January 2011

The Gulf The Gulf The Gulf The Gulf Magnificent Module In Defense of My Great Grandfather The Horse That Beat Dan Patch A Better LBJ

When the Europeans first saw the New World, their overwhelming impression was of trees, an endless forest covering a continent. And even in the boundless timberland that was eastern North America, West Virginia’s Land of Canaan was extraordinary, for it contained the finest stand of climax red spruce in the world.

The canoe-shaped Canaan Valley itself, 150 miles west of present-day Washington, D.C., was not big—little more than 14 miles long and 3 miles wide. It was boxed in by three rugged mountain ridges, shrouded in misty fog, and utterly silent. The novelist Rebecca Harding Davis, writing in 1880, called the region’s absolute stillness “strange and oppressive as noonday” and wrote that “human voices were an impertinence in the great and wordless meanings of the woods.”

As a member of a U.S. Army Reserve Civil Affairs Command that has the Persian Gulf as its area of operation, I found Fredric Smoler’s discussion of the analogies to Munich and Vietnam (“What Does History Have to Say about the Persian Gulf?,” November) particularly thought-provoking, as was his treatment of the contemporary problems in that region. I believe he has done a most excellent service to your readers by presenting our nation’s options from this unique perspective.

“What Does History Have to Say about the Persian Gulf?” was both thoughtful and informative. But does the author realize that his conclusion (i.e., he hopes Saddam Hussein will not be saved by politics but will learn the realities of military power) actually is in complete agreement with Ronald Reagan’s? Reagan bashing aside, is the Cold War over because of Reagan miscues? How would the crisis in the Gulf be different if the year was 1979 and the Soviets were a menace and not an ally? If Ronald Reagan were President now, Mr. Smoler and Mr. Reagan could sit down together in joyous harmony on how to solve the Gulf crisis—by military means, of course.

The answer to Mr. Smoler’s query “Have embargoes ever worked?” is painful obvious. God Himself couldn’t make an embargo work without invoking military force. His embargo on commerce in the fruit of the tree of knowledge was a notorious failure, and only with the eventual military intervention of angels bearing fiery swords (how military can you get?) was He able to enforce the sanctions of loss of food stamps and federally subsidized housing upon the inhabitants of Eden. This is hardly a hopeful precedent for the current situation in view of the generally received notion that Eden was located not far from the present-day Iraq!

The film maker Frank Capra once summed up his optimistic outlook by stating flatly: “People’s instincts are good. Never bad. As right as the soil.” None of Capra’s films expresses this sentiment more forcefully than It’s a Wonderful Life . The popular 1946 fantasy tells the story of George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart), the benevolent owner of a small-town building-andloan company who rediscovers his self-worth with the help of a guardian angel.

One wonders how Capra’s faith in the fundamental goodness of the people would square with the behavior of George Bailey’s professional descendants, the S&L bandits of the 1980s. The answer is easy. It lies in Capra’s definition of “the people.” Capra did not mean the population as a whole; he championed “the little man,” the hardworking, virtuous middle class. George Bailey is the quintessential “little man"; Charles Keating is not.

When Edward Streeter was not busy being vice president of the Bank of New York, he spent his time writing fond, clear-eyed, and very funny novels about the American middle class. But his last book, the 1969 Ham Martin , Class of ’17, tells the story of a boy raised in very modest circumstances by parents who want him to become a writer. So, too. does his highborn fiancée. All are thrilled when he sells a story to the Atlantic during the First World War.

Dr. Philip Bellefleur had been headmaster of the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf for about three years when he found the painting in 1970. He and a housekeeper had opened the door to a large storage closet, one that hadn’t been opened in five years, perhaps more. Inside they saw scores of dusty boxes and a half-dozen paintings stacked against the wall. After a quick look, Bellefleur concluded that maybe two of the six pictures were valuable—one because it was so large, nine by twelve feet, and the other because it gave him goose bumps.

Like most public officials, Governor Gifford Pinchot of Pennsylvania could not answer all his mail personally. Much of it had to be left to aides, but not all of these realized the character of their boss. When a citizen wrote in 1931 to complain angrily about one of the governor’s appointments, Pinchot was not pleased to find the following prepared for his signature: “I am somewhat surprised at the tone of your letter.… It has been my aim since I became governor to select the best possible person for each position. … I hope time will convince you how greatly you have erred.”

The governor was not given to such mewlings and forthwith composed his own letter: “Either you are totally out of touch with public sentiment, or you decline to believe what you hear. … To say that I was not attempting to do right when I made these appointments is nonsense. I was doing the best I knew how, and my confidence that I did so is by no means impaired by your letter.” That was more like it—and more like the man too.

On February 3 the Lynn, Massachusetts, Reporter carried the story of a local woman’s remarkable return to health. Mary Glover had taken a bad fall on a patch of ice and injured her back. Her condition seemed grave. Then, on the third day of her recuperation, the Lynn housewife reported she rose from her bed feeling restored to health after reading the Bible. Mrs. Glover later wrote that her eye had happened on the passage in Matthew 9:2-6 where Christ commands the paralytic to rise from his bed and go home. ‘That brief experience,” she explained, “included a glimpse of the great fact that I have since tried to make plain to others, namely, Life in and of Spirit. … This Life being the sole reality of existence.” Mrs. Glover often cited this moment as the wellspring of her faith when, proselytizing as the chief architect of Christian Science under the name she later took, Mary Baker Eddy.