SUFFOLK CLOSEUP: Putin And Hitler "Tyrants"

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

It began a while back in connection with my moderating a panel in Suffolk, at the Jewish Center of the Hamptons, titled “Freedom from Tyranny: An American Woman’s Struggles and Triumphs to Save Soviet Jewry.” That woman was Lillian Hoffman and the event—which included an exhibit featuring copies of the Congressional Record citing her work and successes as well as posters, letters, films and books—was organized by her daughter, Sheila Bialek of Sagaponack.

On the panel was Peter M.F. Sichel who had a vacation home in East Hampton and is a friend of Sheila and her husband, Al. 

Sichel has had quite a life: he has been called the “Jewish James Bond.” 

He and his family escaped from Germany amid the Nazi horrors and came to New York. Sichel enlisted in the U.S. Army the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. With his fluency in German and background in Europe, he was recruited into the Office of Strategic Services, the military’s intelligence agency during the war, rising to the rank of captain. A main job was arranging for German POWs who were not Nazis to go back behind enemy lines as spies.  

When the Central Intelligence Agency was established after the war, he became chief of the CIA base in Berlin. He remained with the CIA until 1959. Not only was he well-familiar with Germany but he has deep knowledge of Russia because of his Cold War intelligence work.

Ms. Bialek arranged for me to interview Sichel for a TV program before the panel program. After the shoot, Sichel and I chatted. He mentioned that in interrogations by U.S. military officers and intelligence agents, members of the German General Staff said they would have overthrown Hitler if the German army had been opposed when the Nazi dictator, in his first big act of aggression, ordered 20,000 troops into the demilitarized Rhineland in 1936. He said France and Great Britain didn’t mount a challenge even though the move was in contravention of the Treaty of Versailles and even though the French had a large army. And, there was the British government’s policy of appeasement then. 

What an enormously important part of history, I thought.

In recent weeks, following the invasion of Ukraine, led by another dictator, Vladimir Putin, I got back in touch with Sichel to expand on what he told me earlier. In a set of interviews, Sichel enlarged on how many on the German General Staff “hated Hitler,” looked down at his status as a corporal in World War I. Moreover, “the General Staff told him that they could not face the French. They did not have the means—the troops and the armaments—to do this.” Sending the German army into the Rhineland became a “gamble of Hitler’s and he was successful” because there was no opposition.   

I did research and found a variety of historians have also said that strong military action by the French and British to oppose the German move was a moment in time when Hitler could have ended up removed. William L. Shirer in his comprehensive 1960 book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, A History of Nazi Germany, quotes the testimony at the Nuremberg Tribunal of Alfred Jodl, chief through the war of the Operations Staff of the Wehrmacht, the German armed forces, that: “Considering the situation we were in, the French covering army could have blown us to pieces.” Shirer writes that the French army “could have” done this, and “had it, that almost certainly would have been the end of Hitler, after which history might have taken quite a different and brighter turn than it did, for the dictator could never have survived such a fiasco.”

Wrote Shirer: “In March 1936 the two Western democracies were given their last chance to halt, without the risk of a serious war, the rise of a militarized, aggressive, totalitarian Germany and, in fact…bring the Nazi dictator and his regime tumbling down. They let the chance slip by.”

Sichel says of the savage invasion of Ukraine: “Terrible! Terrible!” A comparison with the invasion of the Rhineland as to response is “very complicated,” he said, mainly because of the nuclear weaponry possessed by Russia. However, the rising Russian military death toll will, he anticipates, have an impact on the Russian people. When the “body bags came back from Afghanistan, it was the Russian mothers who forced” an end to that Russian war. Further, with “the public involved” in protesting in Russia, if the number of people “willing to face up to the brutality of the police” grows, that will matter. And the Russian army “is not very strong,” says Sichel. Meanwhile, the sanctions are taking a great economic toll on Russia.

As was the situation with Nazi Germany, says Sichel, also at the center is a “tyrant.” 

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books. 

Nissequogue River State Park Master Plan Draft To Be Released In June

By Stacey Altherr

Photos courtesy of “Long Island State Parks.”

