January 2011

Bobby Horton, one cassette.

Bobby Horton, the tireless minstrel of the Lost Cause, is back with a fifth volume of songs of the Confederacy, and it says a good deal about the quality of Civil War-era music that this tape is every bit as appealing as its predecessors. Among the numbers are a North Carolina ballad that wisely borrows the wonderful tune “Annie Laurie”; “Do They Miss Me at Home,” an immensely popular song written nine years before the fighting started; and an engaging oddity, “The Infantry,” a tribute to that organization written to the tune of “O Tannenbaum” by Gen. Bernard Bee, a South Carolinian who took a mortal wound at Bull Run. Horton plays all the instruments- mandolin, fiddle, guitar, concertina, banjo—and sings the songs with lilt and sincerity. Although an Alabaman with deep roots in Southern soil, Horton has also produced three fine volumes of Union Army songs.

GRP Records GRD-2-619 (two CDs).

Verve 314 517 898-2 (three CDs).

In year five of the six years I spent working on President Kennedy: Profile of Power , I ran into an old friend, Thomas Rees, a former congressman from California, who had campaigned with Kennedy in 1960. He asked what I was doing and then he said: “I’ve read all the books, and they get everything down but the most important thing: the magic. The man was magic. He lit up a room. He walked in, and the air was lighter, the light was brighter.”

Yes, I had heard that. I don’t think I’m exaggerating too much when I say that half the people I interviewed began with this sentence about John F. Kennedy: “He was the most charming man I ever met.”

“Land of the Free Trade,” by John Steele Gordon, in the July/August issue of American Heritage , was far below your usual standard. Instead of being a careful look at the forces that shaped history, it is a polemic to justify the greed of those who profit from the destruction of our national economy.

As a social studies teacher, I have relied on American Heritage for more than fifteen years to provide integrity and historical knowledge. Is it really necessary for the right wing of this country to use what was once an illustrious magazine for its purpose? I spent my money on a subscription to what I thought was a historical journal, not a Rush Limbaugh or Bob Dole hatchet job on a sitting President.

The JFK article was not prompted by any political agenda. Rather, we read an essay by Richard Reeves (judging by his syndicated column, a liberal Democrat and a Clinton supporter) drawn from the biography of Kennedy he had long been working on, found it provocative and interesting, and asked him to expand it into an article. We regret that the result should have struck Mr. Ellis as so hostile, but are happy to report that President Clinton evidently did not share his view. Instead, the President asked for galleys of the biography and read it during his vacation on Martha’s Vineyard. —The Editors

Do you think it was necessary for the Forbes family view to be so plainly exhibited on the cover? Why didn’t you run a “Dangerous Precedent” article upon the election of George Bush in 1988? You could have had Ronald Reagan nodding off on the cover and the article could have warned Mr. Bush of the pitfalls of running the country with the aid of an astrologer.

There is surprising naivete in Richard Reeves’s suggestion in the September issue (“‘The Lines of Control Have Been Cut,’”) that if Kennedy had only kept Eisenhower’s elaborate national-security bureaucracy, the republic would have been spared the Bay of Pigs.

Eisenhower’s system was largely for show. The control of CIA covert action, as Robert Lovett and David Bruce concluded in a top-secret report to Eisenhower’s Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities, “can, at best, be described as pro forma ” The idiotic Cuban adventure passed unscathed through the much vaunted Eisenhower staff structure, the Operations Coordinating Board and all, and Eisenhower’s recommendation to Kennedy on the day before the inauguration was full speed ahead. Richard Reeves’s condemnation of Kennedy’s management style is exactly what critics used to say about FDR—and about as well merited.

JFK’s Management JFK’s Management JFK’s Management The Perils of Free Trade The Perils of Free Trade

On July 5, 1896, the Los Angeles Times greeted the imminent arrival of Thomas Alva Edison’s moving-picture projector with enormous enthusiasm: “The vitascope is coming to town. It is safe to predict that when it is set up at the Orpheum and set a-going, it will cause a sensation as the city has not known for many a long day.”

Thousands of city residents had already viewed moving pictures by peering into the eyeholes of peep-show machines on display in saloons, railroad terminals, and amusement parlors, but these images were no bigger than a postcard. Never before had anyone seen moving pictures projected big as life on a screen.