Review: The Carnival Campaign: How the Rollicking 1840 Campaign of "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too" Changed Presidential Elections Forever by Ronald Shafer

 This is an intriguing book.  I listened to it while driving which meant about every 5 miles, I had to pull over and take notes. (I really need a better system.) 1840 was the election that propelled William Henry Harrison to the presidency.  He is best known for having the shortest term of office, dying a month after taking office. I was intrigued and dug up some academic articles on Harrison’s relationship to the Indians, one that was fraught with dishonor, but was handy in developing an image for Harrison’s campaign and also provided background for one of the best political slogans, ever: “Tippecanoe and Tyler, too.”

The 1840 Whig presidential campaign permanently altered American politics by transforming the brutal reality of the 1811 Battle of Tippecanoe into a sanitized, highly commercialized founding myth. In reality, the battle was a chaotic, high-casualty frontier skirmish where William Henry Harrison’s forces were caught off guard by a pre-dawn surprise attack, resulting in a Pyrrhic victory that ultimately drove Tecumseh’s confederacy into an alliance with the British. Three decades later, mired in an economic depression, the Whigs completely buried Harrison's aristocratic Virginia upbringing and tactical missteps, successfully rebranding him as a humble, log-cabin-dwelling savior of the West. By ditching a formal policy platform in favor of catchy slogans ("Tippecanoe and Tyler Too"), free hard cider, and mass-marketed merchandise, the campaign pioneered modern political showmanship, proving that a carefully manufactured legend could comfortably eclipse historical truth at the ballot box.

In 1800, the American "experiment" in republicanism was seen as the pinnacle of political progress. It was also seen as a moral high point that, ironically, needed a steady diet of cheap ancestral soil to stay upright. Thomas Jefferson, who planned this enlightened growth, thought that Republican virtue—which means being thrifty and moral—could only be maintained through individual Independence, which could only be reached by having a lot of people own land. A simple desire for land was turned into a high moral necessity by this intellectual juggling.  Jefferson spoke to native delegations about "justice and humanity" and the "blessings of civilization" through a "roseate mist" of rhetoric. In secret, these layers were taken off of his orders to William Henry Harrison, who was governor of the Indiana Territory. In letters written in 1803 that he specifically asked to be "kept a secret from the Indians," Jefferson laid out a plan for cold, economic foreclosure. He thought that Trading Houses could be used to create a state-backed monopoly that would undercut private competition and force "important Indians" to leave because they owed so much money that they could only "lop off" by giving up land. This wasn't a mission of society; it was a machine for taking away people's rights, meant to turn the "American dream" of freedom into a nightmare of native dependence. Harrison used treaties to acquire some 60,000,000 acres from natives, infuriating Tecumseh.

The American treaty system was the "cheapest and least upsetting way" to get rid of native people, whom George Washington had compared to wolves because they were both "beasts of prey, though they differ in shape." In the 1780s, the United States claimed land by right of conquest through "dictated treaties" like Fort Stanwix, Fort McIntosh, and Fort Finney. This legalistic theater then moved on to a more complex "bribery and purchase" model. In 1795, the Treaty of Greenville set up a "meaningless formula" of permanent borders that only served as a short-term problem for the next group of settlers. The Annuities system, which William Henry Harrison saw as a must-have for peace, was a key part of this process. The "salt annuity" from the 1803 Treaty of Fort Wayne was one of these yearly payments. It turned native leaders into government pensioners who could no longer fight the American state without starving their people. The "roughshod" diplomacy reached its peak with the Treaty of Fort Wayne in 1809. This is when William Henry Harrison bought 2.5 million acres for less than two cents each. He did this by taking advantage of the Potawatomi's "poverty and wretchedness" and telling the Miami they would lose their existing annuities if they didn't sign. This was economic castration that looked like diplomacy. It made sure that the fighting on the frontier stayed a calculated side effect of the Governor's ledger.
  
  For a governor like William Henry Harrison, whose support in the area was falling, making a "demonic" villain was a brilliant political move that helped him stay in power.  Harrisonians used the threat of a radical Prophetstown to call people who were against slavery traitors.  Harrison said the settlement was full of "militant banditti," but John Badollet and Nathaniel Ewing, who were not involved in the settlement, said it was full of "peaceful farmers" who didn't drink and grew corn on hundreds of acres. This fact about peace was unpleasant, and Harrison tried to hide it. To clear up the Governor's legal lies, Tecumseh, the leader of the Shawnee people, came to Vincennes in 1810 and correctly said, "those that did sell, did not own it." You can see that Tecumseh forced people to sign the treaties and warned Harrison about the "cynical brilliance" of the faraway federal architect. He said that while the President "sits still in his town and drinks his wine," Harrison and the Indians would have to "fight it out." For fear of being watched by the government and losing his job, Harrison started an "ill-conceived" march to Tippecanoe in 1811. He did this in a last-ditch effort to protect his job and prove the "terror and corruption" of his government by starting a military conflict.

