"Admiral Halsey"

sweet violets

2:45 pm Thursday afternoon 1/24/08
Communicated by my Higher Self

Annie watched a great movie on tv last night. It was a 1960 movie with Jimmy Cagney playing Admiral Halsey when he took command of Guadalcanal.

Morale was terrible at Guadalcanal when Halsey was put in charge. The previous admiral had nearly lost it. The Japanese were drawing up their plans for the surrender ceremony.

Halsey accomplished a miracle by turning this all around. And he did it by two things. He treated everyone with respect and politeness and as his equal; and listened to what they had to say; he wanted to learn what they thought and what they knew. Plus he made all the right decisions.

Since the whole movie is how Halsey interacted with people and the decisions he made and what they were based on, Annie found it fascinating. It was the same experience as being under my wise counsel. To treat everyone with love and as a brother and sister, which Admiral Halsey did. And to make creative bold intelligent decisions; not go by appearances; and to keep your eye on the ball.

By doing this Admiral Halsey succeeded in the impossible, and made him a hero to Annie. She has a new hero in her pantheon of Sibel Edmonds, Paula Jones, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King.

It was the most fascinating movie she ever watched because it was all decision making. And that interests her so much because of my constant input in her decision making.

And because he was such a humble man with zero arrogance. And because he cared so much about all his men. When his own son was lost at sea during combat, and they offered to put in a special detail to look for him, he said "no," it has to be the same for all. In his mind, they were all his brothers and his sons.

He told someone that his friend at the end of his long life told him he had learned 3 things, "it is better to tell the truth than to lie, better to know than to be ignorant, and better to be free than to be a slave."

He was a completely honest man, and herein lies his strength....

P.S. Annie just went and looked up Admiral Halsey on Wikipedia. She found out his first name is Bill. She found out that after Guadalcanal he made a lot of huge blunders. She also found out that when the war started he said Kill Japs. She thinks, "how can this man be my hero?"

That is what warfare is, one side tries to kill the other side. There was no need for WW2 to have happened, the insane governments in Germany and Japan should have been stopped earlier. But once it started, they had to be defeated.

As for General Halsey’s major blunders later on, we don’t know the whole story, and assuming they happened just as she read in Wikipedia now, it does not take away from the miracle he accomplished at Guadalcanal. And it does not take away his extraordinary decency..