January 2011

In 1987, Paul Kennedy published his eighth book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. The first seven had established his reputation as an admirably capable professional historian, and he was pleasantly surprised when this one became celebrated far outside academic precincts. He also must have been astonished when he found himself the object of political invective.

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers touched a nerve. Just as the vigorous assertions of national pride that characterized the Reagan years were beginning to ring a little hollow to some people, the book seemed to suggest that American exceptionalism had no place in the annals of economic, diplomatic, and military history. We were part of a long series of hegemons—loosely speaking, great powers that had lost their preeminence as their military obligations exceeded their economic means.

While a Navy lieutenant stationed at headquarters staff in London, I was one of the duty officers on Sunday, March 17, 1968, the day the “Vietnam Solidarity Campaign” stormed the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square.

The Navy headquarters is about a hundred yards from the embassy, so I was an eyewitness to the afternoon’s proceedings. Grosvenor Square is a small park with a statue of FDR on one side and the Four Freedoms carved on stone blocks around the statue. Like all parks in England, and especially in London, it is very well kept, with green lawns and beautiful trees enclosed in a perfectly trimmed hedge.

1891 One Hundred Years Ago 1916 Seventy-five Years Ago 1941 Fifty Years Ago 1966 Twenty-five Years Ago

In April of 1942, I enlisted in Psychological Research Unit 3 at the Santa Ana Army Air Base. I had written the story for a historical film called Ten Gentlemen from West Point, and, when it played at the post theater, I became a local celebrity and was promoted from private to sergeant and assigned to the Public Relations Office.

I was sent to an old movie studio near Hollywood on orders of General Henry (“Hap”) Arnold, who had established the first Motion Picture Unit of the Army Air Corps to produce aviation training films and send combat camera units around the world. I presented my papers to the personnel officer, a handsome, friendly 31-year-old lieutenant with horn-rimmed glasses and reddish brown hair, named Ronald Wilson Reagan.

I was in Glasgow, Scotland, in September 1939, when World War II broke out. I was about to start my last year at the University of Glasgow, but school opening had been delayed to allow time to build air-raid shelters for the students (trenches with tin roofs covered by sandbags). I therefore had the time to serve as an unpaid clerk at the American Consulate-General, downtown in a grand old Victorian building on West Regent Street. My father was the American consul, and he put me to work typing and filing. The consulate was swamped with American citizens, long resident in Scotland, who wanted to return to the United States but whose passports had expired. And when a U-boat near the coast of Scotland sank the liner Athenia with a large number of Americans aboard, those unfortunates had to be taken care of by the consulate.

For information on Yellowstone and the surrounding areas, call the Wyoming Travel Commission (1-800-225-5996) and Travel Montana (1-800-541-1447). Tom Segerstrom can be reached at the Great Plains Wildlife Research Institute, P.O. Box 7580, Jackson Hole, WY 83001 (307733-2623). His five-day trips start and end at Jackson, and you’ll sleep in comfortable quarters—a guest ranch, a bed and breakfast, and a historic hotel. It’s possible to arrange to skip the return drive from Cody and stay in Buffalo Bill’s town for an extra night, flying home from there. That will give you more time at the splendid Buffalo Bill Historical Center, whose huge collections vividly present the art and culture of the West. And once you’ve seen the powerful lower falls of the Yellowstone in person, it’s reassuring to find from the first paintings of it, by Moran and Bierstadt, that the fundamental things in this corner of the northwest Rockies still apply.

In people of a certain age, the sight of a gas cookstove like the threeburner Glenwood at right evokes the same nostalgia as a 1940s radio or an automobile with running boards. On such stoves the pot roasts of our childhood simmered; in their ovens baked the pumpkin pies of Thanksgiving and the peanut-butter cookies that cooled on racks as we came in from school. The gas stove was indestructible, and nothing ever went wrong with it. But its appeal goes beyond the practical. These stoves are “more than metal objects,” according to one dealer in vintage ranges, which have come back into vogue in decorator kitchens. “They are really pieces of art.”

Readers are invited to submit their personal “brushes with history, ” for which our regular rates will be paid on acceptance. Unfortunately, we cannot correspond about or return submissions. Not Right for the Part No Brush London Bloodshed

The latest installment in our house-styles series looks at a superb example of Frank Lloyd Wright’s prairie style … a World War II bomber pilot spends fifty years trying to find out why his life was spared over Bremen … the man who made a fortune sending New England ice halfway around the world under sail … and, because there’s no 1970s “malaise” here, more.

In 1937, the American economy, which had been slowly rising from the depths it had reached in 1933, suddenly reversed course and sank once more. While this new economic trend enlarged the misery of the American people, it also gave the economists a new problem: what to call it.

Since the start of the 19th century, an economic downturn had been called a depression, but in 1937, the country was already in a depression. So the economists, probably delighted to have a problem they could actually do something about, pressed the word recession into service. Because of the iron law of euphemism (weak terms drive out strong ones), recession took hold, and we have not had a depression since. Today that word effectively belongs to the 1930s and, indeed, is often capitalized to indicate its now unique meaning.