January 2011

In the years between 1989 and 1994, the big-three American automobile companies (with combined annual sales of well over two hundred billion dollars) contributed about two million dollars to congressional-election campaigns. The ten largest American gas and oil companies, with an even greater chunk of the nation’s gross domestic product, gave contributions totaling seven million dollars. The nation’s trial lawyers, meanwhile, contributed nearly thirty-one million dollars.

It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out that vast economic self-interest must be at stake here. After all, as Charles Keating—formerly head of a major savings and loan bank and now in a federal prison—reportedly said when asked if his contributions to congressional PACs had bought him influence, “I certainly hope so.”

At Oberlin College one day in the autumn of 1961, I happened to find myself at the same lunch table with my classmate Rennie Davis. He was a quiet government major then, close-cropped, bespectacled, a former 4-H Club member, but already caught up in the romance of revolution. As I took my seat, he and a friend whose name I no longer recall were animatedly drawing up a plan to shut the college down. I listened, fascinated, as they discussed the pros and cons of occupying the president’s office, blocking the doors to the administration building, and employing passive resistance to confound the town cops, should the administration dare call them in.

I was alternately reading your May/June issue and watching the horror in Oklahoma City. Thinking especially of the young children so brutally crushed there, I couldn’t help wondering how many young lives we destroyed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Had we thought of the victims-to-be as innocent fellow human beings—infants, children, mothers, fathers, grandparents—and not just as the enemy, perhaps our best minds might somehow have found a means to end the war while minimizing their civilian losses as well as those of our own troops.

In the last paragraph of his article “The Biggest Decision: Why We Had to Drop the Bomb” (May/June), Robert James Maddox makes a point that is most important yet is seldom noted by prodecision historians and columnists. At home everyone knew about the casualties on land and sea in the Okinawa campaign. And we knew the Japanese never surrendered in battle. The home islands had to be invaded even if it meant heavy casualties. So for the President or anyone else to hold back a powerful new weapon was unthinkable. The passion to win the war overrode everything else. I can only think those who believe that Truman could and should have said no are too young to remember and understand the all-pervasive sentiment in the U.S. in 1945.

I found Mr. German’s Okinawa article (“My Brush With History,” May/June) most interesting. I had the unpleasant experience of entering (under orders) a cave containing the bodies of Admiral Ota and some four thousand Japanese naval personnel, who had committed suicide. As for Mr. Maddox’s article concerning the necessity for the use of the atom bomb, my own experiences have convinced me affirmatively.

I served with the 2d Battalion, 29th Marines, 6th Marine Division, which secured 75 percent of the island and also took the highest casualty rate: for the battalion, 82 percent. The Army’s four divisions were exceedingly well equipped, but their command apparently believed they could persuade the enemy to surrender through overwhelming artillery fire, and time. They erred. Consequently Mr. Gorman’s division, which had some excellent units, suffered substantial casualties with limited results.

The lady in the center of your May/June cover, smiling into the camera and holding up the Stars and Stripes “Peace” edition, is my extraordinary mother, Edith Nelle Franklin. She is ninety-four now, in good health and spirits, and is every bit as mentally proficient as she was in Paris fifty years ago, when the picture was taken. She lives in Illinois, has many friends, corresponds with her old WAAC companions, plays a deadly game of contract bridge, and makes several trips a year to visit the West Coast members of her family.

The scene is a poignant display of the sudden emotional release we all felt at the ending of those chaotic World War II years of grinding anger, brutality, dislocation, and danger. Every face radiates the open relief, delight, and shared affection we had kept imprisoned for so long.

This diminutive photo (the original is an inch by an inch and a quarter), came to us just days before President Clinton made the reluctant decision on May 20 to close Pennsylvania Avenue to vehicular traffic. Robert Spencer sent it with the following explanation: “In 1937 Marguerite and I were married and we began our honeymoon in Washington, D.C. Of course we wanted to see the White House.

“There was no gate, fence, concrete barrier, not even guards, so we drove in, right up to the portico, parked, and took a stroll around the grounds. No one interrupted our walk until a man in civilian clothes came out of the White House and politely requested us to move our car because the President was waiting to leave. When we asked if we could take a photograph first, the President’s aide agreed, as long as we hurried. The result is enclosed.

“Not too long ago we traveled again through Washington and were saddened by the security that is now needed to protect the President, Congress, and other government officials and buildings.”

There are adherents of even the most repellent concepts who, with a stretch, can be seen as motivated by perverted idealism. No such claim can be made for Fritz Julius Kuhn of the German American Bund. Great liar, thief, forger, adulterous womanizer, braggart, lout, and boor—even Hitler didn’t like him. One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry: a jackanapes Nazi charlatan in boots strutting around beneath swastikas to denounce Franklin D. Rosenfelt’s Jew Deal while declaiming that one day he, the Bundesführer, would run things.

He was born in Munich in 1896. He served from 1914 to 1918 as a lieutenant of machine guns in a Bavarian outfit in France, joined the fledgling Nazi party in 1921, enrolled at the University of Munich to study chemical engineering, and went to Mexico to work as a chemist there for four years. Then, he came to America. By 1934, he was a citizen.

Rhino R2 71617 (four CDs); R4 71617 (four cassettes)

The vast bulk of this very generous collection of American funny business comes from the last forty years or so, but some of it is positively creaky. Thomas Edison’s favorite comedian, Cal Stewart, plays a rube who describes getting a haircut in New York, recorded in 1915; Barney Bernard does “Cohen at the Telephone” a year later, a relentless carnival of mishearing and misunderstanding; Moran & Mack show where the creators of “Amos ’n’ Andy” got their idea; Smith & Dale do a “Dr. Kronkite and His Only Living Patient” routine that they first performed in 1908. Comedy that old is mysteriously fascinating to hear, if only for its confirmation of the amazing perishability of humor. The newer stuff that takes up most of these sides comes from a panorama of familiar names like Abbott and Costello, W. C. Fields, Bob and Ray, Tom Lehrer, Bob Hope, Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Dick Gregory, Henny Youngman, Phyllis Diller, Bill Cosby, Cheech and Chong, Steve Martin, Richard Pryor… . Go ahead. Laugh.