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January 2011
I was reading the article “Capsule History” (November 1999) with great interest when I was startled to see the face of my father in the photo of the Westinghouse capsule on page 93. I was reminded that Dad was a carpenter working at the New York World’s Fair during its construction, in 1938–39. In the photo Michael Wells is on the far right behind the uniformed troops, wearing a fedora and his carpenter’s overalls. At the time he was forty-six years old, and the World’s Fair was a godsend. He had emigrated from Ireland around 1920, and his life was not too easy during the Depression years.
The caption accompanying Kevin Baker’s “In the News” column for February/March refers to “an assassination attempt on FDR.” This leaves out the very real possibility that Giuseppe Zangara was actually trying to hit the mayor of Chicago, Anton Cermak, whom in fact he did kill. Many mob watchers here in Chicago think that was the case.
The rumor first began to spread around Washington last year: Senator John McCain had a skeleton in his closet. Was it something to do with his past as a war hero in Vietnam? His voting record in the Senate? The role he had played as one of the Keating Five in the savings and loan scandal?
No, it was something much worse. Supposedly, John McCain had a temper. The rumor was apparently bruited about by George W. Bush’s campaign, which would make an appropriate bookend to his family’s sojourn in national politics. After all, it was George père’s allies who put it about in 1988 that either Michael Dukakis or his wife or both had a history of mental illness.
Most Overrated Writer:
Perhaps the best way to take a writer’s measure is to assess his influence on other writers, but if that’s the yardstick, one feels compelled to make an exception of the late Raymond Carver (1938–88), who probably wrote the single most influential—and overrated—short story collection of our time, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981). This is the sacred text of “minimalism,” a loose literary movement that turned whole shelves of stories and novels by a generation of workshop-trained writers into an attenuated series of hints, shrugs, and murmurs. At his best, writing about his banged-up, hard-drinking, sweet-souled dramatis personae, Carver could startle and move a reader. But less is not always more, and thanks to his spell, an appreciable chunk of the now-past century went underchronicled by some of our potentially best writers.
Most Underrated Writer:
O. J. Simpson.
War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague.
Why? Obvious! One was about a football player. The other, covered by Court TV in 1996, was the first trial since Nuremburg that attempted to establish a worldwide rule of law.
Omar N. Bradley
Unlike MacArthur, Patton, and Elsenhower, Omar N. Bradley (1893–1981) escaped searching media analysis during the war and has dodged biographers ever since. His A Soldier’s Story (1951) and A General’s Life (1983) protect his reputation and encourage sympathy for Bradley’s struggles with his detractors. Even the movie Patton serves to keep the Bradley myth alive. How can one possibly dislike Karl Maiden as Bradley in his struggles with the imperious, half-crazed George C. Scott?