Harrison's years of frontier diplomacy were a huge win for "sordid land-grabbing" and a huge loss for "national honor." The most important thing that comes from this time is that "wholesale land acquisition" and "friendship" are fundamentally incompatible. It was possible for Jefferson and Harrison to fool themselves into thinking they were "acting for the greatest good" while planning the destruction of a people. They believed in the "invariable operation" of causes, which was a theory put forward by Philip Schuyler and Henry Knox. It said that as white settlements got closer, the game would end, the "savages" would "dwindle to nothing," and the land would be given to the US for free. The "success" of buying the land was the very thing that made sure the "failure" of the national honor. The two were morally and mathematically incompatible. In the end, this time period's history is written in what Henry Knox evocatively termed "sable colors"—the dark record of a people group being slowly erased by colonizers who were able to keep their consciences open enough to help the raw machinery of dispossession.

Women may not have been able to cast ballots in 1840, but they increasingly refused to sit quietly on the political sidelines. The Harrison campaign marked a turning point, drawing women into public politics in ways that startled supporters and horrified critics.

The most striking example was Lucy Kenney, the first woman to write campaign pamphlets for a presidential candidate. After Martin Van Buren insulted her with a token payment for her political writing, she switched sides and became a prolific advocate for William Henry Harrison, boldly distributing her own signed pamphlets in public—behavior so unusual that one astonished British traveler initially assumed she must be insane.

Kenney was hardly alone. Across the country, women organized political meetings, delivered speeches, wrote campaign songs, marched in parades, attended rallies by the thousands, and even traveled long distances to campaign events. Indiana's Elizabeth Clarkson led hundreds of women on horseback to Whig gatherings and addressed enormous crowds while holding her infant son. In Illinois, Jane Field gave fiery speeches celebrating Harrison's military reputation. Women in Ohio raised Harrison poles and publicly toasted the candidate, while groups in Michigan, Massachusetts, and New York turned out in unprecedented numbers to rallies and demonstrations.

Their growing visibility was impossible to ignore—and impossible to avoid criticizing. Democratic newspapers insisted that respectable women belonged at home, not at political meetings. Women marching in parades were pelted with eggs, heckled, and accused of abandoning their proper role. Yet the criticism only underscored how much had changed. Instead of retreating, women embraced increasingly public roles in campaigning, making themselves indispensable to the Whigs' energetic grassroots operation.

For many participants, the 1840 campaign became a political awakening. Young activists like Amelia Bloomer found their first taste of public life through Harrison's campaign before going on to champion women's rights. Elizabeth Cady Stanton would later identify the election as the moment when women first began participating in politics in a meaningful way. Although women would wait another eighty years before winning the vote, the campaign of 1840 demonstrated that they could shape elections long before they could cast ballots, transforming presidential politics from an exclusively male affair into one in which women's voices, organizing, and enthusiasm became an increasingly powerful force.

The 1840 Whig presidential campaign revolutionized American politics by successfully replacing William Henry Harrison's true identity as a highly educated, wine-drinking Virginia aristocrat with the manufactured image of a humble, log-cabin-dwelling common man. To distract from the high casualties and aggressive land-grab strategies of his frontier military record, strategists used heavily romanticized nostalgia surrounding the 1811 Battle of Tippecanoe, burying policy substance beneath catchy slogans, songs, and mass entertainment. This pioneering effort introduced a series of political "firsts"—including massive multi-day rallies, the active integration of women into campaigning, and extensive mass merchandising—proving for the first time that a carefully engineered spectacle could triumph over reality at the ballot box.

 Fun Fact: All of the presidents who had run as Whigs died shortly after taking office. Lincoln, nominally a Republican which was comprised of anti-slavery Whigs, also died in office.  William Henry Harrison, the 9th president , lasted barely a month;  Zachary Taylor, the 12th president last 16 months; and Lincoln was president the longest of the three. Remind me never to run as a Whig.

Additional Resources:

American Indian Policy in the Old Northwest, 1783-1812 Author(s): Reginald Horsman Source: The William and Mary Quarterly , Jan., 1961, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Jan., 1961), pp. 35- 53 Published by: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1922806

Creating a Frontier War: Harrison, Prophetstown, and the War of 1812. Patrick Bottiger, Ph.D. https://www.usi.edu/media/zjxk1m2m/bottiger-creating-a-frontier-war.pdf

Kentucky at the Thames, 1813: A Rediscovered Narrative by William Greathouse. Edited by John C. Fredriksen The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society (Vol. 83, No. 2)https://static1.squarespace.com/static/590be125ff7c502a07752a5b/t/63b18901e88c8c550defa954/1672579341609/Young%2C+Bennett+Henderson%2C+The+Battle+of+the+Thames.pdf

 

How punctuation changed the world.