Plan on seeing some more public meetings this summer on the redevelopment of Nissequogue River State Park after its master plan and environmental impact statement drafts are scheduled to be released in June, according to state parks officials.

Well into the second phase of planning, with design teams refining earlier concepts with more detailed descriptions of projects for the park, the drafts will produce another public comment period, which will be a minimum of 30 days, after the release.

The Master Plan is a set of recommendations that will set in place the plans for the park; from trails to concessions. Officials from New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation say that the master plan and EIS will incorporate much of what community members asked for during the public meeting over the past few years.

In addition, as part of the EIS process, a draft scoping document that was originally released December 8^th,  and garnered public input, will become a final scoping document also released in a next few weeks. That document takes into consideration the environmental impact of the potential Master Plan actions, said state officials.

“It is critical to note that public comments on the draft scoping document, as well as each of the hundreds of comments received throughout all the community engagements, have directly informed and shaped all the actions and steps being considered in the action plan,” said George Gorman Jr., regional director of state parks.

In the public comment summary portion of the Master Plan draft, the wide community net garnered requests for all types of recreational activities, such as tennis/pickleball courts, sledding, pools, golf course, equestrian stables, children playgrounds, sensory and community gardens, theater(s), and eateries.

However, having walking, running and equestrian trails, along with some type of boating recreation, was top of the list of requests. The area is well known for its bird watching, as well.

Some commenters asked that the natural beauty of the park not be disturbed by too much construction to accommodate some of the recreational facilities. State officials say they are aware of that, as well, noting that the trail system is a critical piece of the plan, as well as indoor and outdoor performance spaces. 

“NRSP’s identity is intimately tied to its inherent natural beauty, and to its history of engaging with and observing nature as part of the healing process…. Our team’s environmental consultant has conducted an extremely thorough inventory of the site’s existing ecological communities, and this map underlies all the design work,” said state park officials.

The massive waterfront park, which sits on 522 acres, is the site of the former Kings Park Psychiatric Hospital which was once the home of one of the largest mental health institutions in the country. The hospital closed in 1996, and over the decades became a nuisance for local authorities when the decaying structures became a place for trespassers and vandals. 

Groups of community members and legislators petitioned the state to designate it official parkland in perpetuity. In 2000, then Governor George Pataki signed a law making 153 acres into a state park. On the last day of his administration in 2007, he transferred the rest of the Kings Park property into the already established Nisseguogue River State Park.

Since then, the park has been used passively by community members, and security has been enforced. Because of its size and environmental sensitivity, the design of a state-of-the-art park design has been in the process for years, including studies, public meetings and surveys, although some buildings have been demolished for safety reasons.

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP - A New Cold Was Has Suddenly Arrived

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

A new Cold War has suddenly arrived. 

And as UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned last week, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could lead to a hot nuclear war. Guterres declared that Putin’s “raising the alert level of Russian nuclear forces is a bone-chilling development. The prospect of nuclear conflict, once unthinkable, is now back within the realm of possibility.”

I spent much time last year completing a book, co-authored with historian Christopher Verga, titled Cold War Long Island. 

I thought I was writing about the past.

Still, in 2020 The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set its “Doomsday Clock” at 100 seconds to midnight with it defining midnight as “nuclear annihilation.” This was the closest to midnight since the clock was set at since it was created in 1947. It was kept at 100 seconds to midnight last year and again this year. “U.S. relations with Russia and China remain tense, with all three countries engaged in an array of nuclear modernization and expansion efforts,” said The Bulletin in January 2022.

And then on February 24^th Russia invaded Ukraine. 

Cold War Long Island was published in October 2021. Dr. Verga who teaches Long Island history at Suffolk County Community College and whose book World War II Long Island: Homefront in Nassau and Suffolk came out in 2021, asked me to co-author the successor volume. This was because, several decades older than he, I lived through, and as a journalist covered, various Cold War happenings on Long Island.

Indeed, as an elementary school student at P.S. 136 in Queens, I and the other pupils were issued dog tags to wear around our necks and were led in “duck-and-cover” exercises—ducking under our desks—regularly at school. The specter of nuclear war hung over our heads. 

