Hot Type, for the week of May 28, 2004 -- continued In the military, everybody's ultimate bosses are the secretary of defense and the president. Which brings us back to Abu Ghraib and to a spate of recent articles that wonder if there's any way in the world the so-called handful of rotten apples who've been not only named and pictured but denounced at the highest levels can receive anything close to a fair trial. Irregular Triangle digs deep into the nuances of unlawful command influence, and when you read it you might feel an ounce of sympathy for the position Donald Rumsfeld found himself in when he told Congress he hadn't read the Taguba report or even seen the pictures until just the other day. Arguably he'd been doing what he was supposed to do, keeping his distance while commanders in the field cleaned up their mess. A lot of reporters would probably benefit from reading Irregular Triangle. I asked Vivian Vahlberg, director of the McCormick Tribune Foundation's journalism programs, if she intended to let the media know it's available, and she said no. "I had thought of it, but it's not something we do," she said. "We are not and do not want to be a political foundation. We're happy to make it available, but we're not going to take a more productive role in it." She went on to say that the foundation had distributed as many as 6,000 copies of the report when it was published, so presumably the reporters who would benefit from it already have it. Don't count on that. Earlier in 2001 the foundation held a conference on the media and terrorism. Paul Bremer gave the keynote speech and declared, "The new administration seems to be paying no attention to the problem of terrorism. What they will do is stagger along until there's a major incident and then suddenly say, 'Oh, my God, shouldn't we be organized to deal with this?'" Thousands of copies of the report on that conference were mailed out too. And when Bremer was named by President Bush last year to run Iraq, nobody remembered he'd said any such thing until I pointed it out in Hot Type a month ago. I'm sure hundreds if not thousands of reporters stuffed Irregular Triangle in a drawer when it arrived and now have no idea it's there. When Vahlberg said the foundation has no interest in politics she had in mind the politically charged headlines Bremer's three-year-old remarks at Cantigny had just stirred up. That kind of attention makes the foundation uncomfortable. There's nothing so sensational in the Irregular Triangle report, though some less-than-admiring things were said about Rumsfeld. Vernon Jarrett, Witness to History I was always a little hesitant to call Vernon Jarrett. There was something gruff and impatient in his voice when he answered, but then we'd talk for what seemed like hours. Storms assailed him and history haunted him. In 1991 he talked to me about a column Richard Roeper had just written about being hassled by blacks back in Roeper's old neighborhood. Jarrett didn't like it. Jarrett, who at different times also wrote for the Tribune and the Defender, was a Sun-Times columnist then, and Dennis Britton, the editor, told me he wished he'd had a black "voice" younger than Jarrett's to reply to Roeper. Jarrett, then pushing 70, told me a younger columnist wouldn't know enough to respond in the right way. "He's disturbed because someone looked at him funny," Jarrett said of Roeper. "I remember when they were setting fires, trying to kill distinguished black persons such as Dr. Percy Julian. I'm accustomed to them throwing bombs in your house and a mob of three or four hundred gathering in front of your door." The last time we talked was late in 2002. The Chicago Association of Black Journalists had been founded in his living room back in 1976, and he was so unhappy with the turn CABJ had taken that he'd led an old-guard insurrection to reclaim it. When the move failed for parliamentary reasons, he and his allies set up a new shop, the Chicago chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists. He was 80, but he became its president. He was still president when he died last Sunday night of cancer. "My introduction to journalism started when I was in seventh grade in a little black church down in Tennessee," said Jarrett in 2002, his thoughts ranging far beyond the subject I'd called him about. "Ordinary black people like housemaids, bedpan women, yard boys, mechanics, chauffers, what have you, at one time had such a reverence for education that every male teacher was called 'professor.'" What happened? I asked. "We went to the big cities," he said. "We got lost from each other." He'd founded academic scholarships and competitions to try to turn blacks' minds back to scholarship. "I took two kids to a parent salute the school board gives, and they came up and read from Frederick Douglass like they were anchorpeople on TV," he said. "Folks stood up and cheered them. These kids have never been the same. They're now in college. "Why do so many black kids play basketball?" he went on. "Acclaim. Recognition. At one time white kids completely dominated basketball in Illinois at the high school level. Alonzo Stagg felt sorry for black kids trying to play basketball. He didn't invite them to his annual holiday tournament because he didn't want them embarrassed. My argument is that if you revive some of that community trust and confidence in these kids, they'll do with math and physics what they once did with basketball. I stole that idea from Percy Julian." Jarrett was proud of the distance he'd traveled from Paris, Tennessee, and of what he'd accomplished in life, but he always seemed prouder of his brother. "My brother was on the faculty at Oxford," Jarrett said, bringing him into the conversation for no obvious reason. "He was a visiting professor of English, and he came out of that hick town. He retired as president of Atlanta University. My brother was chairman of the Rhodes Scholar selection committee for the southeastern United States for a long time. Thomas D. Jarrett, University of Chicago PhD with honors, 1947. He got his master's at Fisk." Jarrett told me the devotion to scholarship he remembers from his boyhood in Tennessee "reminds me to a large degree of what you see in the Asian community. I'm trying to re-create the climate that got lost after World War II when we started moving to the big cities. We have kids who take an oath they will read at least once every two weeks to their parents from the pages of African-American history. We have two or three little test schools around South Shore, where I live, and I have an office at South Shore High School. We have kids from the streets reading Du Bois and Douglass, and some of them had never heard of them before." That was our last long conversation. A couple of days later I called and asked what he thought about the nice things Trent Lott had just said when Strom Thurmond turned 100. Lott said America could have avoided a lot of problems if it had elected Thurmond president. "July 18, 1948," Jarrett said. "I was just entering journalism." That was the day Thurmond broke with the Democrats and founded the Dixiecrat Party. Segregation now and forever was its motto. Jarrett knew the date by heart. Send tips, tirades, and comments to hottype@chicagoreader.com Copyright © 2004 Chicago Reader, Inc. All rights reserved.