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A Boy From Tampico
Back in 1965 Ronald Reagan published his first memoir, Where’s the Rest of Me?, borrowing the title from a line in the 1942 Warner Brothers film Kings Row. In the movie—Reagan’s favorite of all he starred in—he played Drake McHugh, a playboy whose legs have been removed by a sadistic surgeon. “Where’s the rest of me?” Reagan famously cried out when he came to, with thespian relish worthy of an...
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Notable Winter Books
The Gun By C. J. Chivers The most lethal and influential weapon of the cold war, argues C. J. Chivers, a former Marine and now a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, was not the nuclear warhead and infrastructure behind it but the AK-47, a cheap, handheld, Soviet-made automatic weapon that could be used effectively by the “mechanically disinclined, the dimwitted, and the untrained...
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Wrong Turns In Korea
On its 60th anniversary, the Korean War looks much like Vietnam, a pointless conflict that gained nothing for those who began it: North Korea’s Kim Il-sung and South Korea’s Syngman Rhee, with the consent of the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin and China’s Mao Zedong. Yet it was far worse than that: The bloodletting in that corner of northeast Asia was an exercise in human folly that cost all sides...
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Editor's Letter
This issue we bring you essays on some important subjects: the 200-year-old seesaw struggle between Congress and the president, the unending fiasco in Korea, and the largely forgotten civil war our patriots fought with former friends and family who remained loyal to King George III.You’ll find an interesting constant in these articles: the use of cartoons. Time and again, political satirists and...
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The Imperial Congress
On a little-remarked, steamy day in late June 1973, a revolution took place in Washington, D.C., one that would transfer far more power and wealth than did the revolt against King George III in 1776. On the 29th, a sweaty, angry majority of the House of Representatives and the Senate defied the president of the United States and voted to end armed American involvement in Vietnam.Whether this...
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Letters To The Editor
 In the Trenches Historian Edward Lengel was right when he wrote that the doughboys “came from rich, poor, and everything in between” in his article about the bloody World War I battle of Meuse-Argonne in the Summer issue. In the fall of 1918, my father, Harry Brough, a telegrapher in the U.S. Army 5th (“Red Diamond”) Division Signal Corps, found himself in a trench...
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With Little Less Than Savage Fury
On April 22, 1775, three days after a British column marched out of Boston and clashed with militiamen at Lexington and Concord, the news—and the cry of Revolution!—reached Danbury, Connecticut, where 18-year-old Stephen Maples Jarvis was working on the family farm. Over the next several days, the young man would confront the hard, consequential choice between joining the rebel patriots or...
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Was Jefferson Davis Captured In A Dress?
 On Sunday, May 14, 1865, Benjamin Brown French, commissioner of public buildings for the District of Columbia, left his home on Capitol Hill to buy a copy of the Daily Morning Chronicle. “When I came up from breakfast I went out and got the Chronicle,” he wrote in his journal, “and the first thing that met my eyes was ‘Capture of Jeff Davis’ in letters two inches long. Thank God we have got...
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Peanuts Turns 60
On October 2, 1950, my father signed with United Feature Syndicate, believing that his job was to help editors sell newspapers. He started in seven papers. Fifty years later, with the strip appearing in a record 2,600 newspapers, Dad still went to work motivated by that same belief.As I grew up, I regarded my father not as Snoopy’s dad but mine. I wasn’t quite convinced he had a real job: He didn...
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FDR Declassified
On June 30, 2010, 14 boxes containing a treasure trove of more than 5,000 personal letters, notes, and photographs from the Roosevelt administration and his family arrived at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York. The material—the personal archives of Grace Tully, Roosevelt’s last private secretary, who served him for 17 years—caused a stir among historians, who believe it may...
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The Last Confederate Prison
November 17, 1864—Three of our men were frozen to death last night in the stockade! Large fires are going, but many are so reduced in vitality that they easily froze notwithstanding,” wrote Union Pvt. Robert Knox Sneden while imprisoned at Camp Lawton in Millen, Georgia, an overflow camp for the infamous Andersonville prison 160 miles to its west.Historians know much about this prison camp...
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Fall Books
 First Family Abigail and John Adams By Joseph J. Ellis   Best-selling author of American Sphinx and Founding Brothers, Ellis admires the most prolific political couple in American history. John and Abigail Adams raised four children (losing two others) and produced 1,200 letters. Combining historical biography, political history, and quotidian romance, First Family is both learned and...