As a journalist, I covered the U.S. Army and Air Force having established nuclear-tipped Nike Hercules and BOMARC missile bases on Long Island. The plan: to fire the missiles at formations of Soviet bombers feared heading to New York City, detonating their nuclear tips which had the power and more so of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and blow the formations out of the sky. Much of the resulting radioactivity could fall out on Long Island—but in the Cold War period this wasn’t considered a big worry by the military.

I covered the case of Soviet spy Robert Glenn Thompson, interviewing him after his arrest and then guilty plea. Thompson, of Bay Shore, ran a fuel oil business in Babylon and otherwise conducted espionage for the Soviet Union. He gathered information about prospective targets in the New York Metro Area. This included taking photos which he passed on to his Soviet contacts. Previously he was in the Air Force working in an intelligence office in Berlin. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison but was released in a spy exchange after 13 years.

There was more including writing about the original mission of the Plum Island Animal Disease Center just off Long Island. Newsday investigative reporter John McDonald nailed this by obtaining through the Freedom of Information Act documents that told how, as he wrote, “A 1950s military plan to cripple the Soviet economy by killing horses, cattle and swine called for making biological warfare weapons out of exotic animal diseases at a Plum Island laboratory, now declassified army records reveal.” Facsimiles of documents were reprinted in Newsday including on its front page.

As for now, “The Impossible Suddenly Became Possible,” was the title of an article by Anne Applebaum appearing in this month’s issue of The Atlantic magazine. “Shifts that no one imagined two weeks ago are unfolding with incredible speed,” she related. “Few imagined that the Russian president’s sinister television appearances and brutal orders could alter, in just a few days, international perceptions of Russia.”

“Vladimir Putin’s paranoid ranting,” she continued, “has frightened even people who were lauding his ‘savvy’ just a few days ago. He is not, in fact, someone you can do business with (original italics), as so many in Berlin, Paris, London and Washington falsely believed; he is a cold-blooded dictator happy to murder hundreds of thousands of neighbors and impoverish his nation, if that’s what it takes to remain in power. However the war ends—and many scenarios are still imaginable—we already live in a world with fewer illusions.”

No one knows now the war will end. Will Russia’s brutal assault succeed or fail?

Either way, with Putin ruling Russia, at hand is a new Cold War, at least.

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books. 

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP - Lee Koppelman Pivotal Figure In Suffolk County History

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

Lee Koppelman was an important, indeed pivotal figure in Suffolk County history.

I knew Lee, who died last week, for a very long time. We first connected in 1962 at a meeting on the effort to create a Fire Island National Seashore. Lee had become the planning director of Suffolk County two years earlier and was in favor of the Seashore initiative.

My first “big” story as a journalist in Suffolk was writing article after article about the four-lane highway Robert Moses was pushing to build on Fire Island and what was being proposed as an alternative, preserving Fire Island as a National Seashore. Most officials feared crossing the powerful and vindictive Moses.

But Koppelman was a courageous, stand-up person.

A Fire Island National Seashore became a reality in 1964.

Koppelman came into Suffolk County government on the winds of reform. In the 1950s, Suffolk government and many local governments were here wracked by what was to be named the “Suffolk Scandals”—a decade of investigations of corruption led by a succession of special state prosecutors. The “Suffolk Scandals” led to adoption of a charter system of government to be led by an elected county executive. In 1960 H. Lee Dennison moved into that the post. Decades before, Dennison, an engineer, came to Suffolk from Hornell in upstate New York to work in the then-Suffolk Highway Department. He was ousted after writing a report saying Suffolk government was so mired in partisan politics that it was “doing nothing to encourage adequate county planning.”

Koppelman and Dennison first met when Dennison attended a presentation in Hauppauge of a “Hauppauge Comprehensive Plan” put together by Koppelman. Hauppauge was a sitting duck for intense development with the Long Island Expressway and a spur of the Northern State Parkway nearing it, Veterans Memorial Highway through it, county government buildings rising, and the once rural area eyed for commercial and industrial construction.

Dennison was impressed by Koppelman’s blueprint to deal with the looming development of Hauppauge in what he believed was a sensible and balanced way. He hired him as the county’s first planning director—to try to do the same for all of Suffolk County.

