A Tribute to Delaney Kiphuth on July 4th

Honoring my American history teacher on the semiquincentennial

He had a twinkle in his eye and a touch of pink in his face.

I can still picture him winking at me when he drank his Bloody Marys at Mory’s, a tavern in New Haven, Conn., where we often met for lunch when I was a student at Yale.

Delaney Kiphuth had seen so much in his decades as a soldier, a football player, a coach, an American history teacher, and athletic director at Yale from 1954 through 1976, the year of the Bicentennial.

On this Fourth of July, the 250^th birthday of our nation, I would like to honor Mr. Kiphuth, a man of light and truth.

Yes, he served with distinction as a soldier in World War II, winning a Bronze Star.

He also served our country for decades as an educator, nurturing and preparing young men and women for careers in service to this nation and the world.

During Mr. Kiphuth’s years at Yale, the nation endured the McCarthy period, the Vietnam War, political assassinations of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, anti-war protests, the civil rights movement, and Watergate.

There was much political upheaval on campus.

Through it all, Mr. Kiphuth retained his optimism in our country, in education as well as in amateur athletics and its ideals of sportsmanship, teamwork, honor, honesty and grace under pressure.

Mr. Kiphuth came from modest origins, not unlike some of our founding fathers, like Benjamin Franklin.

He became the first member of his family to go to Yale. And he never made much money.

He would have understood the suffering that many Americans are experiencing now, with high prices for gas, food and medicine, as well as a lack of affordable housing and health care.

When I was taking his American history class as a junior in high school, Mr. Kiphuth taught me about birthright citizenship, Frederick Douglass and the Dred Scott case, as well as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

He was a loving man, filled with compassion, kindness and good cheer.

He did not impose his views on others.

But he clearly had an expansive and progressive stance on the beauty of our country for all of its flaws.

We are living at a time when fires, floods, earthquakes and heat waves drain our planet.

Data centers, fueling artificial intelligence, threaten not only to poison our land, water and air; they also threaten our minds and our souls.

Meanwhile, our disgraced chief executive profits from corrupt deals in conspicuous acts of graft. And he continues to manufacture lies about the 2020 election, which he lost decisively, while he tramples on our civil rights and our right to vote, rights enshrined in the Constitution.

Thirteen servicemen and women have perished because of Trump’s illegal and unconstitutional war against Iran, a war that we lost, and one that is the biggest foreign policy and national security debacle since Vietnam.

I am convinced that we are going to get through the traumas that the solipsist in chief has inflicted upon us.

We will prevail over the evil of Trump and his enablers, cowards, who are undermining our 250-year-old democracy.

Yes, we will get through the chaos that Trump has unleashed on our country, chaos that threatens all the rights we hold dear, such as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, the right of all American citizens, including immigrants, to vote, the rule of law, and the principle that no one is above the law.

Nixon was not above the law.

And neither is Trump.

Back in the Watergate era, there were Republicans who shone a light on the truth and who told Nixon that he had to resign or he would be impeached and convicted.

There are still Republicans, who believe in our country, and they need to be as forthright and honorable as their predecessors like Barry Goldwater, Howard Baker, Lowell Weicker and so many others, who stood up for our democracy during Watergate.

I never asked Mr. Kiphuth if he belonged to a political party.

But he came from the same tradition as Kingman Brewster, president of Yale during much of the 1960s and 1970s.

Like Mr. Kiphuth, Brewster embodied the tradition of liberal or eastern Republicans.

Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, two men who earned the right to be on Mount Rushmore through their love for our country and their progressive stance, were the forerunners of Republicans, such as Senators Saltonstall and Javitz, as well as Prescott Bush, among others.

Incidentally, Prescott Bush was the father and grandfather of two future U.S. presidents, George Herbert Walker Bush and George W. Bush.

Again, I do not know if Mr. Kiphuth was registered with any political party, but he did come from the tradition of the men whom I just cited.

John McCain came from that tradition, too.

All of these Americans believed in the fairness and compassion that make ours a great country, one that welcomes the stranger, for we too were once strangers in a strange land.

Yes, Mr. Kiphuth believed deeply in helping young men and women of all backgrounds reach our potential.

While no country can guarantee equal outcomes for everyone, our country, at its best, has tried to offer equal opportunities for all.

And Mr. Kiphuth, who came from humble beginnings, loved this aspect about America.

That is why, among his other acts of kindness and vision, he helped to oversee the Ulysses S. Grant Foundation, which offers young students in the New Haven area, many of them students of color, the opportunity to study at Yale during the summer, tuition-free.

The foundation, of course, is named after a former U.S. president, who commanded Union troops during the Civil War.

When he was a child, Delaney Kiphuth met Walter Camp, the founder of modern American football.

