January 2011

History, we’re told, is written by the victors; a nation tends to focus on its patriots, not its traitors, and those who depart are forgotten when gone. But the history of revolution in America and the “revolt of the colonies” are two faces of a single coin: the choice of independence was a nearer thing than at present we portray it, and several of the best minds of the period were uncertain which side to support.

“Many-sided men,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt told an interviewer in 1932, “have always attracted me. I have always had the keenest interest in five men … of comparatively modern times.” They were Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Napoleon, Theodore Roosevelt, and Benjamin Thompson, a.k.a. Count Rumford. Of Roosevelt’s list, the last named is the only one not now a household word. Yet, in certain circles while he lived—the scientific community, for example, and the townspeople of Munich—the count seemed nonpareil.

In early October of 1963, Representative Clement Zablocki, a Wisconsin Democrat, led a House Foreign Affairs Committee fact-finding delegation to South Vietnam. Invited to the White House when he returned, Zablocki told President John F. Kennedy that removing President Ngo Dinh Diem would be a big mistake, unless the United States had a successor in the wings. Remember Cuba, Zablocki said. “Batista was bad, but Castro is worse.”

It was a little late for that. By then, Kennedy was just about ready to sign off on the overthrow of Diem. In Saigon, Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and agents of the Central Intelligence Agency were aiding and encouraging the plots of various coup-minded Vietnamese generals. In Washington, schemers in the State Department, led by Averell Harriman, had persuaded the Kennedy that the fight against North Vietnamese communism was being lost because Diem was corrupt and foolish, and was not taking orders from his American sponsors and allies.

For the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, we devoted the entire December issue to the Second World War. On December 3, a historian at a Midwestern college wrote my boss to say we’d done a pretty shabby job: The articles were “weak on factual accuracy, which, of course, makes them suspect in interpretation.”

He was particularly censorious about a piece by the naval historian Edward Beach that examined how America recovered from calamity to organize and win the war in the immensities of the Pacific—a campaign which Beach had observed  through the periscope of his submarine. I passed the letter along to Captain Beach, who replied far more graciously than I would have had I been upbraided for not comprehending events in which I had actually taken part. He defended his position ably and persuasively, but what brings this exchange to mind just now is that sentence about how errors of fact make an article suspect in interpretation.

There was a miraculous and all-conquering horse, a filly, not a colt, who in nine out of ten races broke or equaled speed records that had stood for years and decades, who in fire and presence and appearance was Black Beauty personified, and was, the author of The Black Stallion said, the mental picture he had of his creation. In her greatest moment she was struck down. She struck herself down. What had made her great de stroyed her. Tens of thousands watched in person, and millions on television. No small number wept. She had done what no horse had ever done and was buried where no horse was ever buried. The great wings were folded about her, and Pegasus flew no more.

“The Almighty dollar,’ Washington Irving wrote, was the “great object of universal devotion” among Americans. Tocqueville described moneymaking as the “prevailing passion.” And though the object of their craving sometimes changed, Tocqueville noticed that the emotional intensity persisted. This was why tightfisted Yankee merchants would break down in penitential tears and convert to Christ, why sober Ohio farmers would abandon their homesteads and join Utopian communes. Because Americans were so bound up in the struggle to get ahead, Tocqueville concluded, they rushed “unrestrained beyond the range of common sense” when cut loose. Thus did a materialistic nation beget so many “strange sects,” each striking out on such “extraordinary oaths to eternal happiness.”

The early 1930s were not good to my grandmother. About all she had left were her memories of her childhood at the old home place. In Grandmother’s case the old home place was a farm outside of Glasgow, Kentucky. This was the center of her universe and now, in 1937, we were all going on vacation there for a visit.

People today accept a vacation as a God-given right, but in the Depression a vacation was a major event to be planned, discussed, and saved for. Those going were my grandmother, my mother, myself, and our boarder. Mother and Father had divorced, and the boarder had been with us for the past seven or eight years and was considered one of the family. He would do most of the driving and pay for the gasoline.

As I counted off the days, Grandma made the wait even longer by telling me that when we reached Glasgow I would see a big secret. I’d ask, “What secret?” but she would only say that I would have to wait.

When I was growing up in the thirties in Cambridge, Massachusetts, there was a lot of antagonism between Yankee and Irish. I knew because my family was Irish immigrant on one side and Empire Loyalist on the other. All my friends were Irish Catholic, and the nuns at my school sometimes called me “spawn of the devil.” I was used to defending myself from all sides.

On Sundays my friends and I would go to museums just to get out of the house, and we always followed the same path; we were very ritualistic eleven-year-olds. First we would visit the art museum, where we would stand in front of each painting and count to a hundred, then the University Museum, the Civil War Memorial, and what we called the Chinese Gate. We’d finish by rolling down an incline by one of the Harvard dorms.

The saying has it, “There’s no such thing as an ex-Marine,” and in my case it’s all too true, even though it’s been nearly thirty years since those brief three I spent on active duty with the 2d Marines.

In what history will regard as peacetime just before the war in Vietnam, I served with a few men who became lifetime friends and many others who earned my deepest professional respect and admiration.

Far from the least of these latter was a young corporal. He was a Rifle Squad Leader in H Company, 2d Battalion, 2d Marines (“Horrible Hog” of “Two-Two”) of which I was the executive officer for about six months in 1963.

During those six months I had the chance to observe this corporal at close quarters. He was a recruiting-poster . Marine, tall, broad-shouldered, blond, and, like most of us then (sigh!), very fit. Buy beyond appearance, his performance was truly outstanding. He had qualified every year as a Sharpshooter with the M-14 rifle. He led his thirteen-man squad by example, joining them in all the dirty work.

When Marian Anderson died recently, obituaries of the great American contralto recalled how, in the spring of 1939, the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow her to give a recital in Constitution Hall, their auditorium in Washington, because she was black, and how Harold Ickes, the Secretary of the Interior, offered her the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, where she sang out-of-doors on Easter Sunday.

For three centuries, from the Spanish Colonial period to the present day, benches like this fine early-nineteenth-century example have provided handsome, practical seating in countless New Mexican homes and churches. In fact, a charred banco excavated from the ruins of a seventeenth-century church is the earliest known piece of New Mexican furniture. In the bench pictured opposite, simple triangles cut from opposing splats and rails form a striking overall pattern. This use of what artists call negative space is common in New Mexican furniture and almost unknown in other early American styles.

The banco ’s design and construction demonstrate the ingenuity of the New Mexican carpenter copying sophisticated Spanish prototypes at a primitive frontier outpost five thousand miles from the mother country. The only wood available to him was soft ponderosa pine, so he had to use thicker boards and extra support. His saw, similar to a large serrated butcher knife, could not easily execute curves, so he translated curvilinear designs into straight lines.