding Memorial Association, a group of local relatives and notables in Marion, was preparing for the late president’s 1965 centennial. In conjunction with this, the Association was planning a 1964 transfer of all of its Harding documents to the Ohio Historical Society. In the midst of this, Francis Russell of Massachusetts, a writer, one of several who were planning anniversary biographies of the much-maligned Harding, arrived in Marion. In an old book about the 1920s, Russell had read that during the 1920 Harding campaign all the store fronts in Marion were decorated—all, that is, except the store owned by Jim Phillips. Russell wondered why and soon found out about the Phillips affair and the rumor that Williamson had the letters. Russell tracked Williamson down and saw the documents himself, and that is when the great legal drama began. Russell convinced Williamson to transfer the letters to the Ohio Historical Society. Williamson agreed, and the cat was out of the bag. This set up a fight between Kenneth Duckett, an archivist at OHS, who genuinely wanted to preserve the letters for history; the OHS itself, which, as it turned out (or so Russell alleged) was something of a political arm of the Ohio Republican Party rather than a traditional historical depository; the Harding heirs, who wanted to suppress or destroy the letters; Russell, who wanted to be the first to use them; and American Heritage, to which Russell was a contributor.

Eventually, an easily manipulated state judge, relying on a highly questionable interpretation of copyright law, transferred the letters to the Harding Memorial Association. Duckett, however, had already made several microfilm copies, once actually having a fistfight at the copier when an OHS official tried to stop him, and had secreted the copies at various places around the country. Russell managed to get a a copy to American Heritage, but a court order forbade anyone to use the letters for any reason. Russell became so frustrated that, in 1968, he published his biography, The Shadow of Blooming Grove: Warren G. Harding in his Times, with long rows of hyphens replacing the alphabet characters of the Harding letters. In the end, a later court protected the letters by transferring them to the Library of Congress, where they were to remain under seal until July 2014, fifty years after the controversy began.

And here we are.

Despite many efforts at suppression and delay, the letters were not completely sealed. Russell had made notes in 1963, and a few stray but incomplete copies remained. In 2009, Cleveland attorney James Robenalt, whom I met first in 2011 and again last week, published The Harding Affair: Love and Espionage During the Great War, the only real study ever done of the incomplete letters. Robenalt believes, and I agree, that the letters, contrary to the long assessment of historians, show a Harding who was intelligent, hard-working, engaged, and scrupulously patriotic. Robenalt is calling for a professional reassessment of Harding and his place in history, and I support that effort. That is why I am now associated with the Warren G. Harding Symposium in Marion, and why I have traveled to that event three out of the last four years.

If you find this topic interesting, I urge you to pay attention to the news out of the Library of Congress on Tuesday. However, I would not expect too much in the way of serious treatment of the letters. The media will focus on sex and pet names and the like, and there will be little real analysis. Current politics will also come into play, as there has always been a Progressive political bias among professional historians against the three Republican presidents who served between Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt.

You may want to read Robenalt’s book, The Harding Affair: Love and Espionage During the Great War, which is readily available. You can also consult Robenalt’s web site, www.thehardingaffair.com [2020 note: the link is now dead]. Next year will be the 150th anniversary of Harding’s birth, so that, in conjunction with the release of the letters, will probably lead to a spate of new books.

As for me, you know that I live for this kind of thing, so I welcome any discussion of it on Facebook. Thanks for listening.

—Kevin Brewer, July 27, 2014

Empires and Small Towns: Of Edward Gibbon, Sonny Melton, and Elton John

Memorials
I originally published this tribute as a Facebook note shortly after Sonny’s death. Facebook is phasing out notes, so I am now migrating it, slightly modified, to American Pathos.

Tonight, I sat pondering the tragedy that befell my community 20 hours ago, when Stephen Paddock unleashed his hate, or bitterness, or pain, or madness, or whatever upon the concertgoers in Las Vegas, taking the lives of Sonny Melton and so many others. As I did, someone posted an image of Sonny’s last Facebook check-in: a little red teardrop of a marker on a map of the city.

It is said that Edward Gibbon first conceived his magisterial History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in October 1764, as he “sat musing amid the ruins” of Rome, “while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter.” Gibbon was trying to understand what crumbled Rome. I’m no Edward Gibbon, but I do feel as though I am sitting amid ruins, not of a civilization, but of many lives. Were he here, looking over my shoulder, Sonny would roll his eyes and grin at this overblown allusion, but I think he would appreciate my sincerity, and I know he would not be surprised that I had written it.

The image of dots on a map will not leave me, and it occurs to me that each of us is a dot moving about. I am. You are. Sonny Melton was. The gunman, Paddock, was as well.
Paddock’s dot first appeared on the map some 64 years ago. Early on, his story is a tangle of confusion and rumor, and it may never be clarified. He roamed the earth for 35 years before Sonny Melton’s dot appeared in the summer of 1988. Since then, their two markers, each oblivious to the other, have moved on their respective paths, usually distant, sometimes closer, but never, so far as we know, approaching, until they converged in a gaudy desert oasis on Sunday night.

It is, of course, a disturbing notion that somewhere out there, sharing the world with us, is a person we know not who holds the key to our destiny. What would we do if we knew? Could we change things? Would we? In the course of a lifetime, each of us meets so many people. Nearly all of them seem harmless, and nearly all of them are. Abraham Lincoln once watched John Wilkes Booth perform in The Marble Heart, and according to legend perceived that Booth “looked a little sharp” toward him at one point in the play. Since we cannot identify all the dangers that swarm around us and since it is impossible to live the kind of happy and meaningful life that Sonny Melton lived while thinking about it, we simply tune it out and hope that all will come right. Ironically, in this case neither man ever knew that the other existed, yet their dots are now permanently fixed, side-by-side, on the same acre of Nevada.

Gibbon’s famous tale of his afternoon in Rome is, I suppose, too lofty, too high-culture an image for what has happened to us here. It would make the humble and good-natured Sonny blush, and it is too majestic for the loathsome man who took him from us. Another, more contemporary quotation from the world of popular culture is needed. One comes to mind immediately and from a source that Sonny would have approved. It is the line Sir Elton John sang in an effort to understand and explain the feckless Mark David Chapman’s senseless murder of John Lennon:

“It’s funny how one insect can damage so much grain.”

KB

Remembering Dr. Otis Stephens, Jr.

Memorials,

I wrote this memorial for Dr. Otis Stephens in 2017 after learning of his December 2016 death. I first published it as a Facebook note. I am now moving it, in slightly modified form, to American Pathos.

Last night—the night before I sent my son off to college—I learned of the death, last December, of one of the greatest men I ever knew.

