January 2011

When the picture of Hungarian immigrants arriving in America ran in the magazine a year ago, several readers wrote in to ask why they had evidently flown here on the President’s private plane. We helplessly replied that we had no idea. Now we know.

In the last February/March issue your story “What Should We Teach Our Children About American History?” included a photograph showing a group standing in front of an airplane. “Old impulse, new vehicle,” read the caption. “Immigrants arrive from Hungary on Christmas Day, 1956.” I recognized the scene at once. The man waving his cap is my father, John Hegedus; my mother, Ilona, is standing just beyond his elbow with my two brothers, Joe and George, in front of her. To her right is my sister Maria and, in front of her, my sister Susie. I am the girl holding two packages just to Maria’s right. The airplane, the Columbine , belongs to President Eisenhower, and what follows is my father’s account of how we came to be aboard it.

From early times, the Bahamas have enjoyed the notion of themselves as the “Isles of Perpetual June,” and more than one piece of tourist literature has assigned that sentiment to George Washington, who supposedly visited as a young man. In fact, there is no proof that Washington spoke well of the Bahama Islands, or that he slept here. But his countrymen certainly have—by the millions. Some came as refugees, some as tourists, some to pursue the cause of war, and some to drink elixirs forbidden to them back home by the Volstead Act.

In 1923, an Englishman on holiday observed: “The Bahamas are so much nearer to the United States than to England that, if you take an American off his guard, you will find him speaking of them as if they were an additional state, or at least a territory.”

One splendid morning during a recent West Coast vacation, I was turning the pages of a San Francisco newspaper over my coffee when I came upon a headline that clouded my cheerful mood: GERMAN POLL FINDS SENTIMENT AGAINST FOREIGNERS RUNS DEEP. According to the story below it, one-quarter of a group of Germans polled in a survey agreed entirely or partly with the slogan “Germany for the Germans,” which right-wing extremists had been chanting during several weeks of rampages against foreign refugees. Included in the atrocities were the rock-throwing attacks on refugee shelters and the torching of foreigners’ homes. “Shades of the 1930s,” I thought with the automatic shudder that any possible neo-Nazi activity sends through me—in Germany or anywhere else.

Many historians have argued that whatever their function in the state religion, the pyramids of Egypt were also politically useful make-work projects. By employing peasants during the season when the Nile flooded the fields, pyramid building provided an income to the poor and thus helped secure political tranquillity for those in power. If this is the case (and Egyptology is hardly my field), then the pyramids are not only one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World but the earliest surviving government pork-barrel project as well.

Gilbert Stuart flattered himself that the prominent men and women whose portraits were his fortune admired him almost as much for his good manners and genial gossip as for his skilled artist’s hand. And so, when he was warned that George Washington did not much like small talk, he was not unduly worried.

“Now, sir,” the artist said confidently as he began to sketch his most celebrated subject, “you must let one forget that you are General Washington and that I am Mr. Stuart.”

The president’s blue eyes flashed in their large sockets—the largest, Stuart said later, he’d ever tried to paint. “Mr. Stuart need never feel the need of forgetting who he is,” his sitter said, “or who General Washington is.”

Exactly who General Washington was will always remain something of a mystery. Like Abraham Lincoln, like Franklin Roosevelt, he kept his own counsel, had no confidants. “With me,” he said toward the end of his life, “it has always been a maxim rather to let my designs appear from my works than by my expressions.”

The term lobster shift emanates from an old wives’ tale that designates lobster meat as being very hard to digest. In the old days this resulted in the standard admonition to the stag-banquet-bound husband, “Now don’t eat too much lobster or you’ll be up all night.”

As a graduate of one newspaper’s postmidnight “lobster shift,” I recall being told in the late 1940s one theory regarding the origin of that expression, mentioned in the July/August edition (“Brisk Walk and Brusque Talk” by Gene Smith). And it doesn’t involve the beloved lobster, in any condition. The root of the word is merely “lob,” an English slang import meaning blockhead, buffler, idler, or similar pejorative applied to journalistic neophytes who were routinely assigned to this dead period, generally to keep them out of the mainstream of news—and thus out of trouble’s way.

In his fascinating account of Harry Truman’s nomination to the Vice Presidency in the July/August issue (“‘I Hardly Know Truman’”), David McCullough refers to the secrecy that enshrouds Bob Hannegan’s half-hour visit with FDR aboard the presidential train on the eve of the 1944 Democratic convention in Chicago.

Over dinner one memorable evening several years ago the only other person present at that meeting described what took place. According to Grace Tully, FDR’s private secretary, when Hannegan, the Democratic party chairman, boarded the train, he bore a letter he had just received from Roosevelt.

As Tully recounts the story, the letter said, in effect: My preferences for Vice President are William O. Douglas and Harry S. Truman. Recognizing the implied preference for Douglas, Hannegan—who had not shown the letter to the convention—asked Roosevelt to have it rewritten, with Truman’s name listed first.

I always like the “My Brush with History” section, and I particularly appreciated the letter about Tom Mix (May/June). I, too, was a Tom Mix fan as a youngster in the same generation with Mr. Shaw. In fact, I once owned a Tom Mix pistol, which I acquired by saving box tops from Ralston’s hot cereal.