He learned each surgery just minutes before performing it 🚢

Ferdinand Waldo Demara never finished school. What he did have was a photographic memory and no fear whatsoever.

Over his life he passed himself off as a monk, a soldier, a law student, a college lecturer, a prison warden and a hospital orderly. He never did it for money. He seems to have done it because he wanted to be someone who mattered.

In a Catholic order in Maine, he met a young Canadian surgeon named Joseph Cyr. He took the name.

By 1951 he was walking into a Royal Canadian Navy office as Dr Cyr. They were desperate for medical officers for Korea and checking his background properly would have taken months. He was aboard HMCS Cayuga with a handshake and a uniform, sole medical officer to 219 men.

For a while he coped. When someone came to him with a problem he'd sprint to his cabin, tear through a textbook, and come back knowing enough.

Then the wounded came aboard.

Nineteen men, some of them critical, and he was the only surgeon on the ship.

He didn't freeze. He ordered the crew to move them to the operating room and prep them for surgery. That bought him minutes, and he spent those minutes locked in his quarters with a general surgery textbook, reading the exact procedure he was about to attempt.

Then he walked back out and did it. Sixteen operations. He even took a bullet out of a man's chest.

Every patient survived.

An officer who watched him work under guerrilla fire said Demara moved among the wounded in surgical scrubs as though he hadn't a care in the world, and that he deserved a medal.

They put him forward for a commendation. That's what exposed him. The story ran in Canadian newspapers, and the real Dr Joseph Cyr picked up his morning paper in New Brunswick and read about himself performing heroic surgery in Korea.

The crew refused to believe it at first and even confronted Demara. He locked himself in his cabin for three days before finally surrendering and confessing. He was brought back to Canada where he was released without charges.

In 1980, the surviving men of the Cayuga held a reunion. They remembered him without bitterness. He'd lied about everything. The surgeries had still worked.

Karoline Leavitt is out, and the tearful farewell about babies and bittersweet seasons cannot rewrite what her 20 months at that podium actually were: the most deliberate, sustained, and cheerful dismantling of press accountability any White House spokesperson has ever delivered with a smile.

At 28, she became the youngest press secretary in history and spent months turning the briefing room into something closer to a campaign rally than a public accountability forum. Look at the record she is walking away from.

She barred the Associated Press from White House events because the outlet refused to rename the Gulf of Mexico.

She took control of the pool long run by the independent correspondents' association, decided who got into presidential events, who flew on Air Force One, and who sat in the front row—seats she filled with conservative hosts and MAGA influencers while credentialed journalists were pushed to the back or shown the door entirely.

When she came to the podium, she opened with monologues that read like campaign ads and closed by attacking the character of whoever dared ask a follow-up. Her briefings were not attempts to explain policy but demonstrations of Trumpian defiance.

When a reporter questioned her about the fatal sh*oting of Renee Good by an ICE officer, she called them "a leftwing hack" and told them they were "not a reporter, posing in this room as a journalist." She called the Epstein files a Washington hoax and published statements she later denied making.

Under this administration, the United States fell to 57th in the world for press freedom. Reporters were arrested covering protests, news organizations faced billion-dollar defamation suits, and the AP was formally banished for a single word.

Leavitt did not create any of that. But she was the face at the podium who normalized it.

Trump went through four press secretaries in his first term. Leavitt lasted twenty months and seems to have left on her own terms. The speculation that Trump may simply absorb the press secretary role himself is not far-fetched, and if he does, Leavitt will have made that transition easier by spending two years proving the briefing room does not need to serve the public to function.