Dr. Otis Stephens was a professor of political science and law at the University of Tennessee. When I arrived on the U.T. campus in the mid-1980s, he was already a legend there. Here was a man born totally blind who had both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in political science and a Ph. D from Johns Hopkins. Just a few years before I met him, when he was already in his late 40s, he received a law degree from U.T. while he was working there. Only later did I learn that he was an accomplished pianist, and only yesterday did I learn that he paid his way through the University of Georgia tuning pianos and playing in a band called “The Bulldogs” and that he held a distinguished chair at Harvard. Once, in graduate school, I used a massive, blue constitutional law textbook; he wrote it. I was pleased but not surprised.

Dr. Stephens was the first person I ever knew, and the only one I ever knew well, who had a guide dog. Since childhood, I had had a reverent interest in these dogs. It began in the 1970s when I read James B. Garfield’s remarkable children’s novel, Follow my Leader, about an 11-year-old boy who is blinded in an accident and learns to live again with the help of a guide dog. My brothers read the book too. It was something we shared, and I used to think about it every time Dr. Stephens, led by Amery (I hope I have the name right after three decades), his German Shepherd, walked into a classroom.

At any time of day, one might see Dr. Stephens and Amery walking confidently across campus. If you spoke to him while he was moving, he would cut you off and tell you that he was counting steps, so that was a mistake you made only once. The next time he saw you (he joked often about students’ awkward efforts to avoid saying saw or see in reference to him and assured them that he used the words in the same way sighted people did) he would apologize for the necessity and ask how you were doing or how he could help you.

When I first met Dr. Stephens, Amery was a new dog. His previous dog had died—I can only imagine his sorrow in this—and he told some other students and me that he had been given a choice of returning to weeks of training with a new dog or taking a “re-trained” dog that had somehow not lived up to the expectations of the school. He chose the latter. One day, he walked into the classroom carrying a bundle of papers, and before any of the students could stop him, Amery led him headlong into the edge of a set of world maps. Dr. Stephens ran into the maps and hit his face on them. He turned red, made the dog sit, and struck the maps twice with his hand, shouting, “Right here, Amery! Right here!” He then smiled at us and joked about the whole thing, saying that this was part of the process for correcting the dog’s errors. Amery, as usual, curled up under a table, but his ears drooped a little more than they normally did.

Dr. Stephens’s classes were always fascinating and fun; I doubt if I ever missed one. He was open about the special procedures necessary for a blind man to run a classroom. He smilingly told us to “blurt,” since raising our hands was a waste of time (though not blind, I encourage this method to this day and usually invoke Dr. Stephens’s teaching to explain it to my students). To help him better interact with the students, he asked you to pick a seat and make it your own. Early in the semester, you were to speak up and identify yourself. Within a few class sessions I could simply interject, “Dr. Stephens,” and he would answer, “Yes, Mr. Brewer,” and look in my direction. I can’t exactly explain why, but this had a way of making one feel important. He cast a spell on his students. Once, when discussing a Fourth Amendment legal case that had begun with a drunk driving stop, he interjected, “This guy had about as much business driving a car as I have.” For the rest of the semester, we knew we could laugh at anything.

As he was the first educated blind person I ever met, Dr. Stephens was the first person I ever knew who used Braille. I knew much about Braille from my childhood with Garfield’s novel. His books were thick and heavy looking, made of what looked like manila folder stock. It was shocking to see a man stare into nothing and read aloud, with dashing speed, complicated legal cases and judicial decisions, his fingers flying across the page, making a slight scraping sound with each stroke. That there were 20 or so fascinated people watching him do this seemed not to trouble him at all. Only once did I ever see him angry at anyone, and we never knew who it was. He said word had reached him that someone in one of his classes was answering the attendance roll for another student and that he was going have to take more careful records. At this, he took out a Braille writing slate and a pointed stylus. We were accustomed to seeing him read in Braille, but there was an audible gasp when he began to write in Braille, punching bumps into a piece of card stock with the speed of a typist as he stared blankly into the crowd. He would call a name and then write. We never knew what he was writing or how it helped him with his problem, but I will wager that no one present that day ever thought of taking advantage of or trying to outsmart the man.

I have not spoken with Dr. Stephens in about a dozen years. After I was named a James Madison fellow, in 2003, and began writing my paper on A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, I contacted him to tell him about my fellowship and to ask his help in tracking down the Schechter Brothers’ district court trial transcript. He put me in touch with some sources but mostly congratulated me on my accomplishment. I was honored when he said he remembered me well as a “fixture” in his classes in the 80s.

As I have grown older, teaching history and government to small town kids, some of them impoverished and troubled, I have thought about Dr. Stephens as a teacher. His patience, his kindness, his humility, and his humor all deeply impressed me and have influenced how I relate to my own students. He seemed keenly aware of the atmosphere of wonder, admiration, and nervousness his blindness provoked in some of the young people he taught and did all he could to dispel it. This, with his intellect, made him masterful. You knew you were in the presence of greatness. Deep down, he probably knew it too, but he never acted that way. He never said it, but I think he would agree: know your stuff, and don’t take yourself too seriously; your students will love you for both.

K. T. B.

Yes, the President’s Daughter

Presidential History

I originally published this essay as a Facebook note in August 2015. I am now moving it to American Pathos.

Comes today news that researchers have used DNA analysis to confirm, finally, that President Warren G. Harding was the father of Elizabeth Ann Harding-Blaesing, the daughter of the infamous Nan Britton. Britton’s grandson produced a DNA sample, something neither Britton nor her child ever agreed to do. This sample, solicited by collateral descendants of Harding, proved that Harding’s grand-nephew and Nan Britton’s grandson are second cousins.

In an age when most wild historical claims collapse in the face of science, depriving historical romantics (such as I) of something magical, we now find that the maligned Ms. Britton was telling the truth all along.
Continue reading Yes, the President’s Daughter →

August’s Long Shadow: A Thirty-Year Reflection on the Murder of Tommy Baer

Memorials, Phi Kappa Tau Fraternity, ,

Suddenly, we find we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the play. Or rather we are both.

-oSCAR WILDE: tHE PICTURE OF DORiAN GRAY

History favors the eyewitness. In its quest for the truth of the past, it privileges the experiences of the firsthand participant. Life is complex, though, and sometimes it is the events we do not witness that overtake and overwhelm us. When those we love endure tragedy in our absence, our sense of having escaped it can bring remorse and guilt. “If only I had been there!” we tell ourselves, indulging the fantasy that we would have changed the course of events where others failed.

Such are my memories of thirty years ago this week. Though I know the principal event only from others’ accounts, I endured its aftermath, and it has shadowed my life and my friends’ lives for three decades. At the heart of even a familiar story, there is always something more to discover, and it is worthwhile, perhaps, to ponder it anew from time to time and, with T. S. Eliot, go back to where we started and “know the place for the first time.”

