January 2011

“Nana,” George, the Secret Service man, called across the yard to me, “I’m going to plant a couple of poplar trees up near the entrance to the estate. Do you want to bring the children and let them play there?” George was one of the men assigned to protect the grandchildren of the President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was 1942, our country was at war, and George often used gardening as a cover for his guard duties at the family home on Mercer Island near Seattle.

I was the nurse and companion for the children of Anna Roosevelt and John Boettiger, her husband. Tree planting sounded like an interesting activity, so Sistie, Buzzy, little Johnny, and I walked up the long graveled drive. We never went near the entrance without a guard.

The children and I set to work dragging vines and uprooted bushes. It didn’t take us long to become a very grungy group of helpers.

From 1954 to 1957 I was a starting guard on the University of Kansas basketball squad. My career was fairly unremarkable until the fall of 1956, when a young Philadelphian named Wilt Chamberlain joined our team.

Over seven feet tall with the quickness and agility of someone a foot shorter, Wilt was easily the greatest player any of us had ever seen. He could score and rebound almost at will, and his incredible ability to dunk a basketball left everyone gaping. In his debut performance Wilt scored fifty-two points, and immediately we were picked to win the national championship.

Just two years earlier, in 1954, the Kansas forward Maurice King had become the first black starter for a Big Seven team. Fortunately Maurice had a Jackie Robinson temperament, because he was subjected to outrageous indignities on a daily basis.

For details on Georgetown’s facilities and activities, call the Visitor Information Center at 1-800-472-8230, or Historic Georgetown, Inc., at 303-569-2840.

Within its limited confines Georgetown boasts a number of shops and restaurants that express its history. Prominent among them is the Silver Queen Restaurant & Bar, a handsome 1868 edifice that has operated as a restaurant since the 1950s. What the place may lack in haute cuisine is more than made up for by its comfortable atmosphere and spacious nineteenth-century interior, with a gorgeously carved bar that stretches the length of one wall. Another worthwhile stop is Polly Chandler’s Book Shop around the corner on Taos Street. The store’s proprietress is a lovely septuagenarian who has written several books on the area’s history and is referred to as the first lady of Georgetown.

The first time I saw Georgetown, Colorado, it appeared as a sort of oasis: a cluster of lights that struggled to poke through the dense white gusts of a snowstorm from a valley just off 1-70. That was six years ago, and my friends and I had been crawling eastward on the interstate for two and a half hours on our way from the Copper Mountain ski area back to Denver. When Georgetown flickered into view on our right, we jumped at the chance to hunker down somewhere safe. We eased the car down the exit and took cover at the café of the Swiss Inn, a lively spot with checkered curtains and fading edelweiss stencils, where we happily waited out the weather. I’ve associated Georgetown with snowstorms and warm, friendly interiors ever since.

There isn’t much to laugh about in politics nowadays, but, once in a while, the convolutions of party produce some moderately amusing results. Witness the sudden slowing, in mid-1995, of the drive for what is somewhat windily called the line-item veto. (The word "line" is redundant, and hereafter, this column will have none of it.) To refresh memories, the item veto would allow a president a power already exercised by forty-three governors—namely, to strike out individual items in an appropriations bill that he otherwise accepts. As it is now, he must approve or veto any measure in toto, and the practical result is that he must sometimes swallow provisions that he hates in order to guarantee that money will keep flowing for the ordinary and necessary expenses of running the government.

Although this will come as a surprise to most academic economists, economics is one of the biological sciences. Free markets operate according to the rules that govern life itself, rules that are not always fair. And, just as in a biological ecosystem, the fit (and the lucky) survive the test of the market; the rest do not. Nowhere is this clearer, in both biology and economics, than when a new technology punctuates the equilibrium and changes what is possible. In both cases there is a flurry of creation as new creatures and products come into being and a rapid evolution as they compete. By the time the dust settles, most will have died out, leaving only the best-designed and most efficient models surviving.

Ambrose Bierce was not a notably generous-minded man, and, as a Union veteran who had seen action at Shiloh and Chickamauga and had narrowly survived a Rebel ball that smashed into the left side of his skull at Kennesaw Mountain, he might have been expected to maintain a life-long loathing for the soldiers who had shot at him so often. Not at all. “They were brave and courageous foemen,” he wrote, “having little in common with the political madmen who persuaded them to their doom.”

The review of The Long Fuse in September’s “Editors’ Choice” identifies the author as “the British writer Don Cook.” In fact, Don Cook was one of the great American correspondents of the century —for many years the Herald Tribune ’s (and then the L.A. Times ’s) man in Paris.

Among the many magazines I devour each month, American Heritage is a personal favorite. The quiz-show vignette in “My Brush With History” (September) is one reason; it’s a good story, well written. But I was also interested in the account of the FBI’s counterintelligence activities (“In the News”). As it happens, the FBI once sicced an informant on me, and I wasn’t even heading up a militia. I was just a lowly mother of two and a Democratic candidate for Congress. The lad broke into my house looking for dirty laundry. All he found was the real McCoy. I was too busy shaking hands and passing out leaflets to keep up on the washing. It later turned out the informant had been a second-story man before he linked up with the FBI. Well, he was qualified.

He later went to jail, and I went to Congress. Which one of us got punished more?

In reading Mr. Carnes’s article I was reminded of the film The Great Waldo Pepper , featuring Robert Redford in the title role. Near the end of the film Waldo meets his former German opponent in Hollywood, as they have both been hired as stunt pilots in a war movie. Waldo and his associate complain to the director that veterans of the Great War will notice they are flying over mountainous Southern California instead of Flanders. The director listens to their complaints and remarks, “The world is full of technical experts. I am an artist.”

Along the same lines, Frances FitzGerald’s unsettlement by “references to Montagnards in pan-flat Cambodia” in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now conflicts with both the map’s description of the Vietnam/Cambodian border above the twelfth parallel and my personal experience of rappeling out of Cambodia along the banks of the Song Be River in late June of 1970 with a unit of the 7th Air Cavalry. Film is an art form that uses history as parts of a collage.