January 2011

Toward the end of his life, Charles Burchfield wrote a description of a place that had haunted him since he was a schoolboy. It was “some fabulous Northland unlike any place on Earth—a land of deep water-filled gashes in the earth; old lichen-covered cliffs and mesas, with black spruce forests reflected in the pools, against which swans gleam miraculously.”

The man who had, for half a century, both feared and yearned for this far, fantastic country could not have looked less like what he was. In his 60s, says Burchfield’s biographer John I. H. Baur, he reminded one interviewer of a small-town businessman, another of the family doctor. Indeed, he had been a small-town citizen all his life, but in fact the shy sometime cost accountant was one of the most original and passionate of American artists, a man so consumed by the beauty of the physical world that he always saw the mystical vibrating within the mundane and could find in the most ordinary stretch of countryside the vertiginous majesty of his Northland.

ONE EVENING A YEAR OR SO AGO, I FOUND myself at a party speaking with Lorenzo DuFau and James W. Graham about events that had taken place before I was born. The occasion was the launching of our newest magazine, American Legacy, a quarterly devoted to African-American history, but the heroes of the evening were Mr. DuFau and Mr. Graham and a half-dozen of their comrades, because 50 years earlier, these men had been part of the all-black crew of the USS Mason, a destroyer escort on North Atlantic convoy duty.

The career of the Mason was the subject of American Legacy’s cover story, but I had personal as well as professional reasons to want to talk with these men: During the war, my father had done the same work they had, aboard an identical ship.

We sat over beer on rough-hewn cedar benches at a big old table in the shade of trees that only California grows, young men talking away the hot November afternoon, a November such as we rarely had in the East, all of us in proper uniform, the forest green, and we were pared lean and very fit by the hills and the forced marches and the heat, burned cordovan by the California sun.

It was my birthday, November 15, and tomorrow we were going to the war.

A dozen Marine officers, lieutenants like me, and about ninety master sergeants and gunnery sergeants and other NCOs, men of enormous dignity who made me uneasy when they saluted, had flown north at dawn from Camp Pendleton to the Navy airfield outside San Francisco to take a plane across the Pacific. We were replacements for men dead or wounded in Korea.

“Fresh meat,” one of the sergeants remarked pleasantly.

In a time when the usefulness of the past as a means to comprehend the present remains the object of skepticism, if not outright attack, inside the academy, Donald Kagan, the former dean of Yale College and a professor of ancient history, has published a book about the necessity of historical analogy for understanding a nation’s security interests. The most common arguments against such a view hold that modernity is so profoundly different from all previous human experience, and the past so particular and irreproducible, that analogies are necessarily anachronistic misreadings and can only mislead us.

But Professor Kagan believes that if we are to understand the world in which we live, we have no surer source, indeed no other source, than the past. Whatever the flaws, whatever the difficulty, there is simply nothing better available.

Rocky Marciano is the only heavyweight champion who ever retired .without losing a professional fight or even boxing to a draw. Time and again on his way up, Marciano was in danger of losing when his mighty right pulled it out. While a youth, in Brockton, Massachusetts, before becoming champion in Philadelphia on September 23,1952, he worked as a dishwasher, short-order cook, landscaper, and as a floor sweeper at the Stacy Adams men’s shoe factory.

In 1952 I was a men’s shoe salesman at Marshall Field’s in Chicago. That summer I took a busman’s holiday, visiting a number of men’s shoe suppliers in Massachusetts. While I was talking with Arthur Luce, Stacy Adams’s Brockton comptroller, Rocky Marciano walked in with his father, who had recently retired after working twenty-one years on a bedlast machine at the Stacy Adams factory.

After dinner on winter Sunday evenings, the women sat in the parlor. The men lingered in the kitchen, Standing in a wide half-circle around the white enameled stove. They sipped coffee, smoked cigars, and talked about the ships and lore of the Great Lakes. They spoke of sailing ships, side-wheelers, and steam tugs, of ice and fog, storms and collisions, of vessels lost without a trace. They were, as I recall, good storytellers. It was the middle years of the 1930s.

My brother and I sat quietly on green ladder-back chairs and listened. At my grandfather’s house the notion that children should be seen and not heard was not just a maxim; it was one of the commandments.

It was February 14, 1972, and early morning in the local time zone. I pressed the aircraft transmitter switch and spoke. “Shanghai Tower, this is MAC four-zero-six-two-niner on Victor one-one-niner-decimal-seven, over.” The response was immediate. “Roger, MAC four-zero-six-two-niner, this is Shanghai Tower. Read you loud and clear. Maintain this frequency. You have been radaridentified. Descend to fifteen hundred meters, and proceed to X-Ray Quebec [Longhua radio beacon]. Landing Runway thirty-six. Report field in sight, over.”

The voice on the radio, while unmistakably Asian, spoke with a British accent. Within minutes our U.S. Air Force C-141A aircraft would be landing at Shanghai Airport. For the first time since 1949, when Communist forces under Mao Zedong had ousted the Nationalist forces, an official delegation was the guests of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Although the cloud cover was negligible, the early-morning haze restricted forward visibility.

During the late 1940s I lived in Rowayton, a small Connecticut village, with my wife and two small children. I was the art director of Columbia Records, a job I dearly loved. In my work I had many opportunities to meet the musical celebrities of the day, Frank Sinatra, Benny Goodman, and Duke Ellington among them, and I considered myself a fairly cool cat.

Fate had blessed me with Roussie, the world’s most delightful daughter. At the time she was somewhere between four and six and my regular weekend date. Every Saturday we did the chores together, visited the post office, and wound up in the town’s only drugstore.

Soybel’s pharmacy was a true drugstore— no greeting cards or eyelash curlers. In the rear of the shop the druggist filled prescriptions and sold patent medicines. The front was given over to a small, gaudy soda fountain with four or five stools. George Soybel’s counter was a gathering place for the town cognoscenti, and the stools were almost always filled.