On June 1, 1988, I graduated from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Neither my parents nor either of my brothers attended; I had no relatives there at all. This was a painful topic in my family for many years, but they are all gone now, and I can speak of it. It was sad and disappointing, but it could not be avoided, and they meant no harm. I probably would not have participated in the ceremony at all had not my girlfriend, Sheryl Moore,1 insisted that I do so and that she would be there for me, as she was. Sheryl watched the ceremony. I assume she took photos; I would give anything to have them now, but I don’t. She hugged me and later treated me to dinner. Memphis State University’s law school had accepted me for the fall term, and as graduation gifts Sheryl gave me a leather briefcase and a dark blue, beautifully bound copy of Black’s Law Dictionary.

Memphis was more than 300 miles from Knoxville, and I had arranged to spend the summer with my parents, in Benton County, before moving there. For the moment, though, I was more excited about my immediate plans. After the graduation observances, I returned to my downstairs room in the Phi Kappa Tau house, at 1800 Lake Avenue, to pack. The next morning, Sheryl and I were driving to Charleston, South Carolina to spend a few days with her aunt and uncle, who lived near the beach on the Isle of Palms. I was 23 and had never been on a real vacation without my family, and I certainly had never taken a girlfriend on an out-of-town trip of this sort. It seemed such an adult thing to do. We had a wonderful time. Sheryl’s Uncle Bill, a pilot with his own small plane, flew us low over Fort Sumter, much to my delight. I was young. I was in love. I had many friends. I was now the first person in my family to earn a college degree. There was trouble back home, but I had big plans, and for the moment my future seemed bright.

On June 6, after dropping Sheryl off in Greenville, South Carolina, where her mother met us, I returned to the fraternity house, loaded my belongings into my bronze 1978 Oldsmobile Omega, and drove away from one of the only places where I was ever truly happy. Behind me I left a group of young friends, including some new initiates, soaking up the last days of spring in anticipation of a quiet summer and the fall semester pleasures to come: fraternity rush,2 parties, football, homecoming. The lawn was lush. The trees arrayed along the east side of the house stood like giant columns and looked as though they would be there forever. The ancient windows and doors were open, a breeze wafting through our 1920s Dutch Colonial Revival, which had been used hard by two decades of young men but had once been a mansion. It was, in Katherine Anne Porter’s words, “such a green day with no threats in it.”

Eleven weeks later, my friend Tommy Baer was murdered just a few feet from what had been my bedroom door.

The Delta Kappa Chapter of Phi Kappa Tau, of which I was, at the time of my graduation, the vice president for alumni affairs, initiated Thomas Holman Baer in the fall of 1987. Like several of our members, Tom had been active and successful in Scouting and had risen to Eagle Scout. Our chapter had strong ties to the Boy Scouts, and many of our best recruits came to us through those connections. Since Tom was younger than I was, and since I was not part of the Scouting world, I cannot claim to have known him very well, but I do have vivid memories of him. Most of all, I remember Tom’s positive, at times naïve outlook on the world; his gentle nature; his boundless energy; and his kindness. Tom was a caretaker, what some might call a “mother hen” type. At parties, he fretted and monitored, always on the lookout for problems or danger. He took pride in being a “first responder.” I wasn’t sure what that entailed, but he told me it meant he had been trained to handle a life-threatening emergency until help could arrive. It was clear that Tom had grown up with money, a boast I certainly could not make. The last real conversation I remember having with him was about his recent trip to New Zealand, which, though a popular vacation destination today, was exotic, to me anyway, in 1988. I marveled when Tom casually told me his airline ticket had cost $600. That was a small fortune to most undergraduates I knew, and I couldn’t comprehend someone younger than I was spending such a sum on leisure travel. Still, he exhibited no trace of self-importance. Tom was humble to a fault, and I never heard him say a bad word about anyone.

Early that August, I moved, alone, into the Highland Oaks Apartments on Walker Avenue in Memphis. There, I was soon miserable. The Highland Oaks was a poor choice for me. The door and the one large window in my apartment fronted a courtyard consisting of a rustic, forest-like green space dominated by two large oak trees that obviously long predated the building itself. I was on the ground floor, and everything was in deep shadow, even at midday. Little natural light entered my new home, and my mood, too, soon began to darken. From the outset, I found law school cynical and soulless. I missed Sheryl; I missed her so much I could hardly think of anything else—except the one big thing that had consumed me and all my family for nearly two years and had prevented them from attending my graduation. Back home, my brother Tim, 26, had recently been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, A.L.S. or Lou Gehrig’s disease. He was dying, and it wasn’t going to be merciful or quick.3 I was bereft, but I was also terrified. When I was among my friends in Knoxville, I had borne up well to the growing certainty of Tim’s diagnosis. Now, alone in my shadowy apartment and aware that some types of A.L.S. were genetic, I became obsessed with every muscle twitch, every cramp, every hint of weakness or fatigue. I found it difficult to concentrate, and I didn’t sleep well. Once, I even called Tim, who was still able to talk on the phone, and wept. Many years later, Greg, my other brother, would say of that period of Tim’s diagnosis and decline, “Every one of us should have been in counseling then.” A bright and exciting moment in my life had become harrowing and difficult. My closest friend and fraternity brother, Scott Walkup, was from Memphis and loved it above all other places. Now I was there, not loving it at all, and he was in Knoxville, where I most wanted to be. Everything seemed backward and strange and wrong, but I settled in as best I could and went to work on my courses, already sensing that none of this was going to work out.

Late on Saturday night August 20, my phone rang. It was Scott calling. We were close, Scott Walkup and I. We were as close as any two real brothers ever were. I knew him. He seemed breathless and sounded as though he were frightened or crying—or both. I knew instantly that something dreadful had happened and was immediately conscious of not knowing the details of Sheryl’s day, except that she was to have moved into her dormitory that afternoon. She and I had not been in touch since about Thursday, and a flood of dread welled up in me as I waited for Scott to explain his obvious distress. His words came like hammer blows, but they were not about Sheryl. Someone—an intruder—had come to the Phi Kappa Tau house and had stabbed Tom Baer on the marble walkway just a few feet from my old bedroom.

Seconds ago, I was sitting alone watching television, wrapped up in my own discontent and uncertainty. Now, I was reeling from this bizarre and unexpected crisis. I tried to impose order on Scott’s words. Though it was difficult to imagine the gentle Tom, of all people, in such a situation, hopeful images flashed through my mind: a scuffle, a hospital visit, stitches, some undesired attention from law enforcement, probably some unpleasantness with the U.T. Greek Life Office. Still, if these relatively benign images were accurate, why did Scott seem so frantic? I blurted questions to my friend and to myself. Stabbed? Tom? Why on earth would anyone attack Tom? At the Phi Tau house? That made no sense. School wasn’t even in session! Scott was there when it happened. He had, he said, held Tom’s head in his lap until help—the help Tom had always promised to summon for others—arrived. For now, as far as anyone knew for certain, Tom was still alive; Scott didn’t think so. He said he would call me back.

