I am disappointed to see that you were a cosponsor of S. J.
Res. 49 condemning Southern white men as racists. As a Southern white man, born in Florida and
raised in Alabama, I take offense at your racist bigotry. I am not a “White supremacist” or a “neo-Nazi,”
but my great-grandfather, James M. Williams, did fight for the Confederacy in
the Civil War. There is a book about his
exploits, “From that Terrible Field.”
The title refers to the Battle of Shiloh, where he fought and where he
best friend, George Dixon, was wounded. My
great-grandfather returned to Mobile, Alabama, to command Fort Powell in the
Battle of Mobile Bay. George Dixon went
on to command the Confederate submarine Hunley
which sank the Housatonic in
Charleston harbor. My great-grandfather
named his first son George Dixon Williams in memory of his friend.
In addition to my great-grandfather’s Civil War service, my
grandfather served in the Spanish-American War and World War I. My father served in World War II and the
Korean War. He was awarded the Bronze
Star for his service in Korea. I served
in Vietnam in an Army artillery battery along the DMZ and on the Laotian
border. The names of two of the men I served with are on the wall of the
Vietnam Memorial. After Vietnam, I
served twenty-five years in the Foreign Service of the US Department of State.
I became a confirmed Democrat when I was serving as Science
Counselor at the American Embassy in Warsaw, Poland. One of my main jobs was to oversee a science
cooperation agreement between the US and Poland that was to last five
years. Newt Gingrich and the Republicans
were elected while I was there, and one of their first actions was to end US
funding for the science cooperation after three years, although there was a
signed agreement stating that it was to last for five years. From Poland I went to Rome, where I again
handled scientific affairs. The
Republicans refused to fund appropriations to buy oil for North Korea that the
US had promised under the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization
agreement. One of my jobs became to ask
the European Union, for which Italy then held the rotating presidency, to
contribute enough money to KEDO to honor the US agreement, so that the US would
not be the first party to violate it. I
was extremely upset that the US would give North Korea a legitimate excuse to
restart its nuclear weapons program.
Finally, while I was at a cocktail party celebrating the launch by the
US of an Italian communications satellite, an executive of the Italian telephone
company came up to me and said, “You Americans must really hate me.” It turned out that his daughter had been
denied a visa to visit Disney World because his company had some connection
with the Mexican telephone company that had some connection with the Cuban
telephone company that was banned by the Helms-Burton Act. In the fictional series The Winds of War by Herman Wouk, the Jewish heroine was prevented by
the Nazis from leaving Italy for Israel by denying a visa to her child. The situation I found in Rome was too
similar. I decided that I would retire
from the Foreign Service because US foreign policy did not come up to my
standards of decency. I did not make it
a political issue; I just retired in disgust.
aI voted almost a straight Democratic ticket from then on,
for the next twenty years, until the 2016 election. I voted for Bernie Sanders
at the last Democratic caucuses. But
that changed with Hillary Clinton’s nomination and her characterization of
Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables,” clearly meaning Southern white
men like me. Ironically, I had been the
Warsaw embassy officer responsible for organizing President and Hillary
Clinton’s visit to the site of the old Warsaw ghetto during Clinton’s visit to
Warsaw to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II.
I became disillusioned with the Republican Party for failing
to appropriate funds to meet America’s international commitments. Now I am disillusioned with the Democratic
Party for passing hateful, bigoted legislation condemning me as a racist. You are free to hate me. There is no law against hate, as long as you
do not act on it. However, politicians
are in a position to act on it. I see
this Resolution as a sign that race-based discriminatory legislation is
coming. It is strange that you, Sen.
Schumer and Rep. Pelosi would replace Sen. Jesse Helms, Rep. Dan Burton, and
their ilk as the new racists in Congress.
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