I have always been fascinated by the evolution of heresy and the development of dogma in the Christian Church.  We have Theodosius and Constantine to thank for defining and then codifying the current view of the Trinity. I’ve been reading Paula Fredricksen’s Ancient Christianities: the First Five Hundred Years and ran across this explanation of a passage from John showing just how difficult translating and defining can be.

One place where Paul might seem to tip over from being a late Second Temple Jew to being a fourth-century Christian comes in his letter to the Romans 9.5. In English, this passage could read: “of their people [meaning Paul’s fellow Jews] according to the flesh is the Christ God, who is over all, be blessed forever!” Or it could read: “of their people according to the flesh is the Christ, who is God over all, blessed forever!” The English translation depends on how the sentence is punctuated, with or without a full stop after “Christ.”

On this issue, there are several things to bear in mind. The first is that Paul’s original letter had neither punctuation nor even space between the letters. Modern readers are the ones whose punctuation shapes Paul’s sentences. Second, given that Christ has a plenipotentiary role in Paul’s story of redemption, he could be the “god over all who is blessed forever,” without confusing him or identifying him with God the Father. “God” in antiquity was a very elastic term. Third, the identification of Christ with God the Father, the claim that he was equally as divine as the Father, took until the imperially sponsored councils of the fourth and fifth centuries to formulate. Were Paul identifying Christ with God in the mid-first century, it was a point that eluded theologians for the next three hundred years.

And, I might add, caused numerous wars. Thank goodness when I had Greek and Latin in high school, editors had kindly added punctuation where they thought it was appropriate. One can only hope they were right with Veni, vidi, vici and not Veni, vidi; vici. Or, Veni: vidi, vici.

It reminds me of my 8th grade English class where Mrs. Kenworthy (a teacher with whom most of the 8th grade males were madly in love — notice how I avoided ending the sentence with a preposition — another hideous error; and I won’t even describe the horror of “very unique.”) showed us how changing the placement of a comma in a sentence can radically change the meaning, which is why I have become paranoid about the use of commas and semi-colons.

This is obviously a problem for translators who often were forced to make their own interpretations of the meaning. Bart Ehrman, in Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, frequently explains that the original manuscripts of the New Testament were written in scriptio continua—a style where letters are run together without spaces, paragraphs, or punctuation. Because these ancient Greek texts lack these features, the responsibility of adding them falls to modern translators and editors, who must use their own understanding of grammar, context, and theological interpretation to decide where sentences begin and end.

Ehrman argues that punctuation is an interpretive act rather than an original feature of the text. When translators insert punctuation, they are effectively making theological decisions that can significantly alter the meaning of a passage.

He often points to Romans 9:5 as a primary example of how a single comma (or lack thereof) can change a fundamental theological claim:

• Reading A: "...the Messiah, who is over all, God be blessed forever. Amen." (This treats the final phrase as a doxology/blessing to God, rather than a description of Christ.)

• Reading B: "...the Messiah, who is God over all, blessed forever. Amen." (This identifies Jesus explicitly as "God over all.")

Ehrman notes that since the original Greek lacked diacritics and punctuation, it is impossible to know for certain which reading the original author intended based on the manuscripts alone. Consequently, what a reader sees in their modern Bible is often a reflection of the translator's editorial judgment.

You’d think God would be more careful.

 

The Colonel’s Dilemma: Richard Mentor Johnson, Julia Chinn, and the Political Price of the Color Line

The year 1836 was a season of calculated contrasts for the Democratic Party, an era when the "Log Cabin" aesthetic was beginning to reshape the American political imagination. At the center of this strategic theater stood Richard Mentor Johnson, a man whose political utility was inextricably linked to the blood-soaked soil of the Canadian frontier. To the Democratic establishment, Johnson was the essential ballast for Martin Van Buren’s candidacy. While Van Buren was frequently lampooned as a "New York dandy" of refined tastes and impeccable tailoring, Johnson was the "Hero of the Thames," the rough-hewn Kentuckian credited with the killing of the great Shawnee leader Tecumseh during the War of 1812. This military pedigree was not merely a footnote; it was a potent brand. Supporters leaned heavily into the "Rumpsey Dumpsey" rhetoric, a playful yet pointed campaign slogan that reduced a complex military engagement into a populist jingle: Rumpsey, Dumpsey, Colonel Johnson killed Tecumseh. His appeal lay in his "plain manners" and frontier authenticity, traits that resonated deeply with the burgeoning labor movements of the East and the agrarian voters of the West. He was the man "born in a cane-brake," a figure whose image was forged in the visceral, sensory chaos of 1813, where he reportedly emerged from the swamp on a staggering mare, once white but now mottled with a ghastly pink and red from his numerous wounds. This image of the martyred frontier hero was precisely what Van Buren needed to mitigate his own reputation for artifice and elegance. Yet, even as he was marketed as a national icon of white masculine valor, a shadow loomed over his candidacy—the domestic reality of Blue Spring Farm.