Sitting in a town that was not my home, in an apartment I already hated, I felt helpless and alone. Cut off from my panicked friends by 400 miles, seven hours, an unreliable car, and a lot of money I didn’t have, I had to muster my self-control to resist driving east at that very moment. I knew my fraternity brothers needed help, and I thought I might know where to find it, but I didn’t dare tie up the phone. I waited.

I didn’t have to wait long. After midnight, the phone rang again, sounding menacing somehow. I answered. Scott’s voice came in a flat monotone: “He died.” I replied in the way people do, telling myself I had misunderstood the words and, knowing I had not, quietly raging against their stark finality. “He died?” I asked, not wasting much emotion on the word. “Yep,” came my best friend’s bland reply. No one else was injured. A young man intruded on the house. Tom intervened. The intruder stabbed him in the chest. Tom fell outside the veranda door and never said another word after that. We talked for a minute or two and hung up. Scott was in good hands, I knew, accompanied by Ann Langdon, his sensible and reliable girlfriend, and I realized he probably needed time to speak to his parents, who lived in Memphis, just across town from me.

I had a sensible and reliable girlfriend too, and I wanted to talk with her above all else, but, even at this distance, I had reverted to fraternity officer mode. I had to prioritize. I did not have time to grieve—not yet. There was a murder in what had been my home. A friend and brother was dead. Our officers, including Scott, were all capable young men, but, like me, they were young men. Emotional and legal nightmares loomed at the very moment the new semester was to begin. Chaos, I thought, surely prevails at 1800 Lake Avenue tonight. I asked myself what I would do if I were there in Knoxville. There was only one answer, really, and it had been germinating in my mind since the first phone call: I would contact our most dependable alumnus, Gene Perkins, who had sheltered and advised our fraternity for years. Gene would know what to do; Gene would help. I called his number, waking him. There was no small talk. I began by explaining that I was in Memphis, not Knoxville. Scott, I continued, had informed me that someone had “come to the fraternity house and murdered Tom Baer.” Gene was shocked, of course, but he was good in a crisis. Though it was late at night, he said he would go to the house right away. I knew that was what he would do.

Confident that a trusted adult was taking the reins in Knoxville, I turned my attention to my own loss. Writing today, it seems so strange to recall the difficulty of maintaining contact with loved ones just a few decades ago. Sheryl’s friends were my friends, and I knew I had to call her, but, strangely, I didn’t know how to do it. I couldn’t remember which dorm she had moved into and wasn’t entirely certain she had done so yet. Hesitating in that late hour, and knowing it was an hour later still in Kingsport, Tennessee, her hometown, I reluctantly called her mother’s house. Sheryl’s mom was understandably alarmed when she realized who I was, and at first our conversation was a tangled mess, as I tried to assure her that her youngest child was fine, as far as I knew, and that I was not even in Knoxville. Finally, I was able to explain the bare outline of what had happened and that I needed only to speak to her daughter. Gracious and sympathetic, considering the hour and the startling nature of my call, Mrs. Moore gave me Sheryl’s dorm number, which she had written down just hours earlier.

I called the number. Sheryl and I had met at a Phi Kappa Tau rush party a year earlier. I happened to be standing inside the front door when she walked in with some friends. I thought her face strikingly beautiful and, brimming with home-team confidence I possessed in no other setting, I told her so. I said she reminded me of someone from another era—someone from the golden age of film, or from classic TV, maybe. I thought for a moment, and it came to me. I said she resembled an ’80s version of the actress (Sue Randall, though I did not know her name then) who played “Miss Landers,” Beaver’s teacher on Leave it to Beaver. I was sincere in this, and she laughed, but nothing came of it. She was in and out of the house from time to time that fall and winter, and at the end of the following March, right after my 23rd birthday, we became a couple. Since our first meeting, Sheryl had made many friends at the fraternity house, so by August 1988 she knew Tom about as well as I did. Tonight, she was in Clement Hall, only about three blocks from the scene of his murder, and in that day before campus alert texts and “shelter in place” advisories, the news stunned her.  We talked into the night, and it was only then, as we discussed what had happened and the dreadful fallout that was sure to follow, that I began to cry. The sunny days of early June seemed far away now, but I was no longer alone, and for that I was grateful. We discussed my driving to Knoxville. I wanted to go, and she wanted me to as well, but we both knew I couldn’t. My courses were demanding beyond anything I had known, and the attendance policy in Contracts, which would meet on Monday morning, was draconian. Legal Methods would meet for three hours on Monday evening. I wasn’t going anywhere.

Around five o’clock, I lay down on the bed, worried about Scott, Ann, and my other friends and hoping someone was looking after them all. I was lonely again now, for without Scott I knew almost no one in Memphis. I wanted to call home but hesitated. My brother’s terminal illness, conclusively diagnosed the previous January, was a crushing blow to our parents. They were rural, working-class people with limited resources. Well into their forties, they were now adjusting to a multitude of new and unexpected burdens, and I hated to wake either them or Greg, my younger brother, on a Sunday morning. I considered calling or even visiting the Walkups, Scott’s parents, but I thought better of that too. Scott had already spoken with them, and I had alarmed enough people for one night. Thinking the murder of a student on the flagship campus of the state’s premier university system would be big news, I turned on the radio and tried to listen and sleep at the same time, enduring hours of pop music so I could hear the Tennessee Radio Network News at the beginning of each. No one mentioned the murder. Finally, at about eight o’clock, I called my mother. Mom didn’t know Tommy and had never been to the fraternity house, but we were close, and I needed to share what had happened and to get her loving, practical take on things. After that, I slept much of the day.

On Sunday evening, I spoke with Sheryl, Scott, Stacy Prowell (a close friend and my former roommate at the fraternity house), and others. A coherent story was emerging. There had been perhaps two dozen people at the house. Big social events were planned for rush in the coming days, but rush parties sometimes swelled to a hundred people or more. Typically, around twelve members of the fraternity resided in the house, and the August 20 gathering, which the police and the media would later describe as a “party,” was little more than a few brothers and friends stopping by to visit with those who lived there. There was beer in the house, it seems, in violation of university policy, but I had rarely known there to not be beer somewhere in the house or in any house on the row. Move-in day celebrants and others wandered up and down the strip, a block away, going in and out of the restaurants and pubs there and along the neighboring streets. Among the latter was Gatti’s, formerly Mr. Gatti’s Pizza, directly across Lake Avenue from the fraternity house. Gatti’s was a popular watering hole for the Phi Taus and all of “Old Row,” as distinguished from “New Row,” the “rich” fraternities along the river, on the other side of the campus.

