January 2011

In 1962, an M.I.T. student named Steven Russell pulled off the ultimate hack. Russell was the kind of kid people make jokes about: short, full of nervous energy, passionately devoted to B-grade science fiction, shy, and brilliant. He worked with the Tech Model Railroad Club, a campus organization that had recently begun turning its focus from toy trains to computers. TMRC members had their own vocabulary. Rolling chairs were bunkies , for instance, and broken equipment was munged . Impressive feats and practical jokes were hacks.

Russell’s hack was creating the first interactive computer game.

The tradition of distrusting government—almost any government—has such deep roots in the American past that a newcomer could justifiably think of the United States as a nation of a quarter of a billion near-anarchists. After all, it was Tom Paine, a major voice of the American Revolution, who declared that “government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.” Is Paine too radical for you? Try, then, a congressman in the First Congress: “(All) governments incline to despotism, as naturally as rivers run into the sea.” Or President Jefferson, in his 1801 inaugural: A “wise and frugal government which shall restrain men from injuring one another…[and] leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits is the very “sum of good government.” Or our national sage, Emerson, some years later: “The less government we have, the better.”

During World War II, I served aboard USS Alabama in the United States Navy. Al Barkan, a shipmate more than ten years my senior, assumed the role of mentor to me. Al was a graduate of the University of Chicago and a natural teacher.

In the winter of 1943–44, our ship put in at Seattle, Washington for an overhaul. Al and I were granted leave, and we traveled home by train, he to New Jersey, I to New York. On our return trip, we came through Chicago very early one Sunday morning. Al, noting we had a layover of about five hours, suggested we take a tour of his alma mater, which he had been encouraging me to attend when the war was over.

We went to the campus, and Al, swelling with pride, described the history and architecture of every building. He saved a tour of the football stadium for the very last.

It was the fall of 1936, and students at West Grammar School in Portland, Maine were excited. Alf Landon was coming to Portland! Mr. Landon was running for president against Franklin Roosevelt.

Why were we kids so interested in the election? There was a very practical reason. The desks we used had inkwells recessed in their tops, and we wrote with stock pens. When the pens became dirty, they wouldn’t write well, so we needed a good supply of pen wipers. Alfred Landon’s campaign button was attached to a bright yellow felt sunflower that made the best pen wiper we had ever found. Because of the great demand, what had at first seemed to be an endless supply of buttons was beginning to run out, and campaign workers had started giving them only to adults.

I resigned myself to the fact that the dozen or more wipers I had collected were going to be it.

In 1965, I spent eight months at Bethesda Naval Hospital recovering from shrapnel wounds and two broken legs received in Vietnam. One day that fall, our corpsmen announced that some of us were to be wheel-chaired to a meeting with the president of the United States. Lyndon B. Johnson was in Bethesda for a gallbladder operation, and we had seen the famous picture of him pointing at his scar, presumably to reassure the American people that he was healthy and fit to run the country.

The young lieutenants and enlisted men sat dressed in their blue hospital garb, awaiting a thank-you or even a pep talk. Many in that room had ghastly wounds or missing limbs from high explosives, bullets, or fire.

The president drew himself up and announced, “I know just how you boys feel,” then went on to explain that he had just felt the surgeon’s knife. The room was absolutely quiet, no response except silent amazement being possible.

None of us looked forward to going on duty and standing our watch. Four hours on and four hours off around the clock was not an easy routine. This was especially true if you were a radioman aboard the USS Missouri, flagship for the U.S. 3d Fleet deep in the Pacific Theater of Operations.

The year was 1945. As an 18-year-old eligible for the draft, I had enlisted in the Navy before graduation from high school in Davenport, Iowa. After boot camp and radio school, at Farragut, Idaho, I was assigned to the staff of Admiral William F. “Bull” Halsey aboard the Missouri, an Iowa-class battleship.

Accommodations in Niagara Falls, Canada, tend to the utilitarian. There is one nice old hotel, the Skyline Brock, with chandeliers in the lobby and a doorman in full Cap’n Crunch regalia. Its sister inn, the Skyline Foxhead (905-374-4444 for both), is also pleasant, if less elegant. Wherever you stay, try to get a falls-side room, so you can see the cataract illuminated with colored lights at night.

Goat Island, in the middle of the river, divides the falls into two parts. In a do-ityourself metaphor, the American Falls are rough and turbulent while the Canadian (or Horseshoe) Falls are tranquil and serene. The Horseshoe Falls are the ones you see in all the pictures, with a column of mist hundreds of feet tall. Whenever the sun is out, the mist creates a rainbow. It also creates a perpetual drizzle that sprinkles everything in the vicinity, coating trees with ice in winter.

Niagara Falls is invariably, and quite properly, described as one of nature’s wonders. Yet, perhaps the greatest wonder is that it can still attract visitors in the 1990s. After all, there are no multimedia links and nothing to click on. A trip to Niagara Falls was considered hot stuff in Martin Van Buren’s day, but so were quilting bees and barn-raisings. Surely, Edison didn’t invent virtual reality and the internet so that people could keep traveling thousands of miles to watch water go over a cliff.

When I was a child, the most magical day of the year for me was the one—usually a week or two after New Year’s—when my grandparents would leave on their annual trip to someplace warm. My brother and I got a day off from school, and a hired car took everyone to the piers that then lined the West Side of Manhattan for several miles. There, in our dreams, we would board a passenger ship bound for the Mediterranean, South Africa, Hong Kong, or some other place as distant from New York as it was exotic to my young mind.

There would be a small party in my grandparents’ cabin; my grandfather would take us around to inspect the ship, and I would wave to the people on the pier far below, pretending that I was going, too. Then, inevitably, the loudspeakers would begin announcing the departure, and visitors were asked to disembark. I obediently went along and stood on the pier watching fascinated while tugs pushed the great ship out of her dock and she set off down the Hudson River, headed for the ends of the Earth.

The uproar that erupted only a few weeks after President Clinton’s 1997 inauguration when news of his personal involvement in Democratic fundraising activities came to light made it clear that his second term was off to a bumpy start. That’s not a novelty for Clinton, whose first term can hardly be described as carefree. But from a broader historical point of view, it’s yet another case of a familiar malady. For a variety of reasons (not limited to party politics), two-term presidents have very little time to enjoy the compliment of re-election before the tide turns against them. Here is a bare-bones record of how quickly popular esteem can fade.