January 2011

A student strolling through the Nassau Inn down the block from Princeton University one January day last winter would not have taken particular note of two older people having lunch in one of the Tap Room’s booths. Possibly, the man in the booth is a senior professor: gray hair and a blue pinstripe suit. The woman with him is in slacks and is rather pleasant-looking.

He’s having a club sandwich, and she chose chicken salad. They began with a Bloody Mary apiece and are having wine with the meal. They’ll split a serving of cake with the coffee. The passing student cannot know that, when they were students at this college, to be able to sit together like this, the gentleman of this couple would have fought a lion and climbed a thousand mountains. . .

“WHY WALTER WINCHELL?” I have been asked repeatedly during the years I have been working on a biography of him. Why someone so passé or someone so beneath contempt as also to be beneath biography? There are, I believe, two sets of reasons a biographer chooses a subject: the ones he knows at the outset and the subliminal ones he only discovers along the way, although the latter often prove to have been the more powerful lure and to say more about the subject as well.

I am not of a generation that knew very much about the gossip columnist and radio commentator Walter Winchell or that experienced him when he was in full flush of his power in the thirties, forties, and early fifties. I remember him from my childhood primarily as the clipped narrator of “The Untouchables” and less distinctly as a relic from a paleolithic era of American culture when men wore snap-brim gray fedoras (Winchell helped popularize the hat) and tight suits with expansive lapels, not as one of the emblematic figures of the century.

On an October afternoon in 1918, Major Alexander Pennington "Buddy" Cronkhite took practice with a .45 at a tobacco can atop a post at Camp Lewis, Washington. With him were a sergeant and Captain Robert Rosenbluth, recently back from France, where he had been gassed and wounded on the Western Front. “I got it that time, Rosie,” Cronkhite said, putting a shot through the can. The next one entered his chest. He was dead in minutes.

Brock Yates did his usual excellent job, condensing the story of the mighty Duesenberg into a single fine magazine article, but I’d offer one correction. On page 94 there are two photos of the same Duesenberg, 2585/J-560. A JN convertible coupe with body by Rollston, it was later modified by Bohman & Schwartz. Despite what the caption says, Clark Gable did own this car.

Gable’s name has also been associated with another Duesenberg, 2595/J-567, a short-wheelbase supercharged roadster later labeled “SSJ.” It is this roadster that was probably never owned by Gable. It was lent to him by Duesenberg’s Los Angeles distributor, but after the original two-month loan period stretched into six, the dealer retrieved the car, refurbished it, and sold it to the MGM musical director Géorgie Stoll.

A near-twin to this roadster was owned by Gable’s friendly rival in exotic car one-upmanship, his fellow movie star Gary Cooper.

Anyone who is heard to whine and pine for the automotive good old days ought to have Brock Yates’s sidebar to his wonderful article “Duesenberg” in the July/August issue permanently embossed on his forehead so he can read it every morning when he looks in the mirror to shave. Out in the real world, among people, stoplights, curves in the road, and things to run into, an old car is a beast. This applies regardless of how powerful it may be, or how well crafted, or where made, or by whom. It becomes graphically apparent to me anytime I fire up my 1966 Olds 98 or think back to all the knuckles I busted bolting after-market chassis hardware onto my 1969 Ford Mustang in order to make it corner and stop about as well as my 1992 Pontiac Sunbird does right out of the box.

Of course they don’t make them the way they used to. In every area of performance that matters today—efficiency, safety, maneuverability, emissions—they make them better than ever before. Yates is right. Anybody who wants to drive one of these old monsters faster than a Fourth of July parade has either a faulty memory or a death wish.

Historical revisionism isn’t all bad. The article ”. . . Love, Jackie” (September) certainly revised my impressions about the relationship between Jackie Kennedy and the Johnsons. What a refreshing look at the concern these three diverse personalities evidenced for one another. It was indeed a pleasure to read.

John Lukacs ("Revising the Twentieth Century,” September issue) is himself guilty of a bit of revisionism. D. Worth Clark, the senator from Idaho from 1939 to 1945, was a rapscallion, a liar, a cheat, a drunk, and a lot of other bad things—but withal he was not a Republican, as Mr. Lukacs would have him. He was an anti-New Deal Democrat and was well recognized in his day as the black sheep of an otherwise honorable Democratic family. (His niece Beth became the wife of Sen. Frank Church.) My first involvement in a political campaign was working for the election of Glen Taylor to replace Clark.

Our column “My Brush With History” is just a month shy of its fifth birthday, and it’s a very healthy youngster. In fact, it has grown to become perhaps the most popular feature in the magazine—not merely because it is written by our readers but because it so perfectly reflects the expansive and inclusive nature of our subject. It is generating more submissions than we can answer—although we are grateful for each of them—and the quality of these little essays tends to be impressively high. But now and again there are difficulties.

Once, for instance, we got a marvelous story told by a man who, as a car dealer in the Depression Midwest, had been working late one Sunday when a group of men came in and demanded a Hudson Terraplane; it was fast, their leader explained, and thus suited their needs. He was Pretty Boy Floyd. They took the car at gunpoint, locked the salesman in the washroom, and fled—but not far. Our correspondent soon got his Hudson back, ventilated by police bullets and awash in brass cartridge cases from the gang’s last stand. He even sent us one.

THE RAILROADS, THOSE CHILDREN OF THE INDUS- trial Revolution, introduced the world’s first nonmilitary instrument of widely dispersed destructive power. In so doing, they contributed mightily to the rise of litigation in America. Nearly half of all negligence cases decided through 1896 involved railroads. And the railroads usually won. In this they merely reflected the fact that a century ago, when an individual brought suit against a corporation, public opinion tended to protect the institution. But perhaps this phenomenon is most striking in the case of the railroads, not only because of their size and power but because in later years they came to incarnate for a good part of the public big business at its most ruthless.