As the Phi Kappa Taus and their friends chatted and exchanged summer stories, Jeffrey R. Underwood, a twenty-year-old local man who was not a student, left Gatti’s sometime around eleven o’clock, crossed the street with three friends, and entered the house. Underwood was rude and pushy, claiming he had been invited and asking to see someone named John. There was no one by that name at the house, and when a member told them to leave the four did so. Over the next hour, Underwood reappeared and was asked to leave at least twice more. When he began harassing and threatening Phi Taus on their patio, right outside the veranda, a brother, Scott Brown, concluding that the unwanted visitor was drunk or high, again told him to leave. Underwood accosted Scott and drew a knife, which another Phi Tau, Danny Baker, promptly knocked from his hand. The intruder picked up his knife and skulked back across the street. Someone at the fraternity house flagged down a campus police cruiser, and an officer went to Gatti’s. The officer encountered Underwood, now accompanied by a new companion, on the bar’s porch, but she then proceeded inside, leaving him behind. With the officer inside the bar, Underwood and the other young man moved toward Lake Avenue.

At this critical moment, Tommy Baer arrived at 1800 Lake. Someone told him what had occurred, so when members saw Underwood, accompanied by the other man, coming back across the street from Gatti’s, Tom took up a position at the house’s rear veranda door. By that time, someone from the house had crossed the street to alert the police officer inside Gatti’s that the man she had passed on the porch was Underwood and that he was now back on the Phi Kappa Tau property. Returning to the fraternity house, the officer inexplicably went to the west side of the lot, into the darkness between the Phi Kappa Tau and Beta Theta Pi houses, rather than to the busy and lighted east side, where she would have found Underwood wielding a knife.

Scott Walkup had driven to North Carolina to pick up Ann and bring her to Knoxville for the new semester. They parked in what he remembers as the “primo spot,” at the entrance to the main drive, just feet from the veranda, and were getting out of the car when they saw Tom holding a softball bat horizontally across the door at shoulder level. Underwood came to the door and exchanged words with Tom, who leaned in and quietly said something to the stranger. Scott heard Underwood reply, “You better fucking call the cops then!” As he spoke, and with Scott and Ann looking on in confusion, Underwood struck, lunging at Tom and driving the knife into his chest. Tom cried out, “He’s got a knife! I’ve been stabbed!” and crumbled onto the walkway.

For an instant, all was stunned silence.

“Tom was face down on the concrete,” Scott wrote three decades later. “He went down right before our eyes as we got out of the car. . . I rushed to him and blood was pouring out onto the ground. I asked him what to do (he was the one person there who would know!)” According to later reports, Underwood’s companion picked up the knife, and a brother, Randall, insisting the weapon was “evidence,” demanded he drop it. The stranger sullenly tossed the knife into the grass and went back across the street. Weeks would pass before he would be arrested. One police officer was already on the property, and more, from both the campus police and the Knoxville Police Department, quickly arrived.  They took Underwood into custody. Tom, meanwhile, appeared to be dying; still, the ambulance did not come. “He was unresponsive,” Scott wrote. “I took his cap off his head and fashioned it into a pillow of sorts and held him until he drew what was undoubtedly his last breath.” Underwood’s knife had penetrated Tom’s chest cavity, lacerating his aorta. When they finally arrived, emergency medical technicians tried to save him with defibrillation but were unsuccessful. “I remember watching it all in disbelief,” Ann wrote in 2018. “I watched Scott holding Tom’s head. He was so strong.” Now, as the E.M.T.s took Tom to the ambulance, Ann placed her rosary beads in his hands and prayed.

I slept little on Sunday night and studied not at all. Exhausted and emotionally drained, I pushed through my Monday classes on August 22. In the days and weeks to come, I would hear the rumblings of what was to be a remarkable news story. Investigators were misrepresenting the nature of both the gathering at the house and Tom’s final stand at the veranda door. The “second man,” who had accompanied Tom’s assailant to the house on Saturday, was a University of Tennessee football player. Another friend of Underwood’s, taken to the station for questioning, had briefly stolen the knife from under the noses of the campus police on the night of the murder, and though they had no legal authority to do so, the police offered him immunity to get the weapon back. Incredibly, and despite this bumbling, the U. T. Police, barely capable of managing football traffic, had not surrendered the case to the Knoxville Police Department’s homicide bureau. The stories continued to grow and change. These were rumors and portents. Though interesting, they didn’t matter much yet, not to me anyway, and certainly not to my shattered friends at U.T.

All through Sunday and Monday, Knoxville, my friends, and Sheryl beckoned. Alone when I was not in class, I found myself staring at the clock and calculating what time I would arrive in Knoxville if I left at that instant. I did this in reverse too: “If I had left here seven hours ago, I would be sitting with Sheryl right now.” I needed her to get through this. I had James Taylor’s In the Pocket on cassette and listened over and over to “Daddy’s All Gone”:

There's a bus every other hour
There's even a midnight train
But that don't leave me the power
to see your face again
It's not that simple . . .

Finally, telling myself once and for all that I could not possibly leave Memphis, on Monday night I took up a yellow legal pad and composed a letter to the chapter, directing it to my good friend Todd Trapnell, Delta Kappa’s new and now surely overwhelmed president. In it, I explained why I could not come, even to Tom’s funeral, which, I soon learned, U.T. president and former Tennessee governor Lamar Alexander planned to attend. Assuring my friends that I was commiserating with them from the other end of the state, I struggled for a closing. Finally, turning, as I often did for guidance, to American history, I thought of the assassination of President Kennedy, much in the news that summer as its twenty-fifth anniversary approached. Recalling President Johnson’s words on the runway at Andrews that night, after Kennedy’s body was removed from the plane, I wrote in closing: “Do not brood over this; you will find few answers. As was said on the night of another senseless murder a quarter of a century ago, ‘We have suffered a loss that cannot be weighed.'” Brooding, and thus disregarding my own counsel, I dropped the letter in the mail, went to bed, and then tried to get on with my solitary life in Memphis. Some weeks later, I would receive a reply from one of Tom’s closest friends, thanking me for my “encouragement and compassion” and indicating that someone had read my letter, or part of it, at Tom’s rosary service.

In the coming days, as I struggled to focus on my now compromised studies at Memphis State, my friends in Knoxville said goodbye to Tom. The funeral services spanned three days. Wendy Wood-Rowland, then a “Little Sister of the Laurel” (an auxiliary organization whose members were female friends of Delta Kappa), remembers that 1800 Lake “became the gathering spot for fraternity brothers and also family and friends.” They were there, she said, “to reminisce and attempt to come to grips with a tragedy no one could comprehend.” Others came with different agendas. Wendy recalled with some bitterness that “dignitaries,” led by university president Alexander, “arrived to offer condolences” but that they also lectured those present on the dangers of campus alcohol use, this as the mourners, exhausted and bereft, “sat cross-legged on the floor” like children, some not twenty feet from the spot where their sober friend had just died at the hands of a drunk who was not a student and should  never have been there. “I have never forgotten how overwhelming that continual grief felt,” Wendy said of the week after the murder.

