January 2011

My author’s vanity will survive Roger J. Spiller’s meager Gulf War bibliography, but I must protest his omission of the work of two of my colleagues, the BBC’s John Simpson and the incomparable Seymour Hersh. Simpson’s From the House of War remains the best journalistic summary of what happened, politically and militarily, and Hersh’s brilliant account of Gen. Barry McCaffrey’s senseless slaughter of Iraqis (after a cease-fire was declared) in the May 22, 2000, New Yorker should be required reading for anyone trying to untangle the mass of official lies told about Operation Desert Storm.

Roger J. Spiller’s Gulf War retrospective ("A War Against History") was a good essay on a multifaceted war (February/ March). To me the most engaging story of the conflict was the fact that the U.S. Marine Corps experienced a historical first. For the first time in its history, a father and son fought side by side under fire. They were Gunnery Sgt. George Clark and his son, Lance Cpl. Kevin Clark, of Kansas City, members of TOW Platoon, 2d Tank Batallion, 2d Marine Division. Semper Fi!

Your item “On ‘Wisconsin’: A Battleship Comes Home” in “History Now” (April) tells us that “only three other Iowa -class battleships survive.” This statement, though correct, also misleads in that only three other Iowas were ever completed. All survive, as do several memorialized ships from earlier classes (among them USS Alabama, Massachusetts, North Carolina ).

William Least Heat-Moon’s article “Water World” (April) is great with one exception: The caption for the picture on the last page is in error. First, the subject is not a refinery. It is a natural-gasfueled electrical power plant owned and operated by the Cleco Corporation, an investor-owned NYSE-traded electric company headquartered in Pineville, Louisiana. Second, the emissions from the facility are not “fumes.” What is being emitted is water vapor.

In the April issue’s captivating discussion of the Erie Canal (“The Erie Rising”), an old photograph taken in Durhamville shows a mule placidly descending a catwalk to join its teammate. The caption mistakenly terms the animal a horse. As a reader who grew up handling horses and mules, I suspect that unloading a team of horses might have been more difficult.

Bravo for John Lukacs’s splendid piece on Venice in the April issue! He might have added that the first American novel about Venice was written by, of all people, James Fenimore Cooper ( The Bravo , 1831). And of course William Dean Howells received his Venice consulship in 1861 as a reward for his campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln in 1860.

THESE COULD BE THE GRAND LADIES APPEARING in the Ascot scene of My Fair Lady , clothed and hatted by Cecil Beaton. In fact they are guests at the October 12, 1910, wedding of Kathleen Ewing and Edward H. Daly, with John Parley, archbishop of New York, officiating. “A special train brought bishop and guests from Grand Central Terminal to the bride’s home in Tarry town, New York, where the event took place,” writes their daughter, Eleanor Boylan. Afterward, all the female guests, including the bridesmaids, were asked to gather on the porch overlooking the garden to pose for this striking tableau. Mrs. Boylan recalls a bit of family lore: “The bridesmaids’ hats had been designed by Wanamaker, and when they arrived, complete with egret plumes, my Aunt Clara (highlighted, center right) said, ‘I will not wear anything that a beautiful bird had to die to provide,’ and there was a hasty substitution of flowers. That was a young woman very much ahead of her time!”

I was a little young to remember all the details surrounding my brush with history, but my father wrote an account of it in a letter to The New York Times shortly after Jackie Robinson died in October 1972. The clipping helps refresh my memory.

It was 1956. I had just turned seven and was recovering from mononucleosis. To celebrate, my father was taking me to my first baseball game, a Brooklyn-Cincinnati doubleheader at Ebbets Field. My mother wrote to Jackie Robinson explaining that we would be sitting in a right-field box and suggesting how much it would mean to me if he would stop by and say hello. My father told my mother that ballplayers couldn’t possibly respond to all such requests, and he said nothing about it to me. But he did take a camera to the game, just in case.

Robert Fogel is best known as one of the two authors of Time on the Cross, a pathbreaking 1974 book that applied statistics and numerical analysis to history to make a provocative and important point: American slavery on the eve of the Civil War was not an economically inefficient, slowly dying system, as was widely believed at the time, but rather a healthy monster that would perish only when the Union’s armies drove a stake through its heart. The book provoked furious controversy but withstood it so well that it helped Fogel win a Nobel Prize in economics in 1993.