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CORRESPONDENCE
Media vs. Military
I read with great interest and substantial agreement Peter Andrews’s article concerning the historical relationship between the media and the military (July/August). It is a generally excellent article, but a few additional thoughts are required.
Through twenty-five and one-half years of military service, I have found that the members of both the print and electronic news media covering military matters are grossly ignorant of the subject which they cover.
The night before we launched our one-hundred-hour assault against the Iraqi Army in January, I observed one of our major television networks carrying a live story from one of its reporters in Saudi Arabia, who gave his general location and said that for many hours an unending stream of military vehicles and weapons had been passing him on a specified road, in a northbound direction.
It doesn’t take much knowledge of military tactics and strategy to realize that we were shifting our forces north in order to make an attack into Iraq on their army’s right flank. I suppose it is through the dumbest of luck that the Iraqi Army didn’t figure out what was going on. Any competent military commander with that information would have shifted his forces to prepare for an armored strike from Saudi Arabia directly into Iraq, north of Kuwait. We should have lost the element of surprise, and we should have been met by Republican Guard armored forces positioned to defend against our attack. When a major American network publishes vital intelligence information that could cost hundreds of American lives, I cannot fault the way our military handled the news media. The news media are incapable, because of their ignorance, of comprehending what is vital intelligence information and thus should not be published.
I see only two solutions. Either the news should be managed by the military as it was in Saudi Arabia, or the news media should hire people with substantial military experience to do their reporting.
Edward S. Raskin
Deer Park, N. Y.
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Better Than Britain?
The cover story of your May/June issue, on why America won’t go the way of the British Empire, was heartening. I am a new subscriber to your magazine, and this article alone warranted my order. The recent Gulf War proved that the United States is in no way on the decline. Politically, we organized the first effective, worldwide coalition since the Second World War. Economically, we triumphantly pooled and employed the resources of dozens of nations. Militarily, we led a complex, multinational force to an unparalleled and absolute victory. In its heyday, the British Empire could never have dreamed of such accomplishments.
Anthony M. Smith
U.S. Army Reserve
Philadelphia, Pa.
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Better Than Britain?
Professor Joseph Nye’s answers about America’s future are just accurate enough to be dangerous. To him America is a “rich country that acts poor.” His “low” 31 percent tax rate does not include all the property, sales, dual and hidden fuel and corporate taxes, as well as larger state and local governments than exist in other countries. He’s been on the rich-institution dole too long. It’s tough out in the real America.
Robert Sandlin
Dallas, Tex.
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Better Than Britian
As a Briton who has spent a third of his lifetime in the United States, who has been in business in both the United States and Britain, and who has seen American manufacturing struggle in the 1980s at firsthand, I would like to add a simple thought to “Are We Really Going the Way of the British Empire?”
When living in Britain, I was painfully aware that—at least in the preThatcher era—the country was not even trying very hard to manufacture successfully. I came to the States in 1980 expecting to find that fullblooded capitalism would make attitudes and achievements quite different here. No such luck. Manufacturers wanted to make money—but not so much that they were willing to flush out the under-investment, wasteful overmanning, extravagant salaries, aversion to risk, and heavy health costs and so on that rendered American manufacturing incapable of withstanding foreign competition.
Look at the truly successful American manufacturer these days—and you will often find he is Japanese-owned and -led. Such ownership and leadership enables the Hondas and the Toyotas to make good profits with American managers and workers. The same is true in Britain. Meanwhile, domestic manufacturers in Detroit or Coventry languish.
Perhaps the underlying truth is that a managerial elite automatically indulges itself and—given free competition—is flushed away. This happened in Britain, and in the 1980s it happened here. If so, we must welcome the Japanese, Canadian, European, British, and other foreign transplants to the States. They will generate jobs and profits here, and produce competitive products for consumption here as well as abroad. They will do so not because they are geniuses but because they have to make their own way, unable to rest on laurels earned by previous generations of Fords, Manvilles, and whatnot. They will send very little home as dividends. And they will always have to contend with the rare up-and-coming U.S. firm, like the Nucor steel people.
Roberts. Targett
Painesuille, Ohio
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No Post
I am sorry to see American Heritage (of all magazines) repeat as fact the myth that President Franklin D. Roosevelt offered Charles A. Lindbergh “a new cabinet post as Secretary of Air” in 1940 (“The Time Machine,” April).
I am aware that Lindbergh’s diary reports a conversation (in September 1939) with his friend Col. Truman Smith, who, as military attaché in our Berlin embassy, had been responsible for Lindbergh’s three visits to Nazi Germany. According to Lindbergh, Smith told him that if he refrained from opposing American entry into the European war, “a Secretaryship for the Air would be created in the Cabinet and given to me!”
Actually, the war had only just broken out in September 1939, and no one in authority at that point was advocating American entry. As for the alleged offer of a cabinet post, I have found nothing in the Roosevelt papers at the Hyde Park library to confirm this incident or anything approaching it. Lindbergh biographers have described Secretary of War Harry H. Woodring and Gen. H. H. Arnold as intermediaries; but this quite startling offer is mentioned neither in Keith D. McFarland’s authoritative biography of Woodring nor in Hap Arnold’s autobiography.
The offer would also be startling for another reason: because it implied the creation of an independent air force. In 1939 there was no such thing as a separate air force. The Army and Navy each had their own air corps. To create an independent air force would have meant a titanic struggle with the existing services and their civilian chiefs. It would also have required legislation. The establishment of a new cabinet department would have required legislation too. FDR had other things on his mind, and the last thing he would have wished in 1939 was to get involved in bureaucratic and congressional battles over an independent air force and a cabinet department.
I might add that to this day there is no such “cabinet post” as Secretary for the Air. Neither the non-cabinet post of Secretary of the Air Force nor the independent air force came into existence until 1947.
Truman Smith had no White House entrée. One can only assume that he was trying to restrain Lindbergh by speculating that if Lindbergh did not provoke Roosevelt by attacking a proBritish policy, Roosevelt might do something for him. Or maybe he was kidding Lindbergh, who was not notable for his sense of humor. Smokeblowing speculation or kidding are very different from the allegation that Roosevelt deliberately offered Lindbergh a nonexistent cabinet job.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
New York, N. Y.
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Twice Saved
I thoroughly enjoyed your piece in the May/June issue of American Heritage magazine on these marvelous old New York City homes (“Williamsburg on the Subway”).
I just thought it might be helpful to note that the Gracie Mansion Conservancy is not a recent phenomenon; rather, it was established in 1981 by Joan Kaplan Davidson when she was asked by Mayor Koch to come up with a proposal for renovating the mayor’s house. As the mayor’s chief of staff at that time I worked hand in hand with Joan Davidson from 1981 on. We raised $4.5 million in private funds and undertook a thorough renovation of the house in 1984 and repainted it in the colors depicted in the article.
I know space is limited in preparing these pieces, but it was Mayor Koch who thought that the house needed to be preserved for the citizens of the city as a working mayor’s home, and one that could be used and enjoyed by all New Yorkers. It was Mayor Koch who began the tour program, which continues today, so you can really say that fifty years after its first rescue, Mayor Koch again came to the rescue of Gracie Mansion.
Diane M. Coffey
Assistant to the Chairman
The Dreyfus Corporation New York, N. Y.
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