September came. On the 2nd, Sheryl traveled by bus to Memphis for the long Labor Day weekend. I had seen her only once, on a brief visit in July, since we said goodbye in Greenville on June 6. I picked her up at the Memphis Greyhound station rather late, and I’m sure I lit up when she walked through the door with her suitcase. We were hungry, but many of the nearby restaurants were closed or crowded. Besides, we had much planned, and we both needed to conserve our money. I took her back to my gloomy apartment. There, I shuffled through the stash of random canned goods my mother had sent with me when I left home in August and produced two cans of Campbell’s Chicken and Stars, a children’s soup, really, no doubt purchased with my two-and-a-half-year-old niece, Tim’s daughter Amanda, in mind. We both laughed; I hadn’t laughed in weeks. It would be nice to share hot chicken soup with little stars and be children for a bit.

Basking in Sheryl’s presence and craving firsthand information, as we ate our soup, I asked endless questions, and she struggled to describe what Tom’s death had done to the fraternity—to them all. Sheryl was bright and intuitive. She impressed me with her candid assessment of our friends and their suffering, but her accounts left me deeply concerned. Scott, I knew, was traumatized. I was worried about him. It was not a therapeutic age. Post-traumatic stress disorder was little known or discussed outside a military context, and I really didn’t know how to help. In the face of something so terrible, all one could do was listen, when possible, and try to be a good friend. Even that was not easy. Scott, himself, recently commented that it was a time of expensive phone calls that, as students, none of us could afford to make. “Professional” help, though available, was not promoted then as it would be today. In a recent conversation, Ann wrote succinctly and with regret, “There was no such thing as grief counseling back then.”

Beyond my concern for Scott, Ann, and my other friends, in the weeks that followed Sheryl’s visit, I tried not to think too much about the situation in Knoxville, though I would witness it soon enough. On November 5, U.T. would host Boston College for the 1988 homecoming game. It was a dismal season. A pall had fallen over the campus, and football had not been spared. The Volunteers had lost six of their first seven games, defeating, in another ironic twist for me, only Memphis State. I would go to the game, or to Knoxville anyway, see Sheryl and my friends, and try to understand what had happened in August and since.

Ron Powers, a new friend from law school who was also a U.T. alumnus, made the trip with me on November 4. Ron was personable and kind, and I was grateful for his company and his financial help. On the drive, we talked of our undergraduate lives—of our friends, our courses, and our teachers. My mind wandered to Professor Calfee at U.T. and my American literature class of two years before. It was while writing for that class that I had run across F. Scott Fitzgerald’s mournful essay, “My Lost City.” I was strangely drawn to this short piece and had read it a dozen times in two years. Part of an anthology, The Crack-Up, “My Lost City” was a meditation on Fitzgerald’s tormented love for and simultaneous hate for New York. He loved the city because it had made him, because it embodied his loftiest hopes and dreams, and because it seemed everything he had ever wanted. He hated it because he knew that he could never be worthy of it; that its magic was transient, illusory, even; and that he would lose it in the end. I was apprehensive, and the parallels were not lost on me. Fitzgerald loved New York too much, I reflected. You can love something too much.

Knoxville was cool and gray when I arrived at the Phi Kappa Tau house on Friday afternoon, feeling out of place for the only time since I had first set foot there. Though the game was not until the following day, I had expected more activity. Some cars were parked randomly around the perimeter of the lawn, but there were no obvious revelers. I parked on the street, experiencing a brief pang of regret at the loss of my reserved space east of the house. On edge, I bypassed the front door, crossed the patio, rounded the back corner of the veranda, and stood staring at the place where Tom had fallen. June and even August felt like years ago now, and for the first time ever I did not want to go inside. Entering the back door, I walked by my old room and turned right into the hall. It was still afternoon, but the curtains were closed. The house was dingy and dim. A few old friends greeted me enthusiastically, but they wore tired, anxious looks, and though nearly all were in their teens or twenties, they appeared older than I remembered. As always on such occasions, there was the ubiquitous bright orange clothing and regalia, but it seemed incongruous in the gloom.

In the front foyer, one of the active members met me like an underworld doorman in a speakeasy. He welcomed me back but whispered that the university had the house under “scrutiny.” The story of Tom’s death had gone national. ABC’s 20/20 was picking at its edges. U.T. was embarrassed and angry, looking for ways to discredit the fraternity and shift the narrative from campus police incompetence to student irresponsibility. University president Alexander, who had tipped his hand at the house in August, had presidential aspirations on a grander scale, and the casual, campus-wide alcohol use that U.T. had all but ignored for generations was suddenly an emergency. The doors, windows, and curtains were kept shut most of the time, my somber friend explained. No one was to be out of doors with even a cup. There were fewer social events. Everything was tightly controlled.

When her classes ended, Sheryl came to the fraternity house. She knew I was distressed; she always knew. We sat quietly on the front steps, watching the traffic on Lake Avenue as a busy homecoming weekend unfolded. I was contemplative and downcast. My time at the Phi Kappa Tau house that first weekend in November 1988 was disappointing. I went out with Sheryl and some friends, including some fraternity brothers, but for now, at least, the spark that had burned at the corner of Lake and Terrace had dimmed, and this added to the palpable sadness that had hung about me ever since I had moved in early August.

Returning to Memphis on Sunday, I again pondered Fitzgerald and his “lost city.” He and Zelda had left New York at the height of the late 1920s economic boom—at the height of “carnival,” as Fitzgerald called it—when the Jazz Age metropolis pulsed with light and life and seemed a universe unto itself. They were in France and then “somewhere in North Africa” in the autumn and winter of 1929 – 1930, when first the stock market and then the American economy collapsed, Fitzgerald writing that they “heard a dull distant crash which echoed to the farthest wastes of the desert.” Returning home, “in the dark autumn of two years later,” they found a New York that had changed beyond description. “With bowed head and hat in hand,” Fitzgerald wrote, he had “walked reverently through the echoing tomb.”

Had I not just done the same?

“Among the ruins,” he continued, “a few childish wraiths still played to keep up the pretense that they were alive, betraying by their feverish voices and hectic cheeks the thinness of the masquerade.”

Indeed.

Scott Fitzgerald had once written that there were “no second acts in American lives,” and in the dismal winter of 1989 I was inclined to agree with him. However, there were many acts yet to come in the Tom Baer affair, and in my own life, and even in the life of Phi Kappa Tau at the University of Tennessee. As rumored, a few months after the murder, 20/20 came to Knoxville, to the fraternity house, and filmed a full segment on Tom’s death. ABC’s Lynn Sherr interviewed several of my friends, including Scott, on camera. Bob Cheek, a colorful and prominent Knoxville attorney and the father of Rob Cheek, a Delta Kappa alumnus, had conducted his own investigation, concluding that Underwood’s accomplice had indeed been a Tennessee football player, and charged that the university had engaged in a “cover-up” to protect “football interests.” Cheek reported his findings directly to the district attorney, and it was his allegations, all strenuously denied by university officials, that had attracted ABC’s attention. At the very least, 20/20 suggested, the university had behaved incompetently in allowing the U.T. Police to control the investigation (and briefly lose the murder weapon), to the exclusion of the Knoxville Police Department’s seasoned homicide team. On February 10, 1989, having abandoned the law as a career and preparing to return to U.T. for graduate school, I watched the 20/20 segment at home with my parents, introducing them to a central part of my life, a part that, excepting Sheryl and Scott, was all but unknown to them.