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Civil War 150th Heating Up
 Electronic technician Ed Anderson makes last-minute checks of the new Illinois Gallery at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum in Springfield, Illinois, which displays a Civil War timeline superimposed over Fort Sumter in flames. The exhibit, “Team of Rivals,” showcases Lincoln’s decision making as war broke out. It runs until August 15, 2011. www.alplm....
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More Civil War At The National Archives
 The National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C., has opened the second half of its Civil War exhibit Discovering the Civil War, which includes a Union certificate of service, left, that went to the mother of a man in the 30th Iowa who died and  
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National Jewish Museum
 In the shadow of Independence Hall and a half block from the Liberty Bell, on some of this nation’s most hallowed ground, sits the brand new glass-and-terra-cotta National Museum of American Jewish History, which opened this November. It’s somehow fitting, this juxtaposition of a museum devoted to one of the world’s most persecuted peoples and the colonial hallways...
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Letters To The Editor
 Konnichiwa, Snoopy!  In 1955, when I was 17, the Navy sent me to Naval Air Station Atsugi in Japan to serve as a photographer, where I shot everything from President Eisenhower’s visit to various crime scenes. I’ll never forget how my homesickness lifted when I came across Peanuts comic strips published in a Japanese paperback! I was surprised to learn that the book sold...
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Showdown At Sumter
On March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln’s first day in office, a letter from Maj. Robert Anderson, commander of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, landed on the new president’s desk, informing him the garrison would run out of provisions in a month or six weeks. Lincoln had to make his first, and one of his most important, decisions as commander in chief. Would he keep his inaugural vow to “hold, occupy...
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Iron Wills, Iron Ships
What the USS Monitor’s crewmen remembered most about the moments before the battle on the morning of March 9, 1862, was the silence.   “Every one was at his post, fixed like a statue,” Paymaster William Keeler recalled. “The most profound silence reigned” on board the ironclad, and “if there had been a coward heart there its throb would have been audible,...
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Finding The Real Jamestown
Forget much of what you know about the Jamestown colony. For the past 200 years, many archaeologists and historians believed that the James River had largely eroded any traces of the original settlement over the intervening four centuries. Our excavations, ongoing since 1994, have proved otherwise: we have uncovered more than 250 feet of two palisade wall lines, the east bulwark line, three...
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Champlain Among The Mohawk, 1609
A few generations ago, American colonial history centered on a single narrative that flowed from Jamestown in 1607 to the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Today early American history has blossomed into a braided narrative with many story lines.   A starting point might be four small beginnings, far apart in space but close in time. On April 26, 1607, Capt. John Smith and his comrades...
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Women At War
Early on March 20, 2003, when the desert sky was still shrouded in darkness, stadium lights shone down on Al Jabar Air Base in Kuwait and lit the path to the flight line for a 28-year-old Marine captain whose jumpsuit ID tag bore the name “McGrath.” The aviator strode briskly across the flight line with other pilots from the Green Knights all-weather fighter/attack squadron. Like millions of...
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“Strong Enough To Float An Iron Wedge”
In the waning daylight of the bloodiest single-day battle in American history, a tremendous cheer suddenly resounded from the 23d Ohio Volunteers arrayed across a cornfield in  Sharpsburg, Maryland. The tired men could see the figure of their 19-year-old commissary sergeant driving his mule team through shot and shell to their front lines bearing barrels of hot coffee and food. Every man in...
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Surviving Black Monday
I’d scrutinized the economy every working day for decades and had visited the Fed scores of times. Nevertheless, when I was appointed chairman in August 1987, I knew I’d have a lot to learn. That was reinforced the minute I walked in the door. The first person to greet me was Dennis Buckley, a security agent who would stay with me throughout my tenure. He addressed me as “Mr. Chairman.”Without...
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Remembering David Halberstam
DAVID HALBERSTAM had put the finishing touches on his final book, The Coldest Winter, in the spring of 2007, just five days before his tragic death in a car accident in California. He had essentially finished the book months earlier, but with a book there is finishing, and then a little more finishing, and then a final finishing, and after months of revising, checking and rechecking, slashing,...
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America’s Princess
It was an extraordinary friendship between photographer and subject. Over a period spanning 27 years, from the early years of her Hollywood fame to her tragic car accident in 1982, Howell Conant captured Grace Kelly as she blossomed from a movie legend into a princess and then mother and royal role model. In the process, Conant broke through the cold, goddess-style portrait style that was the...
