January 2011

For a young boy World War II was a time filled with adventure stories, tales of armies, weapons, and gallant men fighting the evil Axis. One of the famous participants was Gen. Jonathan Wainwright, who had the unhappy task of surrendering Corregidor to the Japanese. He then spent several very difficult years as a prisoner of war.

Since Wainwright was a native of the state of Washington, he was chosen to be the central figure in Yakima’s 1945 Armistice Day parade. Standing at one end of the parade route, I waited impatiently as the bands and military units marched by. Finally the car carrying Wainwright approached.

I was shocked. I knew that his nickname was Skinny Wainwright, but I was not prepared for the frail, elderly man dressed in simple khakis sitting alone in the back seat of the open convertible. I suddenly had an inkling that war might be something other than romantic adventuring.

In the spring of 1931 I was a member of a “couples’ club” in Syracuse, New York, composed of both married and single men and women. I was one of the unmarried—the youngest of all at twenty-six. We got together every other Sunday evening to discuss various topics that interested us. There were sixteen of us, and scarcely anyone ever missed a meeting.

That year for the July Fourth weekend we decided to rent a cottage on Lake Ontario. We found what we wanted near Sandy Pond, a house large enough to allow separate sleeping quarters for men and women. We all arrived on Friday afternoon, and the women cooked our first meal. The men did the kitchen chores afterward.

That first evening produced a lovely sunset, which gave way to a bright half-moon and a quiet breeze on the lake. We sat outside until it grew dark, but before long everyone was ready to go to bed. I wanted to go for a walk along the beach, but no one would come except my best friend, Bob Van Wagenen.

I was eleven, and my family had been living in Iran for more than three years while my father was attached to the American Embassy in Tehran. In its Middle Eastern way, both lazy and exuberant, Tehran had been good to me. But that was about to change. In early November of 1978, after months of escalating tensions, my school became engulfed in an anti-shah demonstration that broke its bounds and turned into a riot. That afternoon on the soccer field, we dropped to the ground when a nearby building blew up; a fire set by rioters had ignited the big diesel fuel tank in the basement. Though shaken, our teachers tried to maintain a normal schedule for the rest of the day, even though we could hear the crowds growing outside the school compound. At day’s end we were told via loudspeaker not to go to our buses but to return to our homerooms and await instructions. Our room was on the second floor, and my classmates and I rushed to the window to look over the compound wall to see what was happening.

In the spring of 1935 I was a student at the University of Pennsylvania. Our rowing team was competing in the Childs Cup Regatta at Annapolis, Maryland, and several of my fraternity brothers and I drove there for the race. As we arrived at the Naval Academy, the President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, had just finished reviewing the midshipmen and was driving to the nearby residence of the academy superintendent for lunch.

Carrying my Brownie box camera, I followed the entourage on foot. The President was riding in the front passenger seat of a convertible sedan. His son opened the door, swung his father around, straightened his legs in their braces, and helped him to his feet. They walked arm in arm up a newly constructed ramp.

Call your travel agent for a copy of Crystal’s tempting Cruise Atlas . Crystal passengers are an enthusiastic lot; many of them have traveled dozens of times on the ships, often booking several cruises back to back.

I wonder how long it generally takes to turn a ship’s passenger into a passionate fan of ocean liners past. For me, it happened in the five days of a crossing from New York to Southampton on the QE2. That was twenty years ago. Back on land, I found myself haunting antiques shops in search of one of the posters that would express all the glamour of the liners in their great days. Then I needed to read about them. Starting with the 1972 volume The Only Way to Cross, the books of John Maxtone-Graham have accompanied me on all my sailings. In Liners to the Sun he offers a reassurance to those of us who are sadly certain they missed the boat in its best decades: “My intent here is to document the shipboard that never really changes. . . . Years as a passenger have convinced me that what we enjoy about sailing, our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents enjoyed, too.

Like Freddy Krueger in the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, anti-trust keeps coming back. The latest company to find itself in the sights of the Anti-trust Division of the Justice Department is Microsoft. It was recently ordered by a judge to make available copies of its operating system, Windows 95, without the Internet browser. Why was Microsoft forced to do this? What was its “crime”? Well, the crime, believe it or not, was making its browser available to the public for free.

Now, the average consumer might be forgiven for thinking that free is a pretty satisfactory price to pay for something useful. But to the theoreticians of antitrust, this was a classic case of “predatory pricing.” With predatory pricing, a rich and powerful company, such as Microsoft, charges a low price, or no price, to force weaker competitors (in this case Netscape) out of the market and thus gain a monopoly. But once Microsoft rules the browser marketplace, according to theory, the company will jack up prices and drain America’s wealth into Bill Gates’s already amply filled pockets.

He was an African-American with no previous experience or special interest in Palestine. He evinced no special warmth for either Zionist or pan-Arab positions. He was working for a new and untested international organization. He was little-known to the general public before 1948, and it’s reasonable to suspect that his name rings no bell today with most Israelis or Americans.

But, during the May 1998 celebration of a half-century of Israel’s independence, Ralph Bunche ought to be recalled with respect by Israelis, American Jews, and in fact Americans of every faith and color. If President Truman’s recognition of the state of Israel eleven minutes after it was proclaimed gave an enormous psychological and diplomatic boost to its embattled creators (see “Present at the Creation Again?” American Heritage, April 1994), Bunche did an equally important job in giving that recognition practical force by getting de facto boundaries set for the infant nation.

June 6, 1944, was the pivot of the 20th century. What had gone before that day led up to the invasion of France, and what followed was the consequence. At stake was the future of democracy. Fascism, communism, and democracy were locked in a death struggle that meant certain doom for one, if not two, of the competing ideologies. What was not certain was which one or ones.

At the beginning of June 1944, the Nazis were in control of the vast human and material resources of Europe, including big parts of Russia, but the Wehrmacht had failed to destroy the Red Army, which indeed was gaining strength daily and by this time had the Germans on the defensive. Hitler had the firepower to stop the Soviet advance, but only if he could concentrate his forces as Stalin was doing.

Several readers have questioned how it could be that the “glowing red sign” to the left of the skyscraper that dominates Georgia O’Keeffe’s painting that ran on the back cover of our February/March issue could be “a tribute to her husband, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz.” And well might they ask. A very unfortunate (and, we say thankfully, rare) printing error reduced O’Keeffe’s vibrant, sharp-edged canvas to bruised murk. Here is how it should have looked, and what showed as a red blur on our cover is in fact a sign spelling out STIEGLITZ . We apologize, too, to Fisk University, in Nashville, Tennessee, which owns the painting.