As the legal cases unfolded, Jeffrey Underwood’s companion maintained that he had nothing whatsoever to do with the events of August 20 – 21. Though the state charged him as an accessory after the fact, the court dismissed the case. In the years to come, this would be a source of much bitterness among the witnesses, who knew his denials to be lies. More certain was the case against the principal defendant. Many of my friends testified in Underwood’s trial. In the end, a jury convicted him of second-degree murder and two counts of aggravated assault. The court sentenced him to fifteen years in prison but lengthened the penalty by two years because he had tried to smuggle drugs into the jail. By then, though, Bob Cheek was dead of natural causes. He did not live to see the 20/20 segment that exposed his diligent investigative and legal work to a nationwide audience. In gratitude, and with the blessing of the fraternity’s national headquarters, the Delta Kappa Chapter posthumously named Mr. Cheek an honorary brother of Phi Kappa Tau. In 1997, nine years after murdering Tom Baer, Jeffrey Underwood would leave prison on parole, disappearing from the news and, mercifully, from all our lives.

As the fall 1989 semester began, some of the oppressive, unnatural tension that had hung like a shroud over the Phi Kappa Tau house began to dissipate. Still, the ghosts were not easily banished. “What-ifs” plagued Tom’s friends, and some had nightmares. The Cheek investigation scandals dragged on in various forms, and though the enhanced police scrutiny of 1988 slowly diminished, it never really ended. In some sense, the Greek social culture of the entire campus was changed, as was that of the university police.  It was over, and it wasn’t over. Late one night, years later, at a Founders Day event in the mid-1990s, Todd Blaeuer and I stood talking by the veranda door. “Sometimes I almost forget it happened,” Todd commented wistfully. “Then you can’t believe it happened. Then you stand outside here, and you know it happened.”

Remarkably, Delta Kappa experienced a renaissance of sorts in the early 1990s. As a graduate student, I was there for some of it, chairing the board of governors, liaising between the chapter and the national office, and, usually with Sheryl at my side, even attending many of the parties. To honor Tom’s memory, the chapter, in 1989, had created the Thomas H. Baer Award for Excellence in Brotherhood, to be presented each year to the new initiate who most embodied Tom’s many fine qualities. His most enduring monument, though, was the “campus safety” movement established by his distraught parents, who lobbied tirelessly and successfully for legislation requiring universities to disclose accurate campus crime statistics to the public. The Baers could have blamed the fraternity or fraternity culture; they didn’t. Throughout the tragedy and its aftermath, they remained supportive friends of Phi Kappa Tau, choosing, I suppose, to remember that Tom’s fraternity friends were suffering too, that Tom had loved Delta Kappa, and that Delta Kappa had loved him.

In the autumn of 1992, four years after the murder, I enrolled in a second graduate degree program at U.T. while working for a non-profit human services agency and searching for teaching jobs in a bad market. I continued to visit the chapter now and then, mostly on game days and special occasions when I might see other alumni. By then, most of Tom’s contemporaries had drifted away. Sheryl, too, was gone. Love can be fleeting and uncertain when you’re in your twenties and the future seems boundless. I had learned, too late I guess, that the future was not boundless, and so I grieved the departure from my life of this bright, funny, and beautiful young woman. We had shared much, most of it grand but some of it more than a couple so young should have to bear. I loved Sheryl. Her personality had so complemented my own that a mutual friend, Brent Rhymes, once playfully announced, “Here comes America’s favorite couple!” as we walked together across the fraternity house lawn, and on some days it felt like maybe we were. My companion, my friend, my confidante of three years, Sheryl was my greatest source of strength through my brother’s rapid and horrifying physical decline, and the dark, otherworldly season that followed Tom’s death. I’m sure I never adequately thanked her for any of that—or ever could. It was too late for that now. She was lost to me, and that loss marked the close of my youth and turned my life on end for years to come. Three decades on, I think of her still, wondering how she remembers me, and what, if anything, she retains of those sad, turbulent days.

A few of my other old friends remained in Knoxville. Scott, who had returned to his beloved Memphis, was not among them, though he and I were, and remain, as close as ever. Still, scar tissue has closed over the wounds of August 1988. We speak of them only rarely, and in hushed tones, and I find that our uneasy relationship with those scars is not unique among our friends from those days.

Time passes differently once you’re finally settled. After 2000 came and went, taking my suffering brother with it, the years clicked by like film frames. By 2006, I had long since returned to West Tennessee, was happily married with three children, and had been teaching history for more than a decade, when word came that U.T. had condemned the Phi Kappa Tau house and would raze it to make way for a new parking garage. Threats of this long predated my membership in the fraternity, but this time it was all too real. Other Old Row houses, including those of our neighbors, Beta Theta Pi and Chi Phi, were already gone or were slated for demolition. We had slipped the trap so many times, but our luck had at last run out.

Late in September, I drove to Knoxville for homecoming. All Friday night and into Saturday, torrential rains pounded the city, clogging and overwhelming the gutters and inundating the streets. The weather forced university officials to delay the football game, and fans of the Volunteers and the Marshall University Thundering Herd waded idly up and down the avenues. The Phi Kappa Taus had taken a short-term lease on the temporarily vacated Kappa Sigma house, at the corner of Lake Avenue and Melrose Place, and it was there I found the refugees, huddled in their orange attire, swapping stories in an unfamiliar room where a year ago not one of them would have been welcomed. “Strangers in a strange land,” I mused. Old friends from my era and from even earlier days arrived, and after the game we laughed and talked into the night. Finally, most everyone wandered off to bedrooms or hotels or home, and the Kappa Sigma house was still.

Past midnight, my friend Mike and I walked west down quiet Lake Avenue toward the deserted Phi Kappa Tau house. The streetlights cast blue halos in the fog as we picked our way past the flotsam deposited by the storm. The waters had receded, and a trio of young college girls, out late on a dreary night, giggled past, just as their mothers might have done in the ’80s. At the corner of Lake and Terrace, the site of the old Gatti’s to our backs, Mike and I stood on the soaked and overgrown lawn, moisture clinging to our faces and clothes, peering through the mist at our former home. The old house stood stark and unfamiliar. Most of the windows had been boarded over from the inside, but something else was different too: something was missing. Presently, I realized the letters were not there. The “Harvard red” letters—Φ, Κ, and Τ—each more than a foot tall, were gone, rightfully claimed as mementos by some lucky brother, leaving ghostly, gray impressions in the places where they had hung for decades.