The private world of Blue Spring Farm, located near Great Crossings, Kentucky, was presided over by Julia Chinn, a mixed-race enslaved woman who was, for nearly a quarter of a century, Johnson’s common-law wife. Chinn was no mere "mistress" in the reductive sense of the antebellum lexicon; she was the indispensable manager of an estate that was often on the brink of financial collapse. By 1821, Johnson and his business partners were drowning in debt, owing the Bank of the United States over half a million dollars—a staggering $12 million in modern currency. In a twist of political irony, it was Johnson’s fellow Kentuckian and rival, Henry Clay, who served as the bank’s counsel in the suits against him. To navigate these pressures, Johnson leaned on Chinn to oversee the plantation’s labor force and the complex operations of the Choctaw Academy, a federally funded residential school for Native American youth established on his property. While the public sang of Johnson killing Tecumseh, the sons of other tribal leaders were being educated in his own backyard under Chinn’s watchful eye. To save money, Johnson introduced the Lancasterian plan at the school—a strictly regulated model of instruction where advanced students monitored elementary grades—and urged his superintendent to keep everything on a "frugal scale," a directive that allowed Johnson to pocket federal funds to service his massive debts. Chinn’s role in this enterprise was central; she managed the accounts, signed contracts, and even doled out cash to white employees, exercising a level of authority that was fundamentally at odds with the racial caste system of the South.

The true "So What?" of the Chinn-Johnson relationship lay in its stubborn, defiant visibility. Unlike other Southern luminaries like Henry Clay, who relegated their interracial dalliances to the darkness of the slave quarters, Johnson treated Chinn as his social peer and his daughters, Imogene and Adaline, as his legitimate heirs. He provided the girls with expensive educations, fine clothing, and substantial dowries, insisting they be accorded the respect of the planter class. This refusal to hide his family inevitably led to "racial collisions" that tested the limits of Kentucky’s social order. While local whites were often content to attend the Johnsons' lavish galas and listen to the daughters play the piano for guests like the Marquis de Lafayette, they fiercely resisted any formal integration. Social friction became acute when Chinn rode through town in a carriage—a privilege strictly coded as white—or when the daughters attempted to enter local social circles. In one stinging instance of white supremacy reasserting itself, Adaline was ejected from a Fourth of July celebration, a stark reminder that Johnson’s political influence could not buy immunity for a family that "claimed equality." These local flashpoints soon provided national ammunition; the problem for his peers was not that Johnson had a Black family, but that he "endeavored often to force his daughters into society."

The political consequences of this domestic defiance culminated in the election of 1836. While Van Buren secured the presidency, the backlash against Johnson’s lifestyle was so severe that he became the first and only candidate in American history to fail to achieve an electoral majority, forcing a runoff in the Senate under the Twelfth Amendment. Southern Democrats and Whigs alike launched a coordinated assault, labeling him a "great amalgamator" whose private life was an "odious" blueprint for the breakdown of racial boundaries. The venom was perhaps most succinctly distilled by Tennessee Supreme Court Chief Justice John Catron, who warned Andrew Jackson that a "lucky random shot" on the battlefield did not qualify a man for high office if his domestic relations were fundamentally offensive. Catron noted that the moment Johnson’s candidacy was announced, the press would feast on the facts of his Black family’s social pretensions. Though the Senate ultimately confirmed him, Johnson entered the vice presidency as a hobbled and ostracized figure, his standing further damaged by a lackluster performance in the presiding officer’s chair and the gathering clouds of economic panic.

By the campaign of 1840, the "Hero of the Thames" had transformed into a political liability. His appearance, once praised for its republican plainness, was now described by observers as shabbily disheveled. He was known for a striking but unkempt scarlet vest and an eccentric refusal to wear a cravat, looking, in the words of one traveler, like a "strange-looking potentate" whose hair wandered "all abroad." As the Whigs successfully appropriated the "log cabin" and "hard cider" imagery for William Henry Harrison, Johnson resorted to increasingly desperate tactics, opening his shirt to display his battle scars to audiences in Ohio. However, new reports from Amos Kendall in 1839 cemented his status as a "dead weight." Following Julia Chinn’s death from cholera in 1833, Johnson had not retreated into respectability; instead, he had entered into a second interracial relationship with an enslaved woman whom he eventually sold for infidelity. He then took a third companion, a "young Delilah" who was the sister of the woman he had sold. Kendall found the Vice President of the United States occupied with the "inglorious pursuit of tavern-keeping," personally supervising the sale of watermelons and the purchase of chickens at a Kentucky resort. This pattern of behavior scandalized even his allies, leading the 1840 Democratic National Convention to the unprecedented decision of not formally nominating a vice-presidential candidate at all, leaving the choice to the individual states.  John Tyler was the result, becoming president just 31 days after the election with Harrison's untimely death, the first president to die in office.