As the World Cup takes place in our country, Camp, a brilliant innovator, should be remembered for changing football from a sport more akin to soccer or rugby to the game we know today.

He invented the idea of a gridiron with a line of scrimmage, a 4-down system, a quarterback, and 11 players on both sides, among other aspects of the sport.

Camp served on the rules committee for football long after he retired as Yale’s coach and long after he began to conceptualize the modern game in 1876, on the centennial of our nation.

I can recall talking to Mr. Kiphuth about many historical events, some of them involving sports legends, like Camp.

Were he alive today, Mr. Kiphuth, who passed away in 1997 at the age of 78, would now be counseling calm, reassuring us, as he reassured troops during World War II that the forces of good will prevail.

Yes, we will prevail, and it is because, at core, this country still has men and women of honor, like Mr. Kiphuth, a patriot, who served in the Army Air Corps in World War II and who, as I mentioned, won a Bronze star.

In my most recent Substack piece, “In Praise of Michelle Obama,” I mentioned that Charlotte Bruney, my high school math teacher, stood up in front of the entire school at morning assembly and defended me when I was being harmed by some kids and even some faculty members.

As I write about Mr. Kiphuth, who protected me in the classroom and the locker room at Hopkins, my high school in New Haven, Conn., I want to make clear that I love my high school and have gone back to a number of reunions, including my 40^th three years ago.

I wrote a June 2013 piece for the Huffington Post, “Attending My 30^th High School Reunion as a Diagnosed Psychotic,” in which I discussed how much fun I had seeing my old classmates.

And I have written other articles about my time at Hopkins, including one for the HuffPost in April 2015, “Separated at Birth: Football Coach Tom Parr, Football Founder Walter Camp.”

In that piece, I referred to Mr. Kiphuth, as well as Walter Camp and Coach Parr, the subject of the article, who was about to receive the Hopkins medal upon his retirement from the school.

I also wrote other pieces in which I discussed the kindness and brilliance of some of my other teachers, such as Toni Giamatti, Maria Dawidoff and Susan Feinberg.

All of them cared greatly for me, as did Miss Bruney and Mr. Kiphuth.

And many of my Hopkins classmates did stand up for me when I was being harmed.

They cared for me, then as now, and I am grateful to my parents that they sent me to Hopkins, just as I am grateful to have gone to every school that I have attended.

I will always be an optimist, as was Mr. Kiphuth, which is important to stress on a day such as this, Independence Day.

Mr. Kiphuth believed very deeply in amateur athletics, and he led the way in founding the Ivy League as a formal sports conference in the mid-1950s.

As I noted at the outset of this piece, when I was an undergraduate at Yale in the 1980s, Mr. Kiphuth and I used to get together at Mory’s, where Yale’s a cappella singing groups, like the Whiffenpoofs, give concerts most weeks during the school year.

Mr. Kiphuth and I would talk for hours into the afternoon about, among others, Yale sports figures, like Frank Shorter, the 1972 Olympic gold medalist in the marathon, and Calvin Hill, who was rookie of the year in the NFC with the Dallas Cowboys, after he graduated from Yale in 1969.

As I also noted previously, Mr. Kiphuth had a twinkle in his eye, a bit of pink in his nose, and a sprightly face, almost like that of Puck.

He would drink his Bloody Marys, wink at me and ask me if I wanted one.

I was slightly underage, so I declined.

A former classmate of Kingman Brewster, the Yale president, who ushered in coeducation at the school in the late 1960s, Mr. Kiphuth served at Yale when there was more than a degree of upheaval.

He worked with Kingman Brewster during the Black Panther trial in the early 1970s when President Brewster famously said that “A Black man can’t get a fair trial” in America.

Mr. Kiphuth, who was a deacon as well as a special adviser to Brewster, helped to steady the university through those difficult times.

As an American history teacher and athletic director, Mr. Kiphuth had a close relationship with many of the students, particularly the athletes, like Calvin Hill.

Though Hill was one of the most talented football players to come out of Yale, he considered quitting the football team at one point.

The story goes that Mr. Kiphuth picked him up after Hill missed the bus to football practice.

On a ride to the Yale Bowl and Clint Frank Field, named after another football hero, one who played at Yale in the late 1930s, Mr. Kiphuth gave Hill a pep talk and convinced him to stay on the team.

Hill would go on to lead the Elis to two Ivy championships and to help the Dallas Cowboys win their first Super Bowl title.

Back then, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the country, as I say, was rife with political unrest, anti-war and civil rights protests.

Mr. Kiphuth, of course, supported the right to protest peacefully and to engage in dialogue, as he and others did during the Black Panther trial in the early 1970s in New Haven, when Bobby Seale and other Black Panthers were tried for murder.

