I like to listen to old time radio and on these comedy shows they often spoof about Congressman visiting camps. Accordingly these Congressman are portrayed as buffoons or useless.
We just started getting reruns of “McHale’s Navy,” and they too often use a visiting Congressman. Like the one who decides she likes someone better than McHale simply because he’s from her home state.
Then today I was watching “Gilligan’s Island,” and Mr Howell asks “What is one thing that every navy has but doesn’t need.” And Gilligan says “A visiting senator.”
I never really noticed this before, so my question is what was the purpose of Congressman going to areas during the war? Was it simply public relations like when Obama went to Afghanistan?
You’re basing knowledge on how Congress works on McHale’s Navy and Gilligan’s Island?
In any case, I doubt congressmen actually visited the front in World War II. It was too long a trip – they had to be gone for a month or more for any bases outside the US.
However, after the war it was more common for congressmen to take trips to visit military bases. I believe the soliders thought of them as a nuisance they had to put up with. Usually the congressmen had little idea of how a base was run, and everyone had to change their routine to make sure everything looked especially good.
A Foreign Affair, one of Billy Wilder’s best movies and one of the most cynical movies ever made, although I repeat myself, is the story of an American Congresswomen going on a junket to post-war Berlin. Find it on DVD tomorrow if you haven’t seen it.
Did members of Congress visit the front during the war? Probably not. They might have gone to staging areas, though. They would have flown on military planes all the way so the time factor wouldn’t have been that extreme. Eisenhower regularly sent people from Washington to gather info for reports when he was Marshall’s aide. Taking a member of Congress along to visit MacArthur in the South Pacific sounds realistic.
Why would Congresspeople go? If you were them, would you believe a word of what the military was telling you?
That’s the same reason they go to Iraq and Afghanistan (and all the other troubled places in the world today). Maybe they’re not getting the full picture, but at least they can see some things for themselves, and they don’t have to completely rely on the military and the State Dept. You’d really would have to be a useless buffoon to be that stupid.
OTOH, they were major pains in the neck. They have to be guarded and protected and kept away from the incompetency. Remember McCain’s famous walk through the Baghdad market, the one that he claimed afterward proved that anyone could “walk freely” in Baghdad, the one where he had 100 American soldiers protecting him, along with three Blackhawk helicopters, and two Apache gunships overhead? That’s why Congress and other officials are hated.
It’s a two-way street. They have to go, but their presence is a total PITA, and they find out nothing, but they still get more than they would otherwise, because otherwise they would get a pack of lies and wind up with negative information. It’s a crazy system, but it’s been around for decades and we haven’t come up with a better one.