The legacy of Richard Mentor Johnson and Julia Chinn is a narrative defined by deliberate erasure and the crushing weight of white supremacy. Following Johnson’s death in 1850, the Fayette County Court refused to allow his daughters to inherit his estate, declaring them illegitimate and stripping them of the wealth their father had spent decades trying to secure. In a final act of archival violence, it is suspected that Johnson’s brothers—James, John Telemachus, and others—destroyed his personal papers, a calculated move to "protect the brand" and scrub the reality of Julia Chinn from the family’s public history. For over a century, this alliance was effectively silenced, leaving only the myth of the "Hero" in the history books. It is only through the recovery of oral histories from Chinn-Johnson descendants and modern scholarship that this twenty-five-year alliance has been returned to the national record. The story remains a powerful testament to the "wounded and warped" nature of American history, illustrating the tragedy of an American family caught between the intimate bonds of personal affection and the rigid, unforgiving structures of institutionalized racism.

Resources:

Meyer, Leland W. The Life and Times of Colonel Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky. 1967.

Myers, Amrita C. "Disorderly Communion: Julia Chinn, Richard Mentor Johnson, and Life in an Interracial, Antebellum, Southern Church." The Journal of African American History 105, no. 2 (2020), 213-241. doi:10.1086/707944.

Shafer, Ronald G. The Carnival Campaign: How the Rollicking 1840 Campaign of "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too" Changed Presidential Elections Forever. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2016.

Review: The Gulf Tanker War: Iran and Iraq's Maritime Swordplay by Nadia El-Sayed El-Shazly

Trump’s Iran war convinced me to go back and read multiple articles and books about the disastrous history of the Persian Gulf following the events in 1953 and then the revolution in 1979. In August 1953, the CIA alongside Britain’s MI6, orchestrated a covert coup d'état code-named Operation Ajax to overthrow Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh. The U.S. and Britain were angry after Mossadegh nationalized the country’s oil industry, stripping control away from the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later BP). Fearing a total British oil embargo would collapse Iran's economy and push Mossadegh into a communist alliance with the neighboring Soviet Union, the U.S. stepped in. The CIA bribed military officers, paid mobs to stage violent anti-government riots, and weaponized the press to create artificial chaos in Tehran. Ultimately, Mossadegh was arrested, and the monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was restored to absolute power as a loyal, autocratic ally of the West—an intervention that successfully secured Western oil interests for the next quarter-century but sowed deep anti-American resentment that would explode during the 1979 revolution leading to Carter’s downfall during the hostage crisis and Reagan’s ascendancy. But that’s another story. The current mess in the Strait of Hormuz and the ascendency of Iran as the real power in the Persian Gulf has its origins many decades ago and one of those events was the infamous Tanker War which, I, to my shame, had either ignored at the time or totally forgotten.

The Gulf Tanker War: Iran and Iraq's Maritime Swordplay by Nadia El-Sayed El-Shazly pretty much is the definitive user manual if you want to know how a localized ground brawl escalates into an international naval free-for-all. First published in 1998, the book provides a microscopic view of the 1984-1988 phase of the Iran-Iraq war, when the conflict spilled over into the vital shipping lanes of the Persian Gulf. El-Shazly does not see the whole mess as a random series of maritime skirmishes, but as a deliberate strategic calculation by a desperate Iraqi regime trying to break a bloody stalemate.

What makes her story so compelling is the combination of high-stakes strategic theory and raw data. She employs the classic military heavyweights, such as Clausewitz and Sun Tzu, to explain why Saddam Hussein chose to weaponize the sky above the Gulf. Iraq couldn't match Iran's massive manpower pool or its geographical depth on land, but they had a serious edge in airpower. Baghdad hoped to choke Iran's oil economy with a campaign against commercial shipping, engineer international intervention and force a reluctant Ayatollah Khomeini to the negotiating table. It was pretty much a textbook case of attempting to use military leverage to force a diplomatic solution when the ground war went sideways. Sound familiar? This book is a stark reminder that the ocean is never insulated from the politics of the land, and commerce often follows its own rules even when missiles fly.