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Joseph Ellis Explains Just How Revolutionary The Revolution Was
MANY YEARS AFTER PLAYING THEIR famed roles in promoting revolution and republicanism among the dispersed peoples of colonial North America, John Adams and Benjamin Rush engaged in a lively correspondence about the importance of human agency in determining the course of history. “I shall continue to believe that ‘great men’ are a lie,” wrote Rush, “and that there is...
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Geoffrey C. Ward’s New History Of World War II
THEWAR: AN INTIMATE HISTORY, 1941–1945, by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns (Knopf, 480 pages, $50), is the companion volume to Ken Burns’ documentary series about World War II that aired in September. The War should be read by everyone in the family, from high schoolers, many of whom, as Burns points out in his introduction, “think we fought with the Germans against the Russians in the Second...
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Lincoln’s Home Away From Home Reopens
Only three miles from the White House, the house in northwest Washington, D.C., offered Abraham Lincoln a refuge from the capital’s summertime heat and political pressures. The 16th president spent an estimated one-quarter of his time in office at this 34-room, brown-and-white stucco building. Now the National Trust for Historic Preservation has completed a $15 million restoration and...
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America’s Frontier Forever Changed
Half a century after engines touched pilot to pilot at Promontory, Utah, to complete the first transcontinental railroad, the imprint of the Iron Road was nearly everywhere in the American West. Some enthusiastic real estate promoters and railway officials even claimed that the railroads invented the West—or at least the national image of the West.With the exception of the federal government, no...
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When The Reaper Came Calling
 To write a great book choose a great theme, said Herman Melville, one of the sages, fools, and common folk who appear in this vivid panorama of tragic history. So let us now praise Drew Gilpin Faust for tackling such a theme in This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Knopf , 346 pages, $27.95): We all die, yet in one particularly gruesome war men died so differently...
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Did Alexander Graham Bell Steal The Telephone Patent?
In his new book, The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell’s Secret (Norton, 256 pages, $24.95), Seth Shulman states that the famous inventor “was plagued by a secret: he stole the key idea behind the invention of the telephone.”In this well-written but critically flawed account, Shulman tells the story of his research in the Bell-versus-Gray controversy— the question of who first came...
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In These Pages
 50 Years Ago   Davy Crockett on How to Win an Election When the day of election approaches, visit your constituents far and wide. Treat liberally, and drink freely, in order to rise in their estimation, though you fall in your own. True, you may be called a drunken dog by some of the clean shirt and silk stocking gentry, but the real rough necks will style you a jovial fellow, their...
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100 Years Ago: The World’s First Airplane Fatality
 The aeroplane seemed to tip sharply for a fraction of a second, then it started up for about ten feet; this was followed by a short, sharp dive and a crash in the field,” reported the New York Times about the crash of Orville Wright and Lt. Thomas Selfridge in Fort Myer, Virginia, on September 17, 1908. “Instantly the dust arose in a yellow, choking cloud that spread a dull pall...
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Survivors America
 Gathered around the office water cooler (actually, the automatic coffeemaker) the other day, we editors shared a bit of our fatigue with the surfeit of reality, survivor, and celebrity-gladiator programming on television these days. Even as our soldiers fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is hard to avoid images of tanned suburban faces eating fake worms in exotic locales and tackling staged...
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First Images Of The New World
 In late 16th-century London, a group of curious Elizabethan courtiers gathered around a sheaf of watercolors and murmured in wonder. A cheife Herowans wife of Pomeoc and her daughter of the age of 8 or 10 yeares exhibited no spectacular artistry, yet did provide something extraordinary: the first representational glimpse of the New World. Aside from a few sailors and a handful of intrepid...
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Rearview Mirror
“A Ride along the Lincoln Highway” (PBS, October 29, 8 p.m. EST—check local listings) tells the story of the nation’s first transcontinental highway, which in 1913 stretched nearly 3,400 miles from San Francisco’s Lincoln Park to Times Square in New York City. Producer/director Rick Sebak of the Pittsburgh PBS station WQED, known for his films about the cultural and...
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No Finer Bass Voice
EMI Classics has just released Paul Robeson: The Complete EMI Sessions 1928-1939 ($85.98), a seven-CD set featuring 170 digitally remastered tracks that include American plantation songs and spirituals, British folk songs, art songs, and popular hits of the day, such as “Ol’ Man River” from Show Boat. Robeson recorded this diverse repertoire for EMI’s HMV label while...