Mr. Kiphuth also knew that there were people, who do not believe in sportsmanship and teamwork, and who do not serve God, country and Yale, the refrain of the Cole Porter song, “Bright College Years.”

Mr. Kiphuth recognized that there was evil in the world, including at Yale, as everywhere else.

He was a member of Skull & Bones, a nod to his leadership on campus, though Bones is the most notorious of Yale’s secret societies.

While Skull & Bones has produced patriots and honorable people, like Mr. Kiphuth, an angel, it has also produced its share of hacks, power-hungry ones, who yearn to harm others.

Some Bonesmen were involved in the founding of the OSS, the precursor to the CIA.

As depicted in the film, The Good Shepherd, directed by Robert De Niro, Bonesmen, like Matt Damon’s character in the movie, undergo a hazing ritual, in which new members must lie naked and apparently confess to the most painful humiliation in their lives.

In this manner, Bones gets kompromat on its members, not unlike the Kremlin, which has interfaced with some Bonesmen over the years, a point that is also dramatized in The Good Shepherd.

There are Bonesmen, who may feel that their greatest loyalty is to Skull & Bones, not to God, country or Yale.

By contrast, Mr. Kiphuth was a man of honor, whose loyalty was to the truth. He always shone a light on the truth, and as I say, he always retained his optimism and empathy for others.

When we would have our talks at Mory’s, he would sometimes ask me what I wanted to do in my life, what I really cared about.

He told me that his father, Bob Kiphuth, who for roughly 40 years coached Yale’s swim team as well as several Olympic teams, often asked his swimmers that question.

As should be quite evident, Mr. Kiphuth was remarkably kind.

He was also capable of being fierce, as one might expect of a man who was a starting lineman on the Yale football team, though he stood perhaps no more than 5-foot-7 and weighed only about 160 pounds.

When I was a graduate student at the Yale School of Management, I can recall encountering Mr. Kiphuth on the streets of New Haven.

It was 1993, if I am remembering correctly, when we bumped into each other on High Street, close to the Old Campus, where most of the freshmen live, and within 100 yards of the mausoleum that houses Skull & Bones.

I can still recall that Mr. Kiphuth, whom I had not seen in years, said with bafflement,“Don’t you know you’re being followed!”

I did not know what he was talking about because I was dissociating from the evil that had afflicted me going back to kindergarten, when my teacher abused me, something that I have discussed at length in other articles.

In this article, I do not want to dwell on the evil of people like my kindergarten teacher, or some in Skull & Bones or anywhere else.

I would rather focus, for the most part, on the kindness and the strength of Mr. Kiphuth and other angels like him, who did stand up for me and for what is right, for honor, for freedom of speech and freedom of the press, for fairness and compassion, and, above all, for the truth, for the light and the truth, which happens to be the motto of Yale.

Our country is facing a crisis, a threat to the values set out in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Throughout history, there have always been some people who want to crush the spirit of beautiful souls.

These villains are the kind of people who relish not the verse of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” but rather the lyrics of the Eurythmics song, “Sweet Dreams.”

In fact, they live by its seeming credo, by the hatred of words such as this: “Some of them want to use you, some of them want to be used by you, some of them want to abuse you, some of them want to be abused.”

Yes, that is the credo of some of these evildoers, who want to hurt and abuse those of us who are kind.

Mr. Kiphuth knew about these people in Skull & Bones and elsewhere.

These mini Trumps think that they are protected by others, who are as amoral as they are in their professed fields, whether those fields are advertising, law, technical writing, computer management, medicine, or anything else.

These hacks desperately want to believe that they are artists of their form.

But, like Trump, they are frauds, liars and cheats.

They could never write Ogilvy on Advertising, or the plays of Arthur Miller, or the screenplays of Julius and Philip Epstein, Harold Ramis or Cameron Crowe.

No, Trump and his ilk, some of them in Skull & Bones, try to steal from true artists.

As I have written before, Trump and his lackeys are disciples of Korah, a Kabbalistic term for the devil.

It is no wonder that Bart Giamatti, upon becoming president of Yale in the late 1970s, alluded to the secret societies, like Skull & Bones, when he stated in his first official proclamation that the school needed “to abolish evil and restore the paradise.”

I mentioned that proclamation by Giamatti, one of Mr. Kiphuth’s colleagues at Yale, in a Substack piece earlier this year, “Nice Guys Finish First.”

Years ago, when I was an undergraduate, Mr. Kiphuth tried to protect me, as he had when I was at Hopkins.

He encouraged me to serve in the military, as he had in the Army Air Corps during World War II.

And he warned me about some of my classmates and the evil that could follow me to New York City, where I moved after I graduated from college.

