January 2011

“Reforming the Law” (“Business of America,” September) managed to jog some aging memory cells from my earliest, introductory days to the law now some two decades ago, when the mysteries of the Field Code were ever so briefly explained to the greenhorns populating the first-year class at the Duke Law School. “We stand more frequently in need of being reminded than we do of education,” Samuel Johnson is reputed to have said. I stand in need of both, thus I am doubly grateful for the piece.

Brock Yates’s nostalgia-laden tribute to the U.S. auto industry of the 1950s (October) was a refreshing, welcome commentary. Mr. Yates embodies many of the best qualities of automotive journalism, and 1 am a long-time admirer of his work, but there was one statement that should be corrected: “Once-proud Packard ended production in 1962. …”

Production of the large, luxury cars that created the Packard legend stopped in 1956 at Packard’s Detroit production facility. During 1957–58 several hundred “Packardbakers,” heavily optioned Studebaker Hawks with Packard nameplates, were manufactured at Studebaker’s South Bend facilities in an effort to keep the Packard name alive.

In 1958 this Studebaker-cloned Packard was discontinued because of dismal sales—the last time the Packard name ever appeared on a production vehicle. Mr. Yates was probably referring to the April 26, 1962, annual meeting of the StudebakerPackard Board of Directors, when the Packard name was officially dropped from the corporate logo.

An item in the excellent “Time Machine” feature in your October issue asserted that the eleven crewmen lost when the destroyer USS Kearny was torpedoed in 1941 “had become the first Americans to die” in World War II.

They were the first American servicemen to die in the European theater, but it should be remembered that six valiant American Red Cross nurses on their way to succor the blitz-battered British perished in the North Atlantic after U-boats torpedoed the SS Vigrid and the SS Maasdam on June 10 and 18, 1941—some four months before the October 17 attack on the Kearny .

In his article on the rites of reparations (“In the News,” July/August) Bernard A. Weisberger states that in November 1923 the German mark reached 4.2 billion to the dollar. He is off by a factor of 1,000. The mark actually dropped to 4.2 trillion to the dollar!

That sort of confusion is understandable. If the author relied on British or German sources, they would (correctly) report an exchange rate of 4.2 billion marks to the dollar. To most Europeans a billion is the same as an American trillion, 1 followed by 12 zeros. An American billion, 1 followed by 9 zeros, is spoken of as a thousand million by an Englishman and a milliard by a German.

America’s favorite World War II movie has led a charmed life. While it was being filmed, each looming disaster turned out to be a cleverly disguised blessing, and after its completion everything that could go right did go right. But, of all the lucky accidents it enjoyed on its way to screen immortality, the fact that shooting began before there was a finished script may have been the most providential.

Had there been a completed screenplay before filming started in May 1942, the studio would have been obliged to send a copy to the Bureau of Motion Pictures. The bureau, a division of the Office of War Information, was nothing less than a ministry of propaganda that sat in judgment on the content of Hollywood’s products. Although the studios’ cooperation with the BMP was on a voluntary basis, bureaucrats were nevertheless allowed to sit in on story conferences, suggest changes, and on occasion write patriotic speeches for insertion into scripts.

During World War II my father served in the North Atlantic aboard a destroyer escort, and a few years afterward his old skipper came into New York Harbor with a destroyer squadron and invited my family out for a ride. I was five or six at the time and predictably enchanted to be brought into this square, handsome gray-metal world inhabited by casual blue-clad demigods. We weighed anchor—lots of satisfying noise and activity—and headed toward the Narrows. I was on the bridge watching it all when Captain Greenbacker turned and said, “Want to take her out, Dick?” And suddenly my father—my father in his workaday father-issue brown suit—was saying things like “Steady up on course zero-three-zero,” and a roomful of men in uniforms were doing what he told them.

It was, said one of the few people who knew about it, “the greatest news story on Earth.” It belonged exclusively to my father, a prolific writer, but he knew it could not be published. The story presented an appalling picture of the former King of England, the Duke of Windsor. It contained dreadful secrets, including an urgent proposal for President Franklin Roosevelt, a message so damning and dangerous that my father actually feared for his life after he had delivered it. In fact, the entire story was so explosive that an aide to Windsor warned that if what the duke had said, on that December evening in 1940, became known, “the lid would be blown off the British Empire.”

In the summer of 1940, the fate of the world depended on the duel between two men: Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill. It was a duel of nerves, and of wills. Churchill carried it off, because Hitler finally chose not to invade Britain. But even before he made that decision, he and Churchill were aware that this was no longer a duel between the two of them. Before the fall of France, Hitler had gained an ally, Mussolini. Before the Battle of Britain Churchill, had gained the support of Roosevelt. That the latter weighed more in the balance than the former both Hitler and Churchill knew.

Something began at 7:50 A.M. (Hawaiian time), Sunday, December 7, 1941. Most Americans seemed convinced it was World War II. But one man wasn’t so sure. And because he happened to be president of the United States, a lot of brainpower was diverted to the practicalities of nomenclature.

Britons tended simply to say “the war,” and more formal Americans shunned “World War II” in favor of “the Second World War.” No unadorned common noun and neither cardinal nor ordinal numerical designations, however, could satisfy the free world’s acknowledged leader. He wanted something more expressive. This was an exceptional war; it demanded an exceptional name.

At his press conference of April 3, 1942, Franklin Roosevelt set forth stringent guidelines. The name must be short, he said, yet convey the idea this was a war to preserve democracy.

The reporters on hand naturally got first crack at trying. “War with the Axis Powers” received quick presidential rejection. Too cumbersome.