The entire study rests on the incredible data that El-Shazly was able to pull together. She secured specialist access to Lloyd’s Register of Shipping records, the equivalent of the Holy Grail for tracking merchant ship casualties. In these records she compiles a painstaking, month-by-month ledger of the conflict that shows up some hilarious, if tragic, ironies of wartime commerce.

Her data, for example, shows how economic self-interest regularly overrode political loyalties. You had tankers owned by Iraq’s supposedly staunch Arab allies casually cruising into Iranian ports to lift crude oil because the profit margins were just too good to pass up. Her work reveals the exact anatomy of the attacks, showing that Iraq actually fired most of the anti-shipping strikes using French-supplied Exocet missiles, while Iran used asymmetrical tactics such as speedboats, mines, and shore-based Silkworm missiles after they began to retaliate. Deja Vu all over again.

El-Shazly comes up with an overall total that shows Iraqi forces fired more individual strikes against commercial vessels than the Iranians, thus blowing the current Western media spin that Iran was the only aggressor on the water.

The data tracks the weird mayhem of identification errors – Iraqi pilots bombed friendly vessels or vessels carrying oil belonging to their own backers because it’s easier said than done to fly through a chaotic combat zone in the dark.
It tells of the exact moment Kuwait got worried enough to ask the great superpowers to step in, leading to the iconic re-flagging operation where the US Navy started escorting merchant ships flying the American flag.

The figures given by El-Shazly perfectly illustrate the slow-motion panic of the Iraqi command. The strategy was an escalatory gamble born of pure anxiety. They had to make the war somebody else's problem, so the international community would intervene and stop it, and that was exactly what happened when the US military footprint in the Gulf reached a point of no return.

Cut to today in 2026 and the reverberations of this maritime swordplay are louder than ever in international diplomacy. If you look at current flashpoints, from the regular disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz to the broader maritime chokepoints in the Middle East, the playbook being used today was written during the Tanker War.

The most obvious legacy is the template for asymmetric naval warfare. In the 1980s, Iran recognized that it did not require a large conventional blue-water navy to confront Western superpowers. They discovered that a combination of cheap sea mines, fast attack craft and shore-to-ship missiles could do as good a job as well. This creates a constant nervous deterrent in diplomatic venues today. Western diplomats cannot simply threaten naval blockades or freedom of navigation operations without reckoning with the massive insurance hikes and economic fallout that El-Shazly meticulously detailed decades ago.

Moreover, the Tanker War changed the perception of outside protection of the regional states for ever. The re-flagging of Kuwaiti ships established a precedent that the flow of oil was ultimately guaranteed by global powers, a fact that still underlies the security architectures of the Gulf states today. This created a dynamic where maritime security is never simply a local issue but a global economic trigger. Reading El-Shazly’s book today is more than a nostalgic walk down memory lane. It’s a stark reminder that the rules of engagement, the vulnerabilities of merchant shipping, and the diplomatic brinkmanship playing out on modern waters are the same games these nations have been playing for forty years.

She touches briefly in the final chapter on the USS Stark incident as well the tragedy of the Iranian passenger plane. On July 3, 1988, the high-tech Aegis air defense cruiser USS Vincennes—affectionately dubbed "Robocruiser" by its own crew for its captain’s aggressive swagger—managed to mistake a massive, slow-climbing civilian Airbus A300 for a rapidly descending supersonic F-14 Tomcat. Despite the Iranian passenger jet squawking a perfectly civilian transponder code and flying precisely within its designated commercial corridor, the American warship fired two surface-to-air missiles, instantly vaporizing 290 innocent people. In a masterclass of geopolitical gaslighting, the U.S. Navy initially blamed the civilian pilots for not radioing back on military frequencies they couldn't hear, while President George H.W. Bush later famously declared he would "never apologize for the United States of America, ever, I don't care what the facts are." Naturally, the ship's crew returned home to a hero's welcome, complete with combat ribbons, and the captain was awarded the Legion of Merit for his "exceptionally meritorious conduct"—proving that in the theater of modern warfare, blowing up an airliner full of families is just another day of stellar resume-building.  

Review: Mayday: The U-2 Affair by Michael R. Beschloss

 Mayday is a gripping, thoroughly researched account of one of the most perilous moments of the Cold War. Here is a political history written like a thriller, reconstructing the events surrounding the 1960 downing of an American U-2 spy plane and the international crisis that ensued. What makes Beschloss’s work so powerful is the way he shows how one covert operation, meant to protect national security, ultimately undermined diplomacy at a crucial moment.

