January 2011

In the summer of 1972 I turned sixteen and was thoroughly enjoying the Presidency of Richard M. Nixon. My father, Howard Norton, was a White House correspondent for U.S. News & World Report . Travel for the White House press corps was provided through a fund supported by their respective news organizations, and if the chartered plane was large enough and the trip was within the continental United States, families could go along at minimal cost. This particular trip to Key Biscayne was to last a full week, but it was cut short on Monday. So I found myself on the press bus headed to Homestead Air Force Base, where Air Force One and the charter plane awaited.

I was watching as we hurried by the pink and green stucco houses of south Florida when I overheard a conversation between two veteran newsmen seated behind me. One was well into the Sunday edition of the Washington Post when he remarked to his seatmate: “Look at this. Somebody broke into the office of the Democratic National Headquarters in Watergate.”

In the summer of 1967 I was working on my master’s degree at the University of South Carolina, and I had to take a high-powered seminar on twentieth-century American history, about which I was abysmally ignorant. At the time, James F. (“Jimmy”) Byrnes, the man who had been expected to be nominated for Vice President in 1944 instead of Harry Truman, was living in Columbia, and although he had not been in politics since his term as South Carolina’s governor had ended, in 1954, he was still much revered in the state. Anyone growing up in South Carolina in those days knew how he had almost become Vice President, and therefore almost President, and how he had so crassly been denied the office.

The Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism (501-682-1191) can supply a number of helpful pamphlets, including Eastern Arkansas’ Great River Road . Call the Helena Tourism Commission (501-338-9831) for their pamphlet Helena: Where the Ridge and the River Meet . And to arrange a tour with Annetta Beauchamp, you can reach her at 501-338-3607.

Blues is still very much part of the Helena story, and with the Great River Road brochure you can fashion a trip that starts eighty miles north in Memphis, the home of Beale Street, stops in Helena, and ends up in Clarksdale, Mississippi, which features a summer blues festival and the excellent Delta Blues Museum (601-624-4461). For more information on Clarksdale, at one time home to W. C. Handy and Muddy Waters, among others, contact the Coahoma County Chamber of Commerce (601-627-7337).

Helena, Arkansas, is a classic Mississippi River town. But it doesn’t exactly reflect the richly ornamented world of Showboat. Spend a day or two there and you can watch Helena being put back together, against great odds and in a time when every preservation dollar is likely to be deemed “pork.” Some of the pieces are in place; others are missing, gap-toothed evidence of the struggle to bring the kind of life to a town that will support locals and draw tourists. Today’s Helena, off the main tourist trail, drowsy, a bit frayed along the edges, was once a busy port, a lumber and railroad center, and Arkansas’s main depot for shipping cotton.

During one week last summer, the stock market suddenly soured on technology stocks. Microsoft’s William S. Gates saw his fortune decline by an awesome 2.4 billion dollars. To get some idea of just how much money that is, consider that, if a person had a net worth that large, he or she would rank about number 22 on the Forbes Four Hundred List, right alongside the likes or Ross Perot. Of course, Bill Gates is not number 22; he is number 1, so the wolves remain many billions of dollars away from his front door. Still, that is probably some sort of record for short-term paper losses.

For short-term real losses, however, the record is almost certainly held by William C. Durant. Between April and November 1920, he lost $90,000,000, well over a billion in today’s money. Had there been a Forbes list then, he would have gone from near the top to the edge of bankruptcy in less than eight months. Ironically, he suffered these real losses in a hopeless attempt to prevent mere paper ones.

As Congress reassembled last autumn, the press reported an upsurge in campaign contributions by tobacco companies to fight new efforts to combat smoking—especially by declaring nicotine an addictive substance that can be regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The industry regards the FDA as fondly as a whale would look on Captain Ahab. So, it seems, do a number of food-processing and pharmaceutical companies. Conservative complaints about the “regulatory burden” supposedly handcuffing American manufacturers often target the FDA for being too slow or too persnickety in deciding what products are allowable on the market without undue risk. But the agency catches it from both sides; consumer organizations occasionally worry that it’s too complaisant in bending the rules when Congress leans on it to spare corporations fiscal pain. A federal regulator’s lot is not a happy one.

I was delighted to read Carla Davidson’s article on her experience in Arizona (“History Happened Here,” September). Ms. Davidson’s account of her group’s exploration of the Sonoran Desert should give readers not yet acquainted with the beauty of Arizona’s lush and colorful desert and the wildlife that abounds within its reaches a fresh insight into the state’s unique landscape—which is, after all, one of the things of which her citizens are most proud.

Stanley Karnow considers himself a historian. Yet in his essay in Past Imperfect , which is cited in the cover story of your September issue, he attacks my film JFK while ignoring the more recent revelations on President Kennedy’s Vietnam policy, and he distorts the truth in the process.

If Karnow had bothered to read the book JFK and Vietnam: Deception, Intrigue, and the Struggle for Power by Professor John Newman of the University of Maryland—based on recently declassified documents from the Kennedy administration—he would acknowledge there was definite evidence of Kennedy’s plan to withdraw from Vietnam. Whether or not he would’ve gone through with it is conjecture, but National Security Action Memorandum 263, issued on October 11, 1963, directed implementation of a withdrawal of a thousand U.S. troops by the end of that year. NSAM 273, which was substantially revised after Kennedy’s death and signed by President Johnson on November 26, reversed this policy and led to the U.S. escalation in Vietnam.

JFK and Vietnam Lush Desert