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January 2011
As 1948 came to an end, America’s intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals were avidly discussing the book that would launch a thousand compound words, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine , by Norbert Wiener. The book had come out in the fall but took a while to catch on as readers struggled with its daunting mix of mathematical notation (which pops up without warning around page 60), formal logic, metaphysics, neurophysiology, psychopathology, electronics, and socialism, all set forth in orotund sentences of baffling length and complexity. Like the latter-day Goedel, Escher, Bach and The Name of the Rose, Cybernetics became known as a book that millions bought and dozens finished. In time, however, enough readers either fought their way through or skipped the hard parts to make Cybernetics the hottest thing in faculty lounges, coffeehouses, and dormitory rooms across the country.
On December 6 Gerald R. Ford was inaugurated as Vice President, becoming the first to attain that office under the terms of the Twenty-fifth Amendment, enacted in 1967. Spiro T. Agnew’s resignation two months earlier had left America without a Vice President for the seventeenth time, and while the Republic had managed to survive on the previous sixteen occasions, this time it actually meant something. With President Richard M. Nixon getting mired deeper in Watergate every day, chances were good that whoever became his Vice President would soon succeed to the Presidency.
Every American knows what Christmas means. It means Miracle on 34th Street, A Christmas Carol, and It’s a Wonderful Life. Year after year. For readers who have found themselves finally half wanting Porter Hall to lock up Edmund Gwenn, Scrooge to fire Cratchit, and James Stewart to jump, here are 12 movies just as good that have avoided such wearying ubiquity. They may even reawaken that old holiday spirit in you.
The Thin Man (1934):
Bill Mayfield was only fourteen years old in 1910 when he boarded the Wright brothers’ “Exhibition B” Flyer with Orville Wright at the controls. He had his bulky camera loaded with a four-by-five-inch glass plate and, when airborne, he hung on to a strut with one arm and clicked the shutter once with his free hand, aiming the lens at the Wrights’ hangar, which sat about where Wright Patterson Air Force Base is today.
As soon as he had the picture, Mayfield recalled, he motioned to Orville to “take me down. I was scared to death.” The Dayton Daily News didn’t publish the shot (the editor complained there weren’t any people in it), but, Mayfield said, “No one ever disputed the fact that I was the first person to take a photograph from an airplane.” Bill had two glass plates with him that day in 1914; Orville used the other to take a picture of Bill at the controls.
Late in his life, Henry Fonda, at dinner with a producer named Melvin Shestack, recalled meeting an old man who said he had firsthand knowledge of a memorable Fonda character, Wyatt Earp, the legendary frontier lawman of John Ford’s classic My Darling Clementine. The man said he “had met the old marshal several times as a child at the turn of the century, at his family’s Passover seders in San Francisco.” Fonda thought the man was putting him on until years later he read a newspaper story which confirmed that Wyatt Earp was indeed married to a Jewish woman. “I wish now,” Fonda told Shestack, “that I’d talked to the man a bit longer.”
My quest began sometime shortly after World War II. I was a young boy when my maternal grandfather told me the story of how my father, Lt. Col. Francis R. Stevens, had been killed in the skies over New Guinea. In the spring of 1942, Dad was assigned to OPD, Operations Division in the War Department, what Colonel Red Reeder, who replaced Dad a few months later, referred to as General Marshall’s command post. George C. Marshall, chief of staff of the U.S. Army, was concerned that he was not getting a clear enough picture of Douglas MacArthur’s activities in the Pacific Theater. MacArthur’s dispatches kept calling for more of everything—more troops, more equipment, more supplies—but they provided precious little in the way of information about what he planned to do with all this added capability. The general’s approach appeared to be that, if he didn’t tell higher headquarters what he was planning to do, it couldn’t tell him to stop. So, General Marshall decided to send my dad and a highly qualified Air Corps officer, Lt. Col. Samuel E. Anderson, on a fact-finding mission to figure out what MacArthur was up to.
I have occasionally been referred to as “Senator No,” and I’m proud of the title. But, when it comes to saying no, I’m not even in the same ballpark with the first North Carolinian to serve as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Nathaniel Macon. A Revolutionary War veteran and native of Warrenton, Senator Macon was chairman between 1825 and 1829. He was a fierce opponent of any and all measures to expand the power of the new federal government. Indeed, during his entire 37-year tenure in Congress, Macon cast more no votes than did any ten other members combined.
He believed what I do: Saying no is a part of the job of being the Foreign Relations Committee chairman. As much as some might wish it otherwise, the committee was never meant to be a rubber stamp for administration policies.