In the last year of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidency, there were real signs that tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union might start to thaw. Both Eisenhower and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had reasons for wanting detente. Eisenhower wanted to diminish the threat of nuclear war and Khrushchev wanted to reallocate Soviet resources from heavy military spending to improving life in the Soviet Union. Ironically, the U-2 program had already demonstrated that fears of a “missile gap” were misplaced, and that the Soviet Union was falling behind the United States in military capability. However, just before a scheduled summit with Khrushchev, Eisenhower reluctantly consented to one final reconnaissance flight, taking the CIA's assurances that the aircraft could not be shot down at face value.

 That assumption turned out to be a disaster. Not only did the Soviets shoot the plane down, they captured pilot Francis Gary Powers alive, along with plenty of physical evidence of American espionage. Eisenhower first went along with a cover story that the plane was a weather aircraft because of bad intelligence. When the truth was revealed by the Soviets the United States was the victim of a public lie which seriously damaged the credibility of the United States. The incident effectively killed the Paris Summit, hopes for improved relations, and is an example of how intelligence operations could directly sabotage diplomatic efforts.

Beschloss does an excellent job of communicating the big picture political implications and human side of the crisis. The detailed description of Powers and the other U-2 pilots adds another dimension to the story. The pilots were flying delicate aircraft not meant for combat at altitudes of more than 70,000 feet and in extreme conditions. The book explains that one of the planes had previously fallen apart after being buffeted by the shock waves of nearby fighter jets , because they were so delicate . This fragility highlights the enormous risk each mission entailed.

The psychological pressure on the pilots was exemplified by chilling details such as the notorious "silver dollar". This hollowed out coin held a pin tipped with toxin for suicide in case of capture, a device reputed to cost a fortune to create. Pilots were not specifically told to use it, but were strongly encouraged to do so to avoid capture.  Also, each aircraft had a self-destruct mechanism designed to destroy sensitive equipment. But many pilots suspected the timing of the explosion would not allow them to escape, raising the possibility that activating the device could kill them, too. These points highlight the moral and personal dilemmas that those in the covert world have to face.

Beschloss also looks at the wider international implications of the U-2 program, beyond the pilots themselves. Allies of the U.S., like Norway, Pakistan and Iran, permitted their territory to be used as bases for these missions, thus exposing themselves to considerable political risk. They were told that if their part was discovered it would be denied, but the possibility of being found out left them uneasy. Cold War espionage was not just a game of the two superpowers, but also trapped smaller countries in dangerous geopolitical gamesmanship.

The fallout from the U-2 incident was extensive. The humiliation of the espionage disclosure meant that Khrushchev, who had been leaning toward lowering military tensions, was under more pressure to adopt a more confrontational stance. The failure of the summit led to increased mistrust between the two sides and helped usher in a more belligerent period of the Cold War. Beschloss suggests that the impact of this breakdown was felt long after 1960. Tensions increased, with consequences for later events such as the construction of the Berlin Wall and the Cuban missile crisis as each side sought to show its strength in an increasingly hostile environment.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Mayday is the examination of the relationship between intelligence gathering and diplomacy. The U-2 flights yielded intelligence of inestimable value—at one time, the bulk of U.S. intelligence on the Soviet Union—but their exposure showed how such operations could boomerang. Secrecy, deception and miscalculation, Beschloss shows, were not the background of the Cold War, but the central forces that shaped it. The book also shows how leaders were often operating with incomplete or misleading information, resulting in decisions with unforeseen consequences.

Written in 1986, before the Cold War ended, Mayday is still a valuable historical analysis. Beschloss may not have had access to all of the Soviet sources, but his use of Western documents, interviews, and archival materials makes for a comprehensive and objective account. He writes clearly and with verve, and makes complex political and military issues comprehensible without making them simple. The story’s mix of rigorous research and dramatic storytelling enables readers to appreciate both the immediate crisis and the long-term ramifications.  Beschloss makes a compelling argument that the failure of the U-2 mission was not simply a tactical misstep but a turning point in the Cold War. The book is a reminder of the close relationship between intelligence and diplomacy, and how their collision can have repercussions that reverberate for decades.

With the benefit of over half a century of hindsight I spent a little time looking for follow-up information on the incident. The 1960 U-2 incident has been discussed for decades, but thanks to newly declassified files, newer research has begun to peel back a few more layers, especially in terms of how badly things went wrong diplomatically and how much the U.S. intelligence community was really doing at the time. In a 2021 study, one historian, Adam Boon, took a look at the whole mess, focusing on Dwight D. Eisenhower’s final year in office. Eisenhower had been hoping to go out on a high note, even planning a big trip to the Soviet Union. But then the U-2 spy plane was shot down and that plan went out the window. Boon says Nikita Khrushchev felt burned; he’d been opening the door a little bit for better relations and then this happened. That sense of betrayal was not just political, it was personal, and it pretty much killed any chance that Eisenhower would leave a peaceful Cold War legacy.

