W. C. Heinz

The man who died today at the age of 93 wrote about courage and grace under pressure better than anyone of his time.

Bill Heinz was idealized by generations of writers who in the new millennium were still reading his books, articles and collected columns.

We met when I edited a piece of his about Lew Jenkins, a Depression kid from Texas who fought his way up to lightweight champion and then lost everything, breaking his body in motorcycle and car crashes and coming into the ring hurt and drunk.

Bill ran into him during World War II when the former champion was in the Coast Guard landing invasion troops and later after he won a Silver Star as a foot soldier in Korea at the age of 36. The article was the best I worked on during my time at Argosy, a picture of a man who knew how to fight but not how to live with what is called success.

In 1958, Bill wrote a piece for me at Redbook about a young boxer who killed his first opponent in the ring. His novel, "The Professional," had just been published to good reviews, but some critics and readers were put off by the ending. The hero does everything right but loses the big fight in a quirk of fate and then learns to live with it. Fight stories are not supposed to reflect a tragic sense of life.

Ernest Hemingway called it the only good novel about a boxer he had ever read. But what mattered to Bill most did not get into the blurbs. It was the only time I saw him allow himself a moment of pride as he told me:

"Hemingway said he knew it had to end the way it did, but when he got to the last chapter, he threw the book across the room."

Bill Heinz's subject was grace under pressure. He wrote about football coach Vince Lombardi, surgeons in the operating room and Martin Luther King's march on Selma. Along the way, he did a little book about a trauma unit in Korea called "MASH."

Out-of-Iraq Shell Games

After years of blundering, the proprietors and enablers of this misbegotten war seem determined to end it the way they began it and waged it--with lies, evasions and cowardice.

The opinion polls show growing public impatience, but the politicians keep playing the same old games.

President Bush is being bubbled around the country to puff out his chest for groups of businessmen and proclaim, "Troop levels will be decided by our commanders on the ground, not by political figures in Washington, D.C."

Faithful Sen. Chuck Grassley, who does not have to face voters next year, tells wavering Republican colleagues who do that they should wait to hear from Gen, Petraeus since they confirmed him by such an overwhelming margin.

But in Baghdad, Petraeus is telling reporters, "We're still at the harder-before-it-gets-easier point” and reiterating, as he has be doing from the start of the Surge, that any solution in Iraq has to be political, not military.

So, as we watch their hands carefully, we have no idea of what, if anything, is under which shell. Does the political have to get better before the military can? Or is it the other way around? Or do both have to improve at the same time? Or are they making it up as they go?

In the Senate, multiple shell games are being played, with Democrats devising different formulas to cut funding or withdraw troops or rescind the 2002 war resolution, while Republicans look for ways to be in favor of ending the war but not just yet or not in any way that might come back to haunt them.

Before the month is out, dozens more of our young people will have died in Iraq and billions of dollars more gone down the drain while, in Washington, they will still be playing these games.

How long do they think they can keep snookering us? Even at carnivals, they sometimes give the suckers an even break.

Political Punks

A useful word that has fallen into disfavor, “punk” should be revived for the current political discourse over Iran.

The loose-lipped Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad certainly fits the primary definition of an inexperienced, combative young thug.

Over here, we have his aging American counterpart Sen. Joe Lieberman, who has never seen a Middle East confrontation he didn’t like, today spouting off on CBS’ Face the Nation that “we've got to be prepared to take aggressive military action against the Iranians to stop them from killing Americans in Iraq."

Although prudently ruling out a “massive ground invasion” now, Jolting Joe insists, "We cannot let them get away with it. If we do, they'll take that as a sign of weakness on our part and we will pay for it in Iraq and throughout the region and ultimately right here at home."

Secondary definitions of punk include “dry, decayed wood” and “poor, of worthless quality.” It’s a very useful word.