It was a time, Lee Koppelman would later recall, that Suffolk County was the “fastest growing county in the United States” in population and economically. At a significant financial loss, he left his landscape architecture practice and accepted the position.

His first chief concern was the preservation of open space in Suffolk. Back then, he would note, no land in Suffolk had been preserved by the county as open space other than Smith Point Park. And, he said, if action wasn’t taken developers would be “paving over”—as he put it—all of Suffolk County. He defined planning as working toward “better human habitation.”

Koppelman had long been impressed by the writings of Lewis Mumford which he was first introduced to from his books at the public library in Astoria, where Koppelman grew up. Mumford’s targets included suburban sprawl—what Suffolk faced. Referring to Levittown on Long Island, in his 1961 book, “The City in History,” Mumford wrote about “a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads…inhabited by people of the same class…This is the ultimate effect of the suburban escape in our time…” Mumford had been a leader of the Regional Planning Association of America. 

Koppelman’s first major report as Suffolk planning director was on how to preserve open space here. By the time the Dennison administration ended 12 years later, many thousands of acres of county parkland had been created. John V.N. Klein succeeded Dennison as county executive, and Koppelman would work closely with him on the pioneering Suffolk County Farmland Preservation Program which was to be replicated all over the U.S.

Throughout his 28 years as county planner, he was incorruptible. Richard Murdocco, a former student of Koppelman’s at Stony Brook University, where he later became director of its Center for Regional Policy Studies, has related: “He told me that he would never let anyone take him out to lunch, because he didn’t want to owe anyone anything, or give the perception that he was being swayed.” Murdocco now teaches at Stony Brook. Koppelman’s degrees included a Ph.D. in public administration from NYU.

Koppelman, who died at 94, was critical in putting a focus on saving the sole source of potable water on which Suffolk depends, its underground water supply. And he cast the light of intelligent planning on so much more. His biggest disappointment was the lack of affordable housing which for so long he pointed to as a huge need in Suffolk. 

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books. 

Transformation Of Nissequogue River State Park Has Begun With York Hall Roof Rebuild

By Stacey Altherr

Work on York Hall, one of the many buildings in the Nissequogue River State Park slated for preservation, is now underway, giving a hopeful glimpse as to what is to come for the former psychiatric hospital grounds.

After years of neglect, vandalism, and the theft of copper flashing, the building’s roof is now being replaced. The new roof will protect the interior of the once-glamorous building, a one-story building with soaring ceilings and ornate balcony seating.

The repair to the roof is being funded by the Nissequogue River State Park Foundation and the Charles and Helen Reichert Family Foundation for a cost of about $550,000. It is to be completed by the end of April.photo courtesy of Dorothy Chanin

York Hall was one of the more significant buildings that appears to be salvageable in the restoration and re-use of the state-run state park. During the days of the psychiatric hospital, both staff and patients used the auditorium for plays and musical theater. It was used also as a community space, with organizations such as the boy scouts and local churches using the property as well, said John McQuaid, president of the Nissequogue River State Park Foundation. NRSPF was established in 2008 with the goal of uniting local community groups to renovate the park grounds and buildings. 

Once finished, the community will be able to use York Hall once again as a local public indoor theater for music concerts, plays and other community activities. 

photo courtesy of Dorothy Chanin“Everyone is excited,” McQuaid said. “This is a really significant step forward, to see that property turned into a legitimate park.”

The next step will be to hire engineers to put together a scope of the work needed and specific costs to refurbish the inside and bring it up to code, McQuaid added.

Many local civic groups and community members asked for York Hall to be saved rather than razed, including the Society for Preservation of Long Island Antiquities, which placed York Hall on its 2017 list of Endangered Historic Places.

The 522-acre property, which sits on the Nissequogue River, was legislated as parkland by the state in 2001. 

The New York State Office of Parks held public hearings on how to best use this bucolic land that will protect its fragile environmental nature and be a community resource. Next up is the completion of the master plan, due by the end of this year.

“We are very pleased with the rate of progress of the master plan,” McQuaid said. “They have done a tremendous job taking feedback from all the constituents in the community.”