After more than 130 years, the fundamental dispute between the American media and the American military has changed hardly at all. The essential argument is still about access. How much should the press be allowed to know and see of the conduct of battle? Access was the question posed by the eighteen hundred media personnel accredited to cover Operation Desert Storm in Iraq earlier this year when fewer than three hundred were permitted onto the field in press pools so carefully escorted and monitored that one correspondent likened them to “excursion tours for senior citizens.”
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January 2011
It is often said that we ignore history at our own peril. Richard F. Snow’s enlightening essay “Hometown” ("Letter from the Editor") in the May/June issue, and its eloquent discussion of how good “the good ol’ days” in New York really were, offers yet further proof of this point.
My wife and I also appreciated the article “Williamsburg on the Subway.” We are privileged to be the occupants of one of the landmarks it features—Gracie Mansion. Its beautiful grounds and historic furnishings, I can assure you, are sufficient cause for a first-term mayor of this great city to consider seriously seeking a second one.
After dinner, Frank Lloyd Wright would sometimes raise a wine glass, watch the yellow candlelight refracted through the red liquid and crystal, and, quoting the Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu, remark that the reality of the vessel lay in the void within, “the place of greatest peace.” Wright was perhaps America’s last great architect to conceive of his work as a search for truth. And, for Wright, truth was found not in the physical form of a building, but in what it contained. “Space,” he wrote, “the continual becoming: invisible fountain from which all rhythms flow and to which they must pass. Beyond time or infinity.”
The cover story on the history of the U.S. banking industry in the February/March issue was thorough and informative. It should be must reading for everyone in Washington, as Congress begins debating how to reform the antiquated regulation of our financial-services industry.
John Steele Gordon states that Elizabethan goldsmiths became the first to issue paper money. I understand that the Chinese invented paper money centuries before. According to The Horizon History of China , bankers and money shops issued drafts payable at the capital during the Tang period. During the Sung dynasty in 1024, paper money was issued with government approval and backing. Mr. Gordon replies: I’m afraid that Mr. Brown has caught me with my Eurocentrism showing. The Chinese did indeed first invent paper money, several hundred years before it appeared in Europe. Alas, it also disappeared from China several hundred years before it appeared in Europe.
In “The Time Machine” in your April issue, you state that Col. Charles Lindbergh “grew silent and faded from public notice” during World War II.
I feel, however, that he should be recognized for his devotion to his country and his accomplishments in working with pilots to improve their performance and their planes’ performance while he was a consultant for Chance Vought and Pratt & Whitney.
I was a first lieutenant in the Marine Corps, squadron VMF 313, flying an F4U (Corsair) fighter and stationed on Midway Island in the Pacific. In 1944, from April 29 to May 2, Lindbergh was with us and took part in a tactical navigation flight and a gunnery practice run.
He was instrumental in showing us ways to improve our engine performance and use less fuel during operations. On May 1, during our gunnery runs, Colonel Lindbergh flew wing on me. When he flew the Atlantic I was eight years old and on this date I was flying with him, a boyhood dream come true.
Lt. Willis Seward Keith, the hero of Herman Wouk’s novel The Caine Mutiny , spends New Year’s Eve of 1943 in the wheelhouse of the wretched old World War I destroyer Caine , nursing the gloomy conviction that the war is “diffuse, slogging, and empty of drama.” He is on his way to take part in some of the greatest battles ever fought, but they will seem at the time nothing more than long bursts of incoherent busyness. “He had often wondered in his boyhood what it must have been like to live in the stirring days of Gettysburg and Waterloo; now he knew, but he didn’t know that he knew.” Only years later would he come to realize that “he, too, Willie Keith, had fought on Saint Crispin’s Day.”
The travails of the 1970s bear little enough resemblance to those of the 1940s, but I thought of this passage when I first read Nicholas Lemann’s essay on the seventies that opens this issue, because it showed me an era 1 simply didn’t know was one.
Who was Robert Johnson? For so many years, that question haunted all of us who loved the blues. Certainly, we knew about Robert Johnson’s music. He had time to make only a handful of recordings before he died at the age of 27 in 1938, and, outside of the small towns of the Mississippi Delta country where he had grown up, he was almost completely unknown. Within a few years, however, the old 78-rpm recordings that he’d made in the two years before his death had become precious collector’s objects, and as his songs began to be reissued on LP anthologies in the late 1950s and early 1960s, young blues singers—many of them white—started to perform his classic songs, like “Cross Road Blues,” “Sweet Home Chicago,” “Walkin’ Blues,” and “Love in Vain.”
Robert Johnson has had an all but spectral aspect for his admirers down the years. He came seemingly out of nowhere and went back into nowhere within the span of less than a decade, which began with a rumored Faustian compact with the Devil and ended in agony from strychnine-laced whiskey slipped to him by the husband of a woman he had been seeing on the side. His legacy—apart, that is, from a couple of posed photographs that do little to resolve the mystery, except that one shows the delicate, long-fingered hands of a born guitarist, and the testimony of acquaintances, most of whom disagree about his nature—consists of those 29 songs recorded under comparatively primitive conditions in San Antonio and Dallas, in late 1936 and mid-1937, over a total of five days. They were enough—enough, even, to put him up there with Bessie Smith, who recorded 159. These two, Bessie and Robert, are by common consent the top of the heap in the field of the blues, and they died within a year and sixty miles of each other in the Mississippi Delta, where Johnson was raised and learned his art.