January 2011

On September evening in 1918, while unpacking an overseas bag for her husband, who had returned from a fact-finding tour of war-torn Europe with double pneumonia, Eleanor Roosevelt came upon a cache of love letters from her social secretary, Lucy Mercer. Later Eleanor would write that the bottom fell out of her world. She did what any high-minded wife would have done at the time: She offered her husband his freedom. Guilty, grief-stricken, but besotted by the lovely Miss Mercer, Franklin accepted his wife’s offer. After six months in Reno, which had recently replaced Sioux Falls, South Dakota, as America’s foremost divorce mill, Eleanor, mindful of the shame and potential scandal that stalked a divorcée, withdrew to a small safe circle of wellborn friends and relatives. Franklin, dismissed from his position by Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, who had hounded his own brother-in-law from the family newspaper and the state of North Carolina for a similar offense, took the second Mrs. Roosevelt back to Hyde Park.

Calling it simply Physics spoke volumes. As a freshman on the campus of Iowa State University in 1983, I always enjoyed that squat brick building. The wooden floors in the foyer creaked as you entered, waking the sullen graduate students slumped over study tables, probably occupying the same chairs since the night before. The foyer led directly to a large lecture hall with tiny desks that never quite accommodated a notebook. It was the essence of the college experience.

The poorly lit old building seemed to harbor secrets in every dark corner. Just inside the door was a small poster trumpeting the creation of the first digital computer, the ABC, by Prof. John V. Atanasoff and his graduate student Clifford Berry.

In October 1962 I was a sonarman on board the destroyer USS Waller , home-ported in Norfolk, Virginia. Our duty was antisubmarine warfare training in the Cape Hatteras area, which meant we were out two weeks and in two weeks. Suddenly all leaves and liberties were canceled. There was activity all over the base, and ships began loading stores, ammunition, and fuel around the clock. One of the guys in our division was sure something big was happening, but Sal tended to be an alarmist, so we paid him little attention. Instead we believed this was a large exercise, as we’d been told. Within a couple of days we were under way with Task Group Alfa, led by the carrier USS Randolph .

The weather was bad as we met several troop transports off Moorehead City, North Carolina. We were steaming “condition III”—men at battle stations—and were told that submarines and surface ships would try to penetrate our screen during this “exercise.” Sal continued to insist that something was up: too many brass were at sea at one time.

On Friday, November 22,1963,1 was in the fifth month of my cardiology fellowship at Bethesda Naval Hospital on the northern edge of the District of Columbia. As I stepped into the hallway at 1:45 P.M. , I noticed a small group by the mailroom window listening intently to a radio broadcast. We heard the awful news of President Kennedy’s shooting.

Around four o’clock we received word that President Johnson was returning immediately to Washington. Since he had suffered a heart attack in 1955 while Senate majority leader, it seemed wise to send a cardiologist in a Navy ambulance down to Andrews Air Force Base to be at the disposal of the President’s physician. Our small cardiology staff gathered about a table. Each of my seniors appeared to have a pressing engagement, and I became aware that all eyes were fixed on me. I volunteered to go.

Contact the Austin Convention & Visitors Bureau (800-926-2282 or www.austintexas.org ) for lists of hotels, restaurants, annual events, and walking tours. When you arrive in Austin, drop by the bureau to collect more of its sparkling and informative brochures such as the one on 101 Things to Do in Austin, and enjoy the large blowups of photos of Austin in the old days that decorate the walls.

I decided to stay at Austin’s historic Driskill Hotel because of its great location on Sixth, near Congress, and because I was looking forward to exploring its elaborate public rooms. It turned out that almost all the public space was undergoing a major restoration (blasé Austinites tell me the Driskill is always being redone), and among the jackhammers, drop-cloths, and closed-off rooms, I had little sense of the place. A good lunch at the Four Seasons, which occupies a scenic riverfront location downtown, made me think that would have been the perfect choice. The Stephen F. Austin Hotel, a 1920s structure on Congress Avenue, has been revamped recently and would also be well worth checking out.

