Victor Davis Hanson’s smug, simplistic assessment (“Sherman’s War,” November 1999) of the leaders and followers of the Old South as people who deserved all the ills that befell them—because they held on to slavery—smacks of the same mean-spiritedness some adherents of the Religious Right espouse in saying AIDS is the just reward for the nation’s homosexuals in violating human normality.
Big yachts have been sailing for the America’s Cup since 1851, which makes it the oldest international sporting trophy in continuous competition. That it has survived for so long seems to defy common sense. No contest could seem more anachronistic than a four-hour race held miles from shore between two otherwise useless objects moving slower than a good marathon runner and maneuvering under rules so complex that even the participants cannot agree about them. But if the America’s Cup survives and thrives, it is precisely because it is so anachronistic. At its heart is an old, simple idea: Two competitors in large, spectacularly beautiful objects, each representing one nation, go head to head (or rather bow to bow) for supremacy.
MUSICIANS
Beastie Boys Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, the Dalai Lama
Ani DiFranco Lucille Clifton (poet),
Utah Phillips (musician), Ammon Hennacy (activist, Catholic Worker Movement), Emma Goldman
Art Garfunkel Woodrow Wilson
Herbie Hancock League of the Iroquois
Faith Hill Jacqueline Onassis
Three years ago I spent my summer vacation trying to find a new way to help persuade the students in my class at Haverhill High School in Haverhill, Massachusetts, that history is not a dead subject but a vital one valued by many people today. I got an idea when I was leafing through an old copy of American Heritage and saw an article by a history teacher who had written to various politicians, military leaders, and authors asking them what he should teach his students about the Vietnam War. He had received many wonderful responses.
I very much liked the idea of writing well-known people to solicit their aid in teaching history. But how would I involve the students? I decided I would let them devise a question, choose the recipients, and each write to his or her own choice directly.
In the fall of 1966 I was serving as an intelligence analyst in the United States Air Force Security Service and was stationed in Washington, D.C., attending Vietnamese language school with about a hundred of my fellow airmen. The school was operated by an outside contractor and was located on S Street, off Connecticut Avenue. Because of the nature of our training and security background, we went to class in civilian clothes.
Down the block from our school was the headquarters for the National Student Association (NSA). This organization, which we later learned was funded by the CIA, was used by the Johnson administration as a foil for burgeoning student dissent and to project a moderate image overseas.
One day we learned that Vice President Hubert Humphrey was going to visit NSA headquarters. When we went out to lunch, a number of us decided to see if we could get a glimpse of him as he emerged from the building. About thirty of us were congregating across the street when the Vice President came out.
One of my early assignments as a rookie civil rights worker was to stay close to Dr. King when we filed through the streets of Selma, Alabama. Three or four of us shared this duty, and together we kept him pretty much surrounded, blocking the aim of any sniper who might be crouched on a nearby rooftop.
I had arrived in Selma less than a month before, white and fresh from college in Colorado. Hundreds of us were set to march that day, February 1,1965. Our ostensible destination was the Dallas County Courthouse downtown, to renew a protest against the exclusion of almost all of the county’s black citizens from the voting rolls. But no one expected to get that far; everybody knew we wanted to provoke arrests.