At the same time, recent documents from the National Security Archive and elsewhere show that the flights were not solely for the purpose of taking pictures from high altitudes. There was a whole other dimension to them: signals intelligence, or SIGINT, where the U.S. was picking up electronic communications and radar data. By the late ’50s, more than 250 of these missions alone had been undertaken, and historians are still trying to figure out just how big and ambitious that program really was. The repercussions of the incident were immediate, and fairly brutal. The big summit in Paris in 1960? Dead on arrival.  The prospect of easing of tensions or working towards disarmament disappeared overnight. Khrushchev had solid evidence on the Soviet side - documents and data that proved the flight wasn't some accident - and used it to publicly embarrass the U.S. on the world stage. To make matters worse, later U.S. records suggest that the Soviets may have shot the plane down while it was still in the air, possibly tampering with its self-destruct system. That meant they could salvage more of the wreckage—and more intelligence—than the Americans had ever hoped. More damage to an already disastrous situation.

All of these sources indicate that the effects of the event were twofold: a complete breakdown of trust at the executive level and a massive change in the way the U.S. conducted surveillance. The Russian documents, and later investigations show, reveal Khrushchev had indisputable proof that the flights were a systematic, long-term violation of sovereignty and not an accidental straying of a "weather plane." This led the U.S. to speed up its shift to satellite intelligence gathering.

Today historians tend to view the 1960 U-2 mess as more than a Cold War blunder. It was one of those game-changing moments. It didn't just blow up a summit or make Dwight D. Eisenhower the laughingstock of the world for a couple of weeks. It ended up changing the way countries think about spying, technology, and even the rules of the sky. Until all this, no one had really nailed down where a country’s airspace stopped and outer space started. Strangely enough, the whole debacle settled that. When Eisenhower admitted the US had been flying spy missions (something leaders almost never did), it forced everyone to face the reality of reconnaissance. And when the U.S. began employing satellites such as CORONA a little while later, the Soviets didn’t object nearly as much. It was as if everyone had already exhausted their outrage on the U-2, and satellite spying quietly became “okay” in a way airplane spying had not.

The episode also brought about technological change. The whole pathetic “weather plane” cover story fell apart so badly that it was crystal clear that putting a human pilot in a spy plane was a tremendous political risk. So the focus quickly shifted — from pilots to machines. Programs like CORONA -- Dudley Buck worked on this project - see my review in a previous post -- suddenly received increased funding and attention, and the U.S. doubled down on unmanned surveillance. At the same time, the fact that the U-2 could be shot down forced engineers to think out of the box. Which led to futuristic aircraft like the A-12 and the SR-71. They not only flew high, they flew really fast and they were hard to detect, so nothing like the Francis Gary Powers shoot-down would ever happen again.  Satellites soon made them obsolete.

The whole episode left a lasting damage to public trust at home. At first, the government tried to pass the whole thing off as a NASA weather plane that just wandered off course, until Nikita Khrushchev basically pulled out the receipts and proved that wasn’t true. Such a very public lie helped set the stage for what people later called the “credibility gap,” something that would only get worse during Vietnam and the Watergate scandal. And then Congress began demanding, at least a little more, to be kept in the loop about intelligence operations, and to not have the White House running risky spy missions in complete darkness.

On the Soviet side, the fallout created ripple effects of its own. In fact, Khrushchev had been trying to trim military spending somewhat and concentrate on the economy, but the U-2 incident made that a much tougher sell. It gave ammunition to hard-liners in Moscow who said the West clearly could not be trusted. So, there was a new push to beef up defenses, especially things like surface to air missiles. And this made the Cold War just a bit more tense and a lot more heavily armed . 

 James Reston wrote at the time, “What troubled Paris tonight was not primarily what President Eisenhower and Premier Khrushchev would do now, which nobody knows, but the realization that the two most powerful nations in the world are also the least experienced of the great powers—both subject to the element of accident, to the ingrained habits of the past and to the whims of personal pride and caprice.” This was “the conference that everyone lost.”

References

Boon, A. (2021).  ‘A Dear and Hoped-For Guest’: Eisenhower’s Cancelled Visit to the Soviet Union and the Final Year of His Presidency. Diplomacy & Statecraft, 32(3), 509-530. https://doi.org/10.1080/09592296.2021.1961488  

CORONA Project: https://www.cia.gov/legacy/museum/exhibit/corona-americas-first-imaging-satellite-program/ 

The National Security Archive. 2 March 8, 2022. Collection of signals intelligence from U-2s, 1956-1960, CIA. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/intelligence-nuclear-vault/2022-03-08/cia-u-2-collection-signals-intelligence-1956