September 2007

The middle of the Mojave Desert might seem an unlikely place for a museum dedicated to Gen. George Patton, “Old Blood and Guts.” But Patton himself became linked to the desolate area in southeastern California, now known as Chiriaco Summit, when he chose it as the headquarters for the Desert Training Center during World War II. It played a major role in preparing soldiers before they marched into the North African desert to stop Germany’s onslaught. During the two years it was operational, nearly a million soldiers took a six-week course there.

Wandering through the General Patton Memorial Museum and the remains of the Desert Training Center makes for a fascinating if somewhat eerie history lesson. Much of the outdoor section remains untouched since Patton’s time.

The War: An Intimate History, 1941–1945, by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns (Knopf, 480 pages, $50), is the companion volume to the Ken Burns documentary series about World War II that airs later this month. It looks, at first glance, like it’s also the coffee table book of the season. It is, but only in the sense that given its size, a coffee table might be the most practical place to read it. 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 World War,” to baby boomers, who may believe they know what their parents went through.

In September 1850 P. T. Barnum brought Jenny Lind, the “Swedish Nightingale,” across the Atlantic to tour America. He risked everything, even mortgaging his home, to guarantee the famous soprano her extraordinary fee of $150,000. Determined to turn a profit, he generated a blizzard of publicity. He salted the crowd that greeted her at the New York dock with dozens of his own men. Some 20,000 onlookers gathered outside her hotel; city firemen paraded past her window.

Some thought it crass when Barnum auctioned the best seats at her concerts to the highest bidders. A hat maker named John Genin, a friend of Barnum’s, shelled out $225 to buy the very first ticket in New York, and his hats became the rage across the country. In other cities, entertainers and businessmen outbid one another to buy the first ticket and bask in the resulting notoriety. Here was the essence of Barnum, melding high and low culture with relentless publicity, instant celebrity, a profitable dash of controversy, and a good time had by all.

Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, in American politics, frontrunner status isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Take the example of George Romney, the popular three-term governor of Michigan (and father of the current presidential candidate Mitt Romney), who many insiders expected would easily lock up the Republican presidential nomination in 1968 despite Richard Nixon’s early lead in the polls. Handsome, energetic, and tremendously successful at everything he did, Romney was thought to be the GOP’s best hope at capturing the White House—until September 4, 1967—40 years ago today—when his candidacy suddenly imploded.

“Can a politician who is his party’s leading prospect for the Presidency a year before its national convention be eliminated from serious consideration before the preliminaries of the primary election have even begun?” The New York Timeswondered a few days later. “It doesn’t sound possible, but there were people in the Washington Hilton Hotel last week who swore that George Romney was on his way to achieving just such an enviable distinction.”