January 2011

In May of 1977, I was a young Marine Corps lance corporal working with the Naval Security Group on Misawa Air Base, tucked away on the northern tip of the island of Honshu, Japan. While Misawa was somewhat isolated, it was conveniently located across the Sea of Japan from what President Reagan later referred to as the Evil Empire. With Vietnam behind us, our attention was once again returning to the Cold War, and, as a low-level communications technician, I was proud to make even the slightest contribution to the effort. Our mission often demanded that we work two full eight-hour shifts in a 24-hour period. This schedule allowed little more than a quick bite to eat and a few hours of sleep between shifts.

I was sweating out the summer of 1960 in a tenement in New York City’s Greenwich Village when a college friend offered me his family’s apartment for the month of August. It was a luxurious spread with a terrace at 2 Sutton Place, one of the city’s grander addresses. On my way to the elevator the morning after installing myself in my elegant digs, I glanced at the name tag on my neighbor’s door. “M. Monroe,” it read, in raised black ink in a businesslike type.

It couldn’t be, I thought. I asked the building’s doorman, and he confirmed that my neighbor was indeed Marilyn Monroe.

“Do you ever see her?” I asked.

“Not enough.”

I first met Douglas MacArthur in November 1921. I was only six months old at the time, but family lore has impressed it firmly in my memory. My father was a major in the Army Medical Corps; General MacArthur was the superintendent at West Point. Dad operated on Mrs. Arthur MacArthur, the general’s mother. I do not know what her medical problem was, but there were serious postoperative complications, and my father stayed at the hospital, never venturing far from her bedside, for at least ten days, until she was out of danger. Every day that my mother was alone at home with my parents’ firstborn—me—General MacArthur sent her a dozen long-stemmed American Beauty roses, with a note expressing his appreciation and understanding. I recall as a youngster seeing those notes, but they have long since disappeared from the family archives. I would give almost anything to have one now.

On Thanksgiving Day 1950, two months after General MacArthur’s masterly strategic stroke at Inchon, I was 75 miles south of Manchuria, posted to a battalion-sized 25th Infantry Division Task Force named for its commander, Lt. Col. Weldon G. Dolvin. Task Force Dolvin’s mission was to probe northward from the Chongchon River along the east side of its Kuryong tributary. This region had been the site of an earlier battle fought by elements of MacArthur’s favorite 1st Cavalry (really infantry) Division. It was rumored that “the Cav” had had “trouble” in the area and been withdrawn. Our division was its replacement.

America entered the 20th century with its finger on the shutter of Kodak’s Brownie (“You press the button; we do the rest”). It gave the amateur point-and-shoot snapper rough equality with the professional photographer, and in its first year on the market, 1900, all sales records were broken. A quarter of a million people had put down a dollar and were busy recording history.

It was emblematic of the century that it opened with imagery. Nowadays, when every man is his own cinematographer, when we expect to watch news as it happens, when we have long since stopped marveling at having the finished Polaroid color prints in our hands within seconds of pressing the button. Nowadays, the old saying that every picture is worth a thousand words has been turned on its head. Every story is worth a thousand pictures. Hardly anybody in the country knew at the time of his election what President Lincoln looked like. Everybody in the world could recognize John F. Kennedy, Jr., from babyhood, and it was through a million images, still and moving, that we commemorated his life.

Merritt Ierley replies: Thomas Crapper indeed had nothing to do with the invention of the toilet, nor does he seem to have played a significant role in its development, though he may have held several patents. Except for his last name he would be no more remembered than the hundreds of others who received patents, important and otherwise, in the late nineteenth century. It is perhaps worth observing that the most prominent contemporary authorities on the water closet, Glenn Brown and S. Stevens Hellyer, took no note of Crapper.

In his study of the evolution of the bathroom (May/June), Merritt Ierley says that Thomas Crapper had nothing to do with the invention of the toilet. Yet I have read—Wallace Reyburn’s Flushed With Pride: The Story of Thomas Crapper is my main source here—that Crapper was indeed awarded Patent No. 4,990 for a Valveless Water-Waste Preventer in 1882 which, according to Reyburn, obtained a flush with only two gallons of water and automatically cut off the flow after the holding tank was refilled. Was Reyburn just making up all of this?

“Would Kennedy have pulled us out of Vietnam?” asks a story in September. The misty memories of Camelot hide the fact that JFK lacked overriding political strength. Narrowly elected in 1960, he had failed to increase his congressional majority in the 1962 mid-term elections. Nevertheless, in 1963 he committed his administration to a highly controversial program of civil rights.

If JFK had withdrawn from Vietnam while simultaneously pushing his domestic reforms, Senate moderates would have abandoned him, leaving him to the liberals (who at the time favored intervention in Vietnam). Kennedy already had met defeat in pushing his Medicare program; it lost in the Senate by 48 to 52 in July 1962. He would not have allowed Vietnam to defeat him in the far more important matter of civil rights. Like LBJ, he would have stood fast.

Roger Kahn is a wonderful writer, but I think he’s out in left field with his opinions that “Ruth today is partly a product of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa” and “baseball has always worked the Babe Ruth shtick” (“A Sporting Life,” October). Comparing the gate at Jack Dempsey’s fights with Ruth’s annual salaries, he contends that Dempsey, not Ruth, created bigtime sports in America. Sadly, it is still true that fight gate revenues are greater than a great ballplayer’s salary; Ruth did not enjoy free agency. But for what he did for baseball, all baseball salaries need be credited to him.

I was very interested in Dr. John W. Appel’s “My Brush With History” in the October American Heritage . He rightly emphasizes the inconceivable stresses that infantrymen endured during World War II and the fact that the most obdurate combatant can absorb only so much of that intense pressure. But there is one aspect of combat that he does not mention. That is the primitive life of the infantryman, which was physically and emotionally debilitating. It ranged from the jungles of the Southwest Pacific to the constant rains and intolerable cold of Italy and Northern Europe. I found it almost unbearable, as did everyone I knew. I have always thought that this endless exposure was almost as psychologically damaging as the dangers of death and wounds in combat.