January 2011

Geoffrey C. Ward’s review of Robert Caro’s Means of Ascent (“The Life & Times,” July/August) misses the mark. To characterize the Lyndon Johnson portrayed by Mr. Caro as “a uniformly evil genius, a monster without redeeming social value,” is to overlook Mr. Caro’s own explanation, in the introduction to Means of Ascent , that Lyndon Johnson’s life contained both bright and dark threads.

That bright thread is movingly explored in Path to Power , Volume I of Mr. Caro’s enterprise. There he does not slight Mr. Johnson’s efforts as a teacher and as a congressman servicing his rural Texas constituents. One cannot read Mr. Caro’s extended treatment of Mr. Johnson teaching in Cotulla, Texas, without being genuinely impressed.

In August of 1863, Frederick Douglass called upon the Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton to explain why the recruiting of black troops for the Union had been slower than some had expected. Black men wanted equal pay, he explained, and a chance for promotion. And they wanted some assurance that the Union would retaliate if the Confederate Congress made good on its pledge to treat captive black soldiers as rebellious slaves, rather than prisoners of war.

Stanton was “cold and business-like … but earnest,” Douglass remembered. His visitor was earnest, too. “I told him,” Douglass recalled, “that the negro was the victim of two extreme opinions. One claimed for him too much, and the other too little … that it was a mistake to regard him either as an angel or a devil. He is simply a man, and should be dealt with purely as such.”

Editor's Note: William Linzee Prescott already knew a lot about war when he went to Vietnam. Born in 1917 and the descendant of the Colonel Prescott, who had told his men to hold their fire until they saw the whites of the enemy’s eyes on Bunker Hill, he studied art at Chouinard in Los Angeles, joined the Army at the outbreak of World War II, and jumped into Normandy with the 82d Airborne. Captured and held for ten months before he escaped, Prescott documented his POW days in brisk sketches and the Normandy invasion with a mural at West Point.

The “My Brush with History” about our lunar excursion module (November) is evocative and, for lots of us, it recalls a heady moment. We’re going to cite it in our company newspaper so that other Grumman people who shared the experience Ray Smith recalls can go to American Heritage to revisit it.

April 14, 1865 was an important day for William Withers, Jr. He was the orchestra leader at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C., and, that evening, he was going to perform his song “Honor to Our Soldiers” for Abraham Lincoln. The president had accepted an invitation by the management of the theater to see the actress Laura Keene in Our American Cousin; Keene herself was to lead the audience and cast in singing Withers’s tribute to Lincoln.

“I was to achieve one of the greatest successes of my life,” Withers remembered. “Hours before theatre time, people began to gather around the main entrance, and I stood for a while outside the stage door watching the crowds.” Then, before going to the music room, he stepped next door to Taltaval’s saloon, an actor’s bar.

by Charles R. Cawthon; University Press of Colorado; 180 pages.

In 1941 Charles R. Cawthon joined the 116th Regiment of the 29th Infantry Division. The 116th was the Stonewall Brigade, and Cawthon, raised on Civil War lore, was very proud of his connection with “what may well have been the most deadly single formation of infantry that this country—North or South—has produced.” At the same time, though, the young recruit had trouble “relating my fumbling efforts and those of the largely bored soldiers around me to the legendary fierce gray ghosts of the Army of Northern Virginia.”

But in the end they turned out to be made of the same stuff, and it is the transition from boys to soldiers to veterans that Cawthon chronicles in his wise, calm, beautifully written memoir. The events he shows us are anything but calm: He went in with the second wave on D-day, fought his way through the terrible hedgerows that led to Saint-Lô, and was wounded near the German border.

In his article on Chancellorsville in the March issue “Lee’s Greatest Victory,” Robert K. Krick characterizes Gen. Alfred H. Colquitt as “inept,” of “starkly limited military attainments,” “this weak reed,” and, possibly worst of all, “a Georgia politician.”

Since General Colquitt was my greatgrandfather and since both my father and brother were named Alfred Colquitt Howard, I have, after smoothing down a hackle or two, done some reading. The author and I are in agreement that General Colquitt halted his Georgians in the course of the attack in order to assess a report from one of his staff officers that there were enemy troops on his right flank.

Colquitt’s unit had been savagely mauled in a flanking maneuver at Antietam the autumn before, and I wonder whether it is all that surprising that, in an area where visibility was often reduced to a few yards, the Georgians exercised a degree of prudence.

D. R. Martin’s “’The Most Wonderful Horse in the World’” (July/August) is a superb recap of the Dan Patch story. Harry Hersey, who drove Dan Patch to his world record 1:55¼ mile at Lexington, Kentucky, in 1905, was a gentleman right down to the wire. On September 28, 1938, only hours after Billy Direct broke that record by a quarter-second (also at Lexington), Vic Fleming, Billy’s driver, received a congratulatory telegram from Mr. Hersey.

Billy Direct’s epochal mile spelled the end of his racing days. As with Dan Patch, no competitors could be marshaled. But unlike Dan Patch, no lucrative exhibition career awaited Billy Direct. The United States had become motorized; people no longer identified with the horse.

On the road again Links with history Loyalist refuge Billy the Kid country Plus …