January 2011

The Reverend Maurice Kidder used to wake at 5:00 to write sermons in his dark study where the beagle slept; that early hour seemed to give him the clarity to compose his lectures, which he delivered in an unaffected but commanding baritone voice each Sunday at his All Saints’ Church in western Massachusetts. By the time I knew him, my grandfather had been giving sermons for more than thirty years. He was a tall, powerfully genial man with blue eyes, a colonial-looking head of wavy white hair, and a long, squared jaw. I knew a few things about him: that he drove faster than my parents did, in a white Rambler with blue vinyl seats; that he liked Heath bars and believed in God; that he ate leftover ham fat with a spoon in the kitchen at holidays; that he sang very beautifully in church or while washing his hands. He had played football in high school, where they called him Tiny to be funny, and his boyhood New Hampshire town had a name out of the Iliad, Laconia.

I did not know very much about his war.

I was excited. I looked at Flight Officer Bill Meisburger, my chosen partner in this coming operation and my fast friend. He was pale, but his eyes were bright. With some twenty-four other glider pilots and forty power pilots we were crowded into the bare, dank interior of a Nissen hut at Greenham Common, the big American troop carrier air base west of London, being briefed on our first airborne combat mission.

“Gentlemen,” Major Clement Richardson, our squadron commanding officer, began tremorously, reflecting the tension in the room, “I want you to know that the big show is about to begin, and we are beginning it with a bang.” He unveiled some large maps and charts on the wall. Our C-47s would transport paratroops into Normandy in the very first wave of assault on the night of D-day minus one. Our gliders would go in on Dday proper. We were only a small part of the gigantic Overlord operation, but to all appearances we were in the brunt of it.

The Cooperstown Chamber of Commerce (607-547-9983) offers a booklet listing things to do and places to stay. The Hall of Fame is open year-round, the Farmers’ Museum is open April through December, and Fenimore House is open May through December; joint tickets are available at a discount. The Glimmerglass Opera performs in July and August. During the summer you’ll need to make hotel reservations at least a month in advance; for popular hotels, such as the Otesaga, several months would be safer.

The name of this column is “History Happened Here,” but in the case of Cooperstown, “History Didn’t Happen Here” might be better. This is not to say that Cooperstown has no history; in fact, it has enough for half a dozen villages its size. But the first thing every American thinks of on hearing the town’s name—the thing that makes it a tourist destination, instead of just a scenic spot with a past—is based on an egregious fabrication.

Haiti is the difficult subject of this month’s discourse. As I write, the United States is attempting to reach a peaceful, noninterventionary solution to the problem created when the president elected by popular vote three years ago, Reverend Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was forcibly ousted by a group of army officers.

It’s all sadly familiar to anyone with even a slight knowledge of Haitian-U.S. relations in this century, though the problems used to be “easier” because the solutions were always one-sided. I can best illustrate what I mean by saying that my own immediate freeassociation response to the word Haiti is “Franklin D. Roosevelt.” For years, I believed a statement that he once made that as Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1916 he had written Haiti’s constitution— “a pretty darned good one if I say so myself.” It turns out that he was not telling the strict truth. But he could have been, and the “joke” itself speaks volumes about what Americans once thought and did where the Caribbean was concerned.

In 1984, IBM had the greatest after-tax profit of any company in the history of the world: $6.58 billion. Eight years later, it had the greatest corporate loss in history up to that time: $5 billion.

How could so profound a reversal of fortune happen to so powerful a company in so short a time? Simple. In those eight years the computer world changed and IBM didn’t.

IBM’s greatness lay in mainframes, the powerful computers that are now indispensable to every big business and government agency. With the introduction of the revolutionary Series 360 system in the mid-1960s, IBM came to dominate the mainframe business worldwide. And once IBM mainframes were installed, companies were very reluctant to change to another brand, because the risk of a system crash and the consequent loss of data in the changeover was too high. IBM had a monopoly.

A good many Americans have been accused of betraying their country over the past two centuries. Yet only Benedict Arnold’s name has entered the language as a synonym for treason.

One reason may simply be that Arnold was guilty as charged. About the rest of the most celebrated accused, we’re not so sure. Aaron Burr may or may not have tried to hack out a country for himself west of the Mississippi. Ezra Pound’s defense for broadcasting on behalf of the Axis during World War II was that he’d been mad. Alger Hiss may have provided secrets to the Soviets, but he was never convicted of having done so. Controversy still surrounds the trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Jonathan Pollard’s excuse is that the country for which he was caught spying is an American ally.

Baby pictures make up a large proportion of submissions to this feature. All of them are engaging, but few leap from the page—and the past—as this one does. Dr. Richard R. Rutter, of Burlingame, California, explains:

Sushi and sashimi are being brought out in Shuji’s Restaurant in New Lebanon, New York, around twenty-five miles from Albany, with the sliced ginger and that boiling-hot green pastelike stuff you mash into the soy sauce. We are in the stone and wood and bigverandah former residence of a longdead man called Samuel Jones Tilden. He is quite unknown to history. But some fifty yards across the street once stood the birthplace of another Samuel Jones Tilden, the uncle of the first one, and this Mr. Tilden, on the testimony of his best friend and authorized biographer, was deprived of the presidency of the United States purely and simply because of a weak stomach, a very poor digestive system. As a television commercial of a few years ago put it, you can’t make this stuff up.