January 2011

“The Cold War is over,” said Paul Tsongas, campaigning for the presidency in 1992. “Japan won.”

Well, maybe. It takes a long time to sort out a war; Americans are still debating what the Civil War was actually about, and we’re not entirely sure how World War I could even have happened.

Only World War II seems free of ambiguity, and it’s perhaps not surprising that we made a far greater national fuss over the fiftieth anniversary of the Normandy landings than we did in August of 1995: D-Day ended with the liberation of Europe and the closing of the Nazi death factories; the thunderclap that finished things for good rolled forward into our own time, continues to vibrate over the present, and perhaps will keep on doing so forever.

Sergei Khrushchev repeatedly insists that Soviet leaders were stunned and scandalized by America’s behavior, from the first U-2 flight in 1956 to Elsenhower’s lack of apology or conciliation in 1960. However, U-2 is pronounced “you too,” and such a riposte is appropriate.

Within the United States, Soviet espionage predated World War II. Stalin began by setting up a trading organization, Amtorg, that acted as a front for theft of industrial secrets. During the war, Soviet agents penetrated the heart of the Manhattan Project and made off with some 10,000 pages of technical material, all of which reached Moscow safely. Igor Kurchatov, who headed the Soviet atomic-bomb effort, made good use of these secrets. His first nuclear reactor closely followed an American design, except for being larger to compensate for the lesser purity of his uranium. The first Soviet atomic bomb, detonated in 1949, amounted to a copy of the Fat Man plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki four years earlier.

On May 1, 1960, my father was shot down while flying a U-2 over the Soviet Union. After the SAM-2 missile exploded near the fragile tail section of his aircraft, everything appeared to be in order until the plane nosed down and didn’t respond to the controls. A few seconds passed before my father realized that the plane had been severely damaged and he was at the mercy of the Lord. He thought about activating the destruct mechanism but first had to prepare himself to use the ejection seat.

However, when my dad was ready to eject, he realized he had been thrown forward in his seat in such a way that if he used the ejection mechanism, both his legs would be severed. He decided to release the canopy enclosing the cockpit and attempt to crawl out. When the canopy was clear, he undid his seat belt and was immediately propelled up over the front of the cockpit. Before he could reach the destruct mechanism, he was thrown clear of the plane.

On May 1, 1960, a Soviet V-750 surface-to-air missile (known in America as the SA-Z “Guideline”) shot down a U-2, one of the “invulnerable” American spy planes. The plane was a phantom—of all the secret projects of those years, perhaps the most secret. Even now, when it seems there are no secrets left, not everything connected with the U-2’s last mission can be explained from the standpoint of normal human logic.

In the 1950s, years of deep freeze in the Cold War, politicians and ordinary people on both sides were gripped by the same fear: that the opposing side, whether Moscow or Washington, would seize the opportunity to deal the first, and possibly last, nuclear strike. At the 1955 Geneva meeting of the four powers—the U.S.S.R., the United States, Great Britain, and France—President Eisenhower presented his Open Skies proposal, which called for planes of the opposing blocs to fly over the territories of probable adversaries in order to monitor their nuclear arms.

Contact the Tourism Council of Frederick County (800-999-3613). Consider staying at the 1876 McCleery’s Flat in downtown Frederick (800-774-7926), walking distance from the delightful Candy Kitchen on Market Street. The guided walking tour of Frederick City is an excellent introduction to the area’s history (301-663-8687). To learn more about Frederick’s earliest settlers, visit the Schifferstadt Museum (301-663-3885), a 175Os German colonial house with two-foot-thick sandstone walls and Spartan period furnishings. In Emmitsburg, in northern Frederick County, visit the National Shrine of Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, the first native-born North American to be canonized. There you can admire the grand basilica and mortuary chapel and tour the earlynineteenth-century buildings where Seton and the Sisters of Charity pioneered the American parochial school.

The Italianate building at 101 West Church Street in Frederick, Maryland, had by 1861 become a house divided. The patriarch of the Baers, the family who lived there, was staunchly pro-Union, while his son had married a Southerner and taken up her cause. Tensions built up so much between the two factions that the elder Mr. Baer devised a plan: His son’s family would live on the first floor and the Northern sympathizers on the second; the dining room and foyer would be neutral territory, with no political talk allowed.

On June 27, 1950, two days after the North Koreans invaded South Korea, I received a memorandum:

  Subject: Appointment as Official Spokesman
  To: Lieutenant Colonel Edward L. Rowny
  1. Effective immediately, in addition to your duties as Plans Officer, G-3 Section, FECOM [Far East Command], you will act as my official spokesman.
  2. You will brief the press daily, telling them all they need to know and nothing they need not know.
  Signed: Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander, FECOM

General MacArthur, dissatisfied with the performance of his public relations officer, assigned me the nerve-wracking job of dealing with the press. For the next two months I lost many pounds and almost my mind dealing with the Alsop brothers and other journalists who came to Tokyo to cover the Korean War. I felt nothing but relief when on September 1, 1950, I joined the invasion forces as the engineer of X Corps.

Unless you’ve never been online, visited a video-rental store, watched cable TV, or turned on the set in a modern hotel, you know how much technology has changed the landscape of sex in recent decades. Or at least the landscape of pornography. The information-technology revolution has not stopped at the bedroom door but burst through it, deluging us with X-rated cyber cams and DVDs and chat rooms and phone-call services. But something else has also happened: Not only have new technologies spurred innovation in pornography, but the opposite has occurred. Sex has become one of the forces shaping information technology.