A friend of mine who settled in Austin about 30 years ago tells me it was really a small town then. “I knew the whole place. Geographically there was a core to it.” Ed Van de Vort, an Austin historian, agrees: “If you compare a pre-1910 photo of Congress Avenue with one taken in the late sixties, you wouldn’t see much change.”

Today, the Texas capital is in many ways a thoroughly modern metropolis, with a population approaching one million and an architectural growth spurt that has allowed a bland, oversized skyline to claim prime territory along Town Lake, the dammed portion of the Colorado River that flows through the city center. Once they were built, those structures fell empty with the economic downturn of the 1980s. Everything has roared back, and the challenge for today’s Austin is to keep the balance between the traces of that small town of recent memory and the high-tech center it has become. “In our curmudgeonly way we’d like it to remain the small college town it used to be,” wrote the columnist Molly Ivins.

As last year ended, three millennial concerns obsessed the public—or at least the press. The first was the utterly anticlimactic concern over Y2K disasters. The second was the utterly semantic concern over when exactly a century ends anyway. The third was concern over the fate of the Panama Canal as it switched to Panamanian control on December 31, 1999.

So far, the Panama Canal fear has proved just as justified as the Y2K fear. The story is far from over, of course, and much may depend on the unpredictable political future of Panama itself, but everything has gone very smoothly in the first months. And the fact that the canal remains so worth worrying about today—indeed that it got built at all—remains extraordinary.

It was when new the most high-tech, advanced, and forward-looking construction on earth—which is the only reason it is still useful more than 85 years later. The United States had both the luck to take it on during the only brief period in history when it would have been possible and the foresight to build , it for the ages.

Thanks to the inexorable workings of plate tectonics, the Atlantic Ocean is about 100 feet wider today than it was when Columbus first made landfall in the Bahamas in 1492. In every sense but the physical, however, it is almost incomparably narrower. Columbus left Spain on August 3 and arrived in the New World on October 12, a voyage of 70 days. Although sailing ships would get much larger and more seaworthy over the next 300 years, they would not get much faster. A two-month passage, sailing westward, was still considered reasonable as late as the early nineteenth century. The coming of steam changed that abruptly. By 1900, it took only a week for a crack passenger ship to cross the Atlantic.

The whole campaign was a sham. It pitted a well-known Washington insider, an incumbent too smart for his own good, against a candidate from the Western boondocks who many thought was simply not up to the job and whom others suspected of having used mind-altering substances. Both candidates tried to hide their shortcomings behind empty slogans and even emptier spectacles. It was, as one of its chroniclers dubbed it, “the Great Image Campaign.”

I’m referring, of course, to the presidential campaign of 1840, between Democratic President Martin Van Buren and his Whig challenger, William Henry Harrison. Van Buren, the “red fox” of Kinder-hook, was considered a political wizard, but in the wake of a devastating national depression he was hard pressed to keep hold of the populist mantle he had inherited from I Andrew Jackson.

While I found Thomas Fleming’s piece “George Washington, Spymaster” (February 2000), both informative and entertaining, I was surprised that he neglected to mention Sgt. Daniel Bissell of Connecticut, the only Revolutionary War spy to be personally decorated by General Washington.

In 1781, as part of his preliminary planning for an attack on British-held New York City, Washington ordered Bissell to enter the city in the guise of a defector, reconnoiter the redcoats’ positions, and return with his intelligence. However, soon after entering New York, Bissell fell ill and was unable to get back to the American lines until after Washington abandoned his plans for an attack and marched off for his meeting with Cornwallis in Virginia.

Two years later, Washington introduced the Badge of Military Merit, the first decoration awarded exclusively to enlisted men (and which was dusted off in 1933 and renamed the Purple Heart). Only three men, all sergeants from Connecticut, received it, with Bissell the only one to get his award at the direct order of Washington.