January 2011

Easter Sunday, April 1, 1945. The invasion of Okinawa began before dawn with two Army and two Marine divisions abreast, a column of landing craft eight miles long bucking and pitching through rough seas toward the beaches. It would be the last battle of World War II, the greatest land, sea, and air battle of all time. And the bloodiest.

A combined 125,000 Americans (13,000) and Japanese soldiers (over 100,000) died in the fighting, with approximately 100,000 Okinawan civilian deaths. Thousands of suicide missions were flown against more than 1400 American ships anchored offshore. Many were hit. The unbelievable tenacity of the Japanese army and the sickening casualty count of military and civilians surely influenced President Truman’s decision to drop the atom bomb.

The fifties may have been a conservative time in many respects, but there were two areas in which America went wild in that mid-century decade: design and consumerism. And in an odd way, the seemingly humble tabletop objects on the right were the perfect confluence of those two currents.

The country had weathered the economic constraints of the Great Depression and the physical and emotional trauma of World War II—twenty years of tense, olive drab existence. Now the economy was booming, and Johnny had come marching home to a house in the suburbs that he and Mrs. Johnny were filling with boomerang-shaped furniture, atomic-patterned drapes, Gay Paree poodle wallpaper in the “powder room,” and, in the kitchen, every conceivable shiny new, modern, laborsaving device.

The Vermont Department of Travel and Tourism (1-800-VERMONT) provides good brochures on Woodstock and environs. Call the local Chamber of Commerce (802-457-3555) to find out about when the entertaining, idiosyncratic walking tours around town and up Mount Tom take place. As for accommodations, I passed up the Woodstock Inn, with all its luxuries, when my phone call was switched to an answering machine and several weeks went by before I received a brochure in the mail. I settled on the well-located Shire Motel in a spacious room with a picture window overlooking a bend of the river. A flower garden edged the water, a family of woodchucks spread out across the lawn, and in the distance, like a little medieval fiefdom, rose the rooflines of Billings Farm.

It’s possible to feel a trifle uneasy in the seductive presence of Woodstock, Vermont. “Woodstock is Hollywood’s image of Vermont,” the mayor of a less favored nearby community said recently. “The most perfect town in the Green Mountain State,” I learned from a travel magazine. And why shouldn’t it be? one might ask. The town at first seems like a carefully groomed wealthy woman who is strikingly beautiful simply because of all the money that went into her making. But you’ll soon discover there’s more to her than mere glamour.

Located in the central part of the state, with the area’s only east-west artery, Route 4, muscling straight through the town, Woodstock offers enough traffic to bring one back to reality from time to time. But its own reality—virtually undistilled beauty—is what grabbed and kept my attention from my first sight of the place.

Six weeks into the 104th Congress, the balanced budget amendment (the BBA) that had passed the House almost made it through the trickier procedural shoals of the Senate with the two-thirds majority needed to propel it on to the state legislatures. The Senate majority leader promises he’ll bring it up for a later vote, so the BBA might yet become the 28th amendment to the Constitution—that is, the twenty-eighth change in our fundamental charter of national organization. What would that mean?

Great autobiographies are few and far between. Not many of us, after all, possess the requisite talent, self-awareness, and willingness to bare our souls to the world. Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that the best of them have so often come out of left field. I know I would have hated its terminally anal-retentive author, had I known him, but The Education of Henry Adams is inescapable in any worthwhile survey of American literature. And U. S. Grant, his mind wonderfully concentrated by the tragic circumstances of sudden poverty and impending death, produced a military memoir that is second to none, not even Caesar’s.

The story as Harry S. Truman told it was pretty good, even for that eminent storyteller. He was having a taping session with two friends, William Hillman and David Noyes, and his yet very active mind—he was 77 in 1961—went back to 1944, when he was running for the vice presidency. In that antediluvian year, he remembered being at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston, and “who should be in the suite but old man Kennedy,” Joseph P. Kennedy, father of President John F. Kennedy. Truman was with Bob Hannegan, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and Bob was hitting up old Joe for some money for the campaign in which Roosevelt was running for a fourth term. Joe was not being cooperative. “And he commenced throwing rocks at Roosevelt, saying that he had caused the murder of his own son by bringing on a war.” Joe meant Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., blown up with his bomber on a dangerous mission. “I stood it as long as I could,” said Harry Truman, “and I said, ‘If you say another word about Roosevelt, I’m going to throw you out that window.’”

The young woman was niece to a Texas governor, with money and social entrée most appealing to Noel F. Parrish, the son of a clergyman whose ministries had been mainly in some medium-size towns of Kentucky, Georgia, and Alabama. But Noel didn’t like his girlfriend’s hands. He had no rational explanation. Just didn’t like them. So, he took off, 21 years old, out of Rice Institute for two years, and hitchhiked to San Francisco. It was 1930. There were no jobs.

Small and skinny, and getting skinnier as he got hungry, he enlisted in the 11th Cavalry. He groomed horses and practiced equitation and saber play for a year and then went to be a flying cadet, learning on ancient biplanes and monoplanes that looked as if they were made of papier-mâché and had to be tied down with ropes on the Army’s open airfields so they didn’t blow away in a high wind.