University officials had told our members to stay out of the house. Mike ignored the warnings and went in anyway, saying he would be a few minutes.

My business was outside.

For a time I sat in the dark on the wooden deck, my elbows on my knees, gazing longingly at the concrete patio and remembering the years of laughter and fun there: the dances, the mixers, the homecoming floats, the ill-advised homemade swimming pool, the “one-man band.” Images of old friends and a lost love moved before me, and I perceived, for an instant, that I could reach out and touch them if I wished.  Finally, my reverie broken by the returning drizzle and the sounds of Mike moving through the house, I stood and rounded the rear corner of the veranda, to stare, one last time, at the remains of the walkway where, eighteen years earlier, Tom had drawn his last breath in Scott’s arms. In my mind, I had seen it all unfold a thousand times. So many times I had wished I had been there to stop it. Now, though, in my last stolen moment in this place, the pain borne by Scott, Ann, and the other witnesses crowded in on me, dissipating my conceit and revealing truths I had shunned for nearly two decades: I wasn’t special. My friends couldn’t stop it, and I couldn’t have stopped it either. There was nothing I could have done. Nothing. “I’m glad I wasn’t here,” I finally admitted to myself, choking back unaccustomed tears in the rain. “I’m thankful I was spared.”

The house would be gone within a few weeks, maybe sooner, and I knew I would never see it again. From Miami University in Ohio, Phi Kappa Tau’s national office had issued the traditional upbeat talking points it reserved for chapters losing their homes: A fraternity can recruit and survive without a house. This is a growth opportunity. This is just the beginning for Delta Kappa.

It wasn’t a beginning. It was the end. I knew, and I knew why. Much of what I retained of religion could be reduced to one simple proposition: “blood sanctifies.” This was hallowed ground now, and we were each a part of it, as it was a part of each of us. The Delta Kappa Chapter of Phi Kappa Tau had somehow become one with this old red and white house, perched for some eighty years on its emerald lawn at the corner of Lake and Terrace Avenues. Were it not true before, it had become so on a warm summer night long ago, when innocent blood ran across these same gray stones and Ann Langdon placed her rosary beads in Tom Baer’s hands.

Mike came out of the house with tears in his eyes. Clearly, we had been on different but not dissimilar journeys. We looked one another in the face with that silent understanding that passes between old friends in times of sadness. Then we turned, crossed Terrace Avenue, and walked east into the shrouded night.

A couple of years after the University demolished 1800 Lake, the discouraged undergraduate officers notified the graduate council and the board of governors that they wished to suspend operations, and Phi Kappa Tau ceased to exist as an undergraduate organization at the University of Tennessee. All our hearts were broken, though inwardly I thought it remarkable that Delta Kappa had survived Thomas Baer by two decades. “It had to end this way,” I thought to myself, looking back on all that had happened. “It was foreordained.” And though I mourned the institution that had given form and purpose to my young adult life, it seemed right and fitting, somehow, that the senseless, empty death, a generation earlier, of a single first-year member would now be fixed like a constellation in its place and would forever stand, unchallenged, as the central event in its history.

KTB: August 2018

  1. For personal or professional reasons, a few of those involved requested I withhold their surnames, and I complied. Names of persons with whom I have no contact are given in full, as are those of the deceased. ↩︎
  2. For readers unfamiliar with the term, rush is a series of parties and other special events at the beginning of each semester, in which fraternities and sororities recruit new members. ↩︎
  3. It was neither merciful nor quick. Tim would live on in utter paralysis for another dozen years, dying on August 11, 2000, at the age of 37. ↩︎

Understanding the New Amelia Earhart “Evidence”

History, Miscellany
By now, you have probably seen the headlines (there was one in the L.A. Times this morning, for instance) about the “discovery” of Amelia Earhart.
 
The story is complicated and misleading, so for those who do not obsess over historic mysteries as I do, I thought I would relate the short version (yes, I know it’s long, but trust me. It’s short).
 
There are several “schools” of Earhart mystery thought. Some are on the kook fringe: Earhart returned to the United States and lived under the name Irene Bolam. Some are close to that fringe: the oft-discredited Japanese capture theory. The mainstream theory is known as the “Crashed and Sank School,” which needs no explanation.
 
Then there is TIGHAR.

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Big Sandy Confronts the Devil: Remembering the Mount Zion Cemetery Craze of 1980

Folklore

When I was a kid, growing up in rural west Tennessee in the ’60s and ’70s, the Devil was everywhere. I first met him as a toddler, when I ran across him in my mother’s pantry. There he was, not one image of him, but several: a tiny, red, horned stick-figure of a devil. He had a sinister, pointy tail and held an even more sinister-looking pitchfork, as he danced on a snow-white piece of paper wrapped around a can of Underwood Deviled Ham.

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Marion Eugene “Skeeter” Mallette: In Memoriam

Miscellany

My parents were strict.

During my early teen years, I went places with my older brother, who could drive, or—rarely—with a cousin or family friend. If I wanted to do anything with my peers, though, it had to be school-related, which explains why I spent so much time at basketball games and other school events. They were my social outlet.

The first instance I can recall of getting into a car driven by one my own friends and going anywhere without adults was when I was 15, in the hot, drought-scorched summer of 1980, when Marion Eugene “Skeeter” Mallette pulled his pampered and souped-up Chevy Chevelle into my drive, to take me not to some happy, parent-free event, but to the funeral of our classmate, Chris Bollen. On July 4, Chris had fallen out of a boat on Kentucky Lake (boating with friends was exactly the kind of thing you would never have found me doing at 15) and was struck by the propeller. It was days before searchers found her. Neither Skeeter nor I was particularly close to Chris. She was lovely, and had blue eyes of the sort that are now Photo Shopped onto makeup ads, so, even though we shared a table in one class, I doubt she could have called me by name (Skeeter she would know). Still, her death traumatized my friends and me, the first loss of its kind we experienced. Only with reluctance did my dad consent to let me attend the funeral with my good friend, whom he viewed with some suspicion.

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A Tribute to Uncle Fred Hudson, 1927 -2017

Miscellany

Yesterday, along with cousins and friends, I struggled through rain and mud to serve as a pall bearer for my uncle, Fred Hudson. The husband for 64 years of my Aunt Inez, my father’s oldest sibling, he was actually my uncle by marriage, of course, but you would never have known that; he treated all of us—my brothers, my cousins, and me— like his children. I grew up in Uncle Fred’s shadow. For the first twenty years or so of my life, I could see his house from my own, and he was as much a part of my life as breathing. When my brothers and I were old enough to occasionally stay at home alone, one of our parents’ backup emergency instructions was always, “Call Uncle Fred.” I don’t think we ever did, but we knew from a lifetime of experience that he was the kind of man who could fix problems and make things happen.

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