Mr. Kiphuth was warning me about the aforementioned liars, cheats and thieves, Trump-like hacks, who want to believe that they are special because they were told perhaps by their parents that they were brilliant or comically gifted.

Maybe, they could recite, though not well, a line or two from Caddyshack.

Perhaps, they think that they are playwrights or screenwriters, because they made their parents laugh, not that they replicate the Marx Brothers.

When these hacks attempt to write poetry, it does not sing; it dies as noise.

Mr. Kiphuth would know exactly what I am talking about.

He could detect evil, and he knew about the jealousies of frauds, who try to poison and to steal from our world.

He was a spiritual man, always kind and modest, points that I want to emphasize.

He was a colleague of Edmund Morgan, one of the country’s most eminent historians of the colonial era.

Edmund Morgan and Delaney Kiphuth believed very deeply in this country, in the Constitution, and its checks and balances, its separation of powers.

They admired leaders, who may not have been perfect human beings, but who did the right thing when it really mattered.

And Mr. Kiphuth was, as I say, a deacon as well as a team player. He served God, country and Yale, in that order.

And that is the only order that makes sense, wherever one has gone to school.

Today, on our nation’s 250^th birthday, some of us will be honoring the founding fathers of this country, like George Washington, who refused to serve beyond two terms as president because he said that he was not a king, that the United States is a democracy.

George Washington knew better than just about anyone that he was a role model, that people would pay attention to his words and his actions.

And he knew that we fought our Revolutionary War to ensure that we would never again be ruled by a monarch or a tyrant.

Years ago, in the fall of 1984, when I was a sportswriter for the Yale Daily News, some people in the sports department chopped up and damaged a piece that I had written about Mr. Kiphuth, who, as already noted, was the athletic director at Yale from 1954 through 1976.

The details of this episode may not be important any longer.

Basically, one of my classmates, the kind of person, who believes that “Nice Guys Finish Last,” was responsible for harming my story on Mr. Kiphuth.

That hack also used a photo of Bob Kiphuth, Mr. Kiphuth’s dad, and misidentified him as Mr. Kiphuth.

No one consulted me on these changes.

As I say, the details may not be important any longer, but I know the person or persons who sabotaged that piece in Bones-like fashion.

I might point out that Kingman Brewster, who was the editor-in-chief of the Yale Daily News when he was an undergraduate, reportedly turned down Skull & Bones when he was tapped.

Other members of the Yale Daily News and other Yale students have also turned down Skull & Bones because there is something inherently evil about secret societies.

In the Book of Job, Elihu, a young man who possesses a rare wisdom, says, “There is no darkness nor shadow of death where the workers of iniquity may hide themselves.”

Job suffers for much of his life, but he continues to persevere.

He passes God’s test, and his wealth, spiritual or otherwise, is doubled at the end of his life.

The villains, the so-called friends of Job, who have lied about and judged him, face a different fate.

God tells Job to pray for them.

But they are not headed for a happy ending.

Neither are the evildoers who preside over a windowless mausoleum in New Haven or bunkers beneath the White House, the Kremlin or anywhere else.

I did not get to see Mr. Kiphuth near the end of his life when he was ill in 1997; he passed away in February of that year.

I was very ill at that time myself, in the early stages of my first psychotic break, one that would lead to my first psychiatric hospitalization in March 1997, a month or so after Mr. Kiphuth passed away.

Though I did not get to see Mr. Kiphuth at the end of his life, I did visit him at a medical facility when I was a student at Yale. In fact, I can vividly recall showing Mr. Kiphuth my article about him for the Yale Daily News when it was in galley form in the fall of 1984.

He came out of his room at the Yale Health Plan on Hillhouse Avenue, where he was dressed in a johnny coat, and we went over his quotes in a draft of the article.

I read him the piece before hand. Mr. Kiphuth deserved that respect.

Like his father, Bob Kiphuth, Yale’s legendary swimming coach, Mr. Kiphuth helped so many young people over the generations, as I mentioned previously.

He nurtured us and counseled a sense of calm, healing, good sportsmanship, ethics and a love for God and country.

He understood that Skull & Bones could turn to evil.

He understood that some Bonesmen would serve people, like Trump and other wizards of Oz, who are loyal to no one except those more evil than they, people like Putin.

Such men and women have sold their souls, just as they have sold out our country.

They have tried to impose their nightmarish “sweet dreams” on some of us. They have bragged about using or abusing us. But they have abused only their own souls; and, like Trump, they are headed for a fall.

On this Fourth of July, as we celebrate our democracy, we must keep in mind that we have gotten through challenges in the past, such as the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Great Depression, McCarthyism, Watergate and 9/11.

We will get through our current crisis, too.

As the Eurythmics would say, “Who am I to disagree?”

Happy 4^th!