January 2011

As a college sophomore in 1960, I had little interest in politics, except that the woman I was dating was a member of the Young Democrats on campus. Democrats at Oregon State College in those days were a rare commodity, so, when the presidential campaign got under way, our little group didn’t expect to be much involved.

Imagine our surprise, then, when we were asked by the State Central Committee to help play host to Senator John F. Kennedy when he made a campaign speech in Corvallis. I knew nothing about campaigns or electioneering, so I was given grunt work: nailing up posters, running errands, and stuffing envelopes.

It was 1956, and Adlai Stevenson was running against Dwight Elsenhower for president. People who supported Stevenson tended to feel an almost personal emotion for him, and I felt as if a beloved relative were running.

Sometime during the summer, I heard that he was making a swing through the state and would give a speech in a hotel in Vancouver, Washington. His itinerary would take him from Spokane in the far east over to the Columbia River, and then many miles west along a winding road that was outstandingly beautiful but narrow, not a road good for anyone in a hurry.

On the day that Mr. Stevenson and his party wended their way to Vancouver, I happened to be driving into the next county on the same Evergreen Highway. My children and I watched like hawks all the way up the river.

By October 30, 1958, Nikita Khrushchev’s assumption of power over the Soviet Union had already produced a slight, if uneven, warming of the Cold War. On that mild autumn day, however, a real thaw took place in New York City, where more than one hundred musicians and technicians gathered at Manhattan Center for an RCA Victor recording session whose guest star was the Soviet Union’s hottest new export, maestro Kiril Kondrashin.

Kondrashin had swept into Western consciousness that April by conducting Van Cliburn’s stunning victory in the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. As a trusted Soviet citizen and twice winner of the Stalin Prize, Kondrashin had been granted leave, albeit grudgingly, to be the first Soviet conductor to tour and record in the United States.

As a further sign of post-Stalinist warming, Kondrashin had chosen to record light classics by Soviet composers who only a decade before had been accused of “anti-popular formalist perversions” with “antidemocratic tendencies.”

In “My Brush with History” (November) Peter D. Baird writes an amusing story of his experience as an aircraft spotter while he was a grade schooler in Moscow, Idaho, during the early days of the Cold War in the 1950s. The impression one gets is of a slipshod operation.

But my experience in Bismarck, North Dakota, in 1953–54 was more positive. I was a-geologist there in the opening days of the Williston Basin oil boom and was recruited, along with a number of others from my company, to man the Air Force’s “filter center” at night. There we would receive calls from spotters like Mr. Baird, scattered over the state, and in turn we would relay the information to Rapid City Air Force Base.

Nathan Ward’s October “Time Machine” submits that the eleven crewmen lost in the October 17, 1941, torpedoing of the Kearny were the first American servicemen to die in World War II. Although not well known outside the U.S. Army Air Corps Weather Service, it’s a fact that Capt. Robert M. Losey became the first American in the service of his country to die from hostile action in World War II more than a year earlier.

As the first chief commander of the Air Weather Service (since 1937), Captain Losey asked Gen. Hap Arnold to send him to Finland (which had been invaded by the Germans in 1939) to observe arctic aerial warfare firsthand. Arnold sent Losey to Finland in January 1940 as assistant military attaché for air. Later Losey was detailed to accompany the U.S. ambassador to Norway, Mrs. Florence J. Harriman, to that country. On April 21, after leaving Mrs. Harriman in a safe place, Losey went forward to observe the fighting and was killed instantly by shrapnel while watching a bombing raid on DombÅs.

“I don’t want it”

Thus Harry Truman on the Vice Presidency of the United States. He was speaking in the summer of 1944, a few days before being pulled into the vortex that would bring him to the land’s highest office. Democratic delegates knew that they were nominating two Presidents: Franklin Roosevelt, who was unlikely to survive his fourth term, and whoever became his running mate. So the only real drama in the election was at the Democratic Convention—but it had drama to spare. In a fastpaced narrative full of tangy detail, David McCullough shows us FDR at his most devious, the old party-boss system at its zenith, and Harry Truman at the pivot of his career.

What we lost in the Great War

They’re at it again. As I write, a big, well-barbered pack of would-be presidents has already finished months of pestering the famously patient citizens of New Hampshire for their votes. By the time you read this, the surviving candidates, reduced in numbers but increased in volume, will have sound-bitten and photo-opped their way back and forth across the continent too many times to count, and if the past is any guide, we will all be pretty much agreed that the current presidential race is the worst ever—vulgar, empty-headed, unworthy of the world’s oldest democratic republic.

Exasperated, as he often was, by the French genius for dividing into multiple and irreconcilable political factions, Charles de Gaulle is reported to have once thrown up his hands and lapsed into apparent non sequitur. “Nobody,” he declared, “can simply bring together a nation that has 265 different kinds of cheese.”

Yet the greatest French statesman of this century seems truly to have discovered an underlying correlation between cheese and political instability. Consider the United States. It has produced only three great, uniquely American cheeses: Monterey Jack, brick, and Liederkranz. But, since 1789, it has also flourished under a single constitution. Meanwhile, France, with hundreds of cheeses, has run through three kingdoms, two empires, and five republics.

A clipping selected at random from a generous stack tells me that the would-be Democratic candidate Tom Harkin is pitching a “populist, sharply partisan message.” I get the impression that the two adjectives are interchangeable. Another clip predictably calls David Duke a “populist.” That’s no surprise, either. I have heard the word applied to Jesse Jackson and Ronald Reagan in previous campaigns—in fact, to practically every candidate who did not outright propose restricting government to the rich, the wise, and the well born. Or, as my friend, the editor of this magazine has put it, to everyone who doesn’t hold an office or own a bank.