January 2011

In 1953 I was inducted into the Army. Since I had studied physics at college and worked for a short time in private industry, I was assigned to the Enlisted Scientific and Professional Personnel (SPP) Program and sent to the Army Chemical Center, in Edgewood, Maryland. There were more than two thousand SPPs at the center when I arrived, many of them recent graduates. We lived in a dormitory, and at times it felt almost as if we were still at school. That is, for a while.

My job was to design and develop instruments to assess the yield of nuclear devices. Much of my work was stimulating, but other people were less fortunate. One evening at Drago’s Pizza & Bar, a group of us decided to stave off boredom by organizing a physics seminar, with each of us presenting a paper in his area of expertise. We asked Colonel Delmar, the laboratory commander, for permission, and he granted it, provided the seminar wouldn’t interfere with our assigned duties.

Sometime in December of 1976 I listened in stunned silence as staffers from President-elect Jimmy Carter’s transition team floated a trial balloon that would eliminate every one of the Strategic Air Command’s bombers and ICBMs, leaving only a handful of missile-firing submarines to deter Russian nuclear forces. Dubbed “Planned Inferiority,” the radical concept would become the cornerstone of the incoming administration’s defense policy.

To get to the conference room at the SAC headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska, Carter’s bright young men walked by the scowling bronze bust of Gen. Curtis E. LeMay, past a replica of the red telephone, and detoured around the gleaming model of the new B-1 supersonic bomber in the center of the lobby. None of this impressed them. In the midst of the Cold War, the new administration planned to cut defense and pour the savings into social programs.

The briefers spoke in the confident tones of trial lawyers, presenting the post-World War II nuclear arms race in vertical bar graphs. The slides were crisp. Soviet nuclear strength was depicted in a red column; our own in blue.

It was a beautiful day in northern Virginia. A great day for a baseball game, even if you were in the Army, as I was on that day in the summer of 1953. I wasn’t a very talented baseball player, but I was a scrapper, the kind of guy who ran out every ground ball to the shortstop no matter how certain it was that I would be thrown out easily at first base. I was “Charlie Hustle” long before Pete Rose came alone.

I was stationed at an Army Security Agency base near Warrenton, Virginia, and a baseball team from Fort Myer, just across the Potomac River from Washington. D.C., came down to play us. Being up there so close to the Pentagon and all the brass, the Fort Myer team had more than its share of really good baseball players, even some major-leaguers who were subject to the military draft in force at that time. We were more like the ragtag and bobtail of the military diamond.

Contact Celebrity Cruises at 800-CELEBRITY and its Web site www.celebrity-cruises.com or through a travel agent. The dozens of ships plying the Caribbean in the winter months offer a wide range of fares that are often discounted from those in the brochure. A good travel agent with ties to various cruise lines can help you through the thicket of costs and accommodations. The newest ships all offer a number of staterooms with verandas, which fortunate occupants agree are worth the additional price. My private balcony on the Galaxy was one of the great pleasures of the trip.

To learn more about the personalities of the various lines, and their strengths and weaknesses, consult the guides published by Berlitz, Fielding, Fodor’s, et cetera. With the popularity of cruising has come a subcategory, books specializing in Caribbean ports of call. For passengers with only a day in port, these can be very useful. I particularly like Cruising the Caribbean by Laura and Diane Rapp (Hunter Publishing, Inc., 1998).

A couple of years ago, an editor at Scribner asked me to write a book covering the entire history of Wall Street. I was reluctant. I’d already written a book on the Wall Street of the Civil War era, and I have never liked writing about anything for a second time. However, suitably bribed with a generous advance, I agreed to undertake the task of making a story from a piece of the past that is now 346 years long, running from 1653, when the wall that gave the street its name was built, to the present.

The children are back at Columbine High School now— if they can still truly be called children after the terrible violence perpetrated upon them. We can only hope that the murder of twelve of their classmates was a random moment of madness. We can only hope, that is, for, in the time since the slaughter in Littleton, Colorado, we have proved ourselves unable to address whether or not they reflect any greater, underlying problems in American society and, if so, what we should do about them.

It’s hard to know where to begin with governmental responses to the massacre: With President Clinton’s campaign to have movie ticket-takers check IDs more closely, a move so meaninglessly symbolic that it could have warmed only the heart of Dick Morris? Or Congress’s brief, vitriolic debate, in which both sides trotted out their favorite whipping boys before agreeing to do nothing.

Now, on the left and then coming from right you’ll see the bombs. …” Of course, at first we couldn’t lift our eyes off the cross hairs on the middle of our TV screens quickly enough to see anything but the explosion billowing up at us. But given the patience to watch repeated NATO briefings, eventually we began to catch the blurs that ignited charcoal puffs of smoke. Perhaps in the next war we can hope to see the speeding bombs and consequent matter-of-fact black-andwhite explosions presented in full color. This advance would fulfill the end-ofthe-century global truism that political, military, and financial success guarantees the victor not spoils but better, more colorful media entertainment.

EDWARD SOREL , whose group portrait of the builders of this century appears in this issue, is currently the subject of a lively exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Called “Unauthorized Portraits,” it surveys thirty years of his drawings, paintings, and caricatures, and has been extended through January 2.

Phil Patton’s article “Lee Defeats Grant” reminded me that truth not only is stranger than fiction, it’s more interesting as well, primarily because it is true. A professor of Soviet history, on loan from Duke University to the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill back in 1985, always reminded his class: “In history, ‘ifs’ don’t happen!” He didn’t want us wasting our or his time with “what might have been” versions of the past. For him it was far more interesting and profitable to study and understand what did happen than waste time making up alternatives to vindicate lost causes.