January 2011

Overrated

On December 17, 1903, Orville Wright (having won a coin toss with Wilbur) took off at Kitty Hawk in the machine the brothers called the Flyer . It reached an altitude of 10 feet and traveled 120 feet in 12 seconds. For the first time in history, a controllable, man-made machine had left the ground, climbed higher than its takeoff point, and landed at the original altitude. Man had flown . The Flyer made three more flights that day, then crashed after the last flight of 852 feet in 57 seconds; it never flew again.

Overrated

Choosing underrated and overrated admirals is especially tricky, because being at the right or wrong place at the right or wrong time has everything to do with how most military commanders are assessed. And biographical profiles of these officers rarely address the political machinations and motivations that may have put them in crucial command situations in the first place. Several admirals, even though they reached flag rank, have sunk to relative obscurity in the big picture of American history. Others had their careers shortened or at least marred by circumstances that some say were beyond their control. Command accountability was often the reason.

Overrated

For four generations, from John to cousin Samuel, to Henry and Brooks, the Adams family was devoted to public service—and to its own reputation. They would be keenly interested in an overrated/underrated ranking of themselves.

The most overrated are John, the second President, and his wife, Abigail. He is justly honored as a patriot and diplomat, and her feisty letters are quoted in every book on the period. John’s biographers overplay their hand, however, when they defend his Presidency. Confronted by a menacing France, he lurched from war hawk to peacenik with an abruptness that finished his career and the Federalist party. Abigail monopolizes attention as supposedly the only bright lady of the Founding; among many others, though, was her friend Mercy Otis Warren, who published a history of the Revolution that, incidentally, trashed John.

Underrated

Contact the Lake Champlain Regional Chamber of Commerce (802-863-3489 for its brochure “The Lure of the Valley,” or try www.vermont.org ). You’ll find good tips on area accommodations and restaurants as well as star attractions. First among these is the Shelburne Museum, founded in 1947 by Electra Havemeyer Webb, an heir to the Vanderbilt fortune. This is a collection of all things American (plus some world-class impressionist paintings) housed in 37 buildings, many with histories of their own. Last year, the museum took a 1950s house that had been used as temporary quarters for staff and visiting researchers and made it into an exhibit. It radiates such an air of homey familiarity that it seemed natural to me to perch on the partly sprung living-room couch and leaf through an aged Saturday Evening Post . Realizing this was a museum, I jumped up in embarrassment, only to find out later that settling in (and schmoozing with the docent about aged and familiar household appliances) are just what you’re meant to do.

In February 1998, Vermont’s senator Patrick Leahy attached a few words to a bill pending in Congress: “The term ‘Great Lakes’ includes Lake Champlain.” With President Clinton’s signature, Champlain became the sixth Great Lake—and eligible for federal research funds. Some representatives of the states alongside the other five bodies of water didn’t like this one bit. SENATOR SNEAKS IN A SIXTH GREAT LAKE ran one newspaper headline, and Ohio’s senator John Glenn spoke out: “I know the Great Lakes. I’ve traveled the Great Lakes. And Lake Champlain is not one of the Great Lakes.” Barely a month later, the Senate voted to revoke the lake’s new status, but a compromise allowed for grants to study the ecology of what no one denies is America’s most historic body of water. Champlain was the site of an important offensive naval action by American forces in the Revolution and today holds the nation’s foremost collection of underwater historic shipwrecks.

As baseball’s pennant races approach their climax, we all can look forward to that furious, no-holds-barred competition that enlivens nearly every season of our national pastime. I’m referring, of course, to the battle between owners and players over the game’s Basic Agreement.

The history of baseball’s labor struggles has always stood the traditional roles of labor and management on their heads. The main goal of the players’ union has simply been to secure for its members what has always been guaranteed to every other American this side of slavery and indentured servitude: the right to sell their services in the marketplace. In response, the owners have demanded socialism, at least for themselves.

One very important factor that kept the Korean War death toll from mounting even higher was the technology and dedication of U.S. Army medical units. In a recent exhibit titled Blood, Sweat, and Saline: Combat Medicine in the Korean Conflict , the National Museum of Health and Medicine ( www.natmedmuse.afip.org ), in Washington, D.C., showed how military nurses, medics, and surgeons struggled to make the art of healing keep pace with neverending advances in the art of killing. Even after the war was over, their work continued to save lives: In Vietnam, helicopter medevacs and trauma care first developed in Korea helped hold the death rate down to 2.6 percent for wounded servicemen admitted to a medical facility. Today, civilians also benefit from the nowroutine transfer by helicopter of patients to specialized trauma and burn units.

The National Museum of Health and Medicine is a branch of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology.

The historian Allan R. Millett has taken us to task for stating last year, in Stanley Weintraub’s anniversary essay on the Korean War, that it “cost the United States of America 54,246 lives.” Writes Millett: “the war is unsatisfying enough without making our losses worse than they were.” He then sets the record straight in a condensation of an essay he wrote on the subject for the immense (1,240 pages!), recently published Encyclopedia of the Korean War (Spencer Tucker, editor; ABC-Clio, $275):

“The 54,246 figure, which routinely appears on monuments and in textbooks, became accepted through its use in the Statistical History of the United States , a compilation that has appeared in various editions for decades under the sponsorship of the U.S. Bureau of the Census.

BAND OF BROTHERS
AN AIRBORNE COMPANY’S SAGA ON HBO

Stephen Ambrose’s best-selling book Band of Brothers followed one company of the 101st Airborne from their training in Georgia in 1942 through their parachuting into France in 1944, fighting in the Battle of the Bulge, and capturing Hitler’s mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden in 1945. Now HBO brings the story to the screen in a 10-part series produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks and partly directed by Hanks. It debuts Sunday, September 9, and promises to be a blockbuster: It has 500 speaking roles, uses more than 10,000 extras, and consumed more pyrotechnics by the third episode than Saving Private Ryan expended in the entire film.

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