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Gonzo Gonzo Gone
For the counter-culture crowd of the late 1960s and early 1970s, reading Hunter S. Thompson was de rigueur. His best-known books, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (1972) and Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 (1973) marked a hypercharged, drug-fueled new style of writing, which came to be called “The New Journalism.” While writers such...
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She Kept The Nest
 Author Kate Clifford Larson does not have any axes to grind in The Assassin’s Accomplice: Mary Surratt and the Plot to Kill Abraham Lincoln (Basic Books, 288 pages, $26), the story of the first woman hanged by the U.S. government. Larson makes no claims to correcting the record or offering new evidence about Lincoln’s assassination. Instead, she simply relates the largely...
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Jamestown Colony Shipwrecks
 The first “permanent” settlement in English North America could hardly have been a worse squeaker. The tragic saga that began in 1607 is now well known, given the tercentennial celebrations last year and the worthy effort to set the record straight vis-à-vis the popularity of the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock. Most Virginia settlers died, while the few who lived endured...
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President Adams Appoints John Marshall
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The Miracle On Missionary Ridge
On the morning of October 24 Charles A. Dana, a War Department special observer in Chattanooga, notified Secretary Stanton that "Grant arrived last night, wet, dirty and well." He added that the General had just gone out with Thomas to examine what looked like a weak spot in the encircling Confederate lines. Grant had wasted no time; by ten o'clock that morning he was riding north of...
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Slaughter On Cemetery Ridge
Not until 2:30 p.m. on July 3, 1863, did the ear-splitting bombardment finally slacken on the rolling farmland of southern Pennsylvania. Nothing like it had ever been experienced before in America, or would be again. “The very ground shook and trembled,” wrote a witness, “and the smoke of the guns rolled out of the valley as tho there were thousands of acres of timber on fire.” For close to 90...
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Adams Appoints Marshall
Most jurists and constitutional scholars today would probably contend that the most controlling precedent to be set in the early republic was laid down in the 1803 Marbury v. Madison decision. While a formidable ruling, it was not, however, the decisive moment—at least not to people at the time. The hinge event in the early history of the judiciary was President John Adams’s appointment of John...
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Editor’s Letter
It happens that three of the most critical and momentous occasions in our nation’s history converge in this issue. Few events have received more scrutiny than the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy. Why did Lee Harvey Oswald do it—and did anyone help him? Over the past 45 years, many have weighed in, from the members of the Warren Commission and the congressional investigators to...
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Lincoln As Commander In Chief
On July 27, 1848, a tall, raw-boned Whig congressman from Illinois rose in the House of Representatives to challenge the Mexican War policies of President James K. Polk. An opponent of what he considered an unjust war, Abraham Lincoln mocked his own meager record as a militia captain who had seen no action in the Black Hawk War of 1832. “By the way, Mr. Speaker, did you know I am a military hero...
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Holiday Gift Special
 Brothers in Arms: The Kennedys, the Castros, and the Politics of Murder  By Gus Russo and Stephen Molton A new report on the Kennedy and Castro brothers reopens the assassination case with 30-years-worth of breakthrough research and interviews, positing that Bobby Kennedy’s push for Fidel Castro’s murder accomplished instead the death of his own brother; and that Lee Harvey...
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Lincoln In Hawaiian Memory
 On the grounds of the Ewa Plantation School just west of Honolulu stands a bronze statue of a young Abraham Lincoln with ax in hand, forearms rippling after splitting logs. Fifteen years before Hawaii became a state in 1959, school officials unveiled this statue, a symbol of Lincoln’s popularity in Hawaii during the American Civil War, when many Hawaiians enlisted in the Union Army...
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Poe Turns 200: 1809-2009
 “I endeavored to shriek–, and my lips and my parched tongue moved convulsively together in the attempt–but no voice issued from the cavernous lungs which,  oppressed as if by the weight of some incumbent mountain, gasped and palpitated, with the heart, at every elaborate and struggling inspiration,” wrote Edgar Allan Poe in his chilling description of a man who...
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First Bateau For Fort Ticonderoga
 Last fall, Lake Champlain Maritime Museum’s master shipbuilder, Dale Henry, above, steers the oak-and-pine bateau he built for Fort Ticonderoga into the La Chute River. In the large roadless upstate New York of the 18th century, the scene of much fierce fighting during the French and Indian War and Revolution, the clumsy, flat-bottomed bateau became the vehicle of choice to transport...
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