January 2011

In July of 1944 I was lying in a naval hospital bed in Honolulu, a very young Marine lieutenant shot full of holes in the Saipan campaign. I shared the room with an old friend I hadn’t seen in months until we accidentally ended up together in the hospital, courtesy of the Japanese.

One bright morning an unusual flurry of activity began: cleaning personnel zipping about, corpsmen dashing down the corridor, nurses coming in to check if we had shaved and washed after breakfast. There even seemed to be an inordinate number of planes roaring by the hospital. Questions about what was going on were ignored, but finally a favorite nurse gave us the word: President Roosevelt was in Hawaii—for a conference with his Pacific commanders, as we learned later—and was visiting the hospital and would maybe visit a few rooms.

I hadn’t the faintest idea I was having a brush with history one evening in the spring of 1929. I just knew that it was the end of a wearying, happy day.

The afternoon had seen me place well enough in several events to win my track letter. Now here I was being presented with a five-dollar gold piece as my reward for finishing second in Whittier High School’s constitutional oratorical contest. My speech, “John Marshall and the Constitution,” had just lost to one on the subject “Our Privileges under the Constitution.” I didn’t begrudge the winner of the firstplace ten-dollar piece. Richard M. Nixon had simply been the better speaker.

According to recent studies, alcoholics “have stronger expectations about how alcohol will affect them than other drinkers do. Alcoholics believe that alcohol transforms their personalities,” making them more relaxed, entertaining, sexually alluring. This is also more or less the sort of transformation actors hope for when they take the stage. “An actor is much better off than a human being,” John Barrymore once said. “He isn’t stuck with the paltry fellow he is. He can always act his better and non-existent self.” And so it is really not surprising that acting and alcoholism often seem to go together, though rarely have they been so sadly intertwined as in the lives of the Barrymores—Lionel, Ethel, and John—newly chronicled in The House of Barrymore by Margot Peters.

Some years ago, a magazine asked J. Paul Getty to write an article to be entitled “The Secret of My Success.” Getty agreed, and, a short time later, the manuscript arrived in the mail. It read, in its entirety, “Some people find oil; others don’t.” Earlier, Commodore Vanderbilt is supposed to have explained his own economic success by noting simply that “I seen my opportunities and I took ’em.”

Both Vanderbilt and Getty, of course, found opportunities that made them rich almost beyond counting, and as a result, their stories have been told many times and at much greater length than their own one-sentence forays into autobiography. But, in this respect, economic history is much like military history, for it is usually generals and admirals, not Pfc.’s and able seamen, however brave, who are remembered and memorialized. Likewise, for every Getty and Vanderbilt, there have been tens of thousands of others who also saw their opportunities in the American economy and took them.

The problem is classically simple to state, and impossibly difficult to solve. One country invades and subdues another. Third-party nations protest and insist on the aggressor’s withdrawal but are unwilling or unable to enforce their demand by war. They try diplomatic pressure and economic sanctions. Time passes, nothing happens, the crisis festers, and debate rages between those who call for toughness and those who want more time for nonviolent measures. What can be done?

As I write these lines, the stalemate in the desert is unbroken. I’ve been casting about in my mind for any events of the American past that might be instructive under any circumstances.

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.
The Prince and I The Emperor and I No Beer in Berlin FDR’s Bedside Manner The Better Speaker

Three of us Pacific war correspondents decided to give ourselves a vacation from the military and to get away—if only for a few days —from the frightful and chilling devastation all around us in Tokyo.

I was a war correspondent for TimeLife magazines in the Pacific and had flown a few days earlier from Manila to Atsugi Field, near Yokohama, with others attached to the MacArthur command. We were there to be aboard the battleship Missouri for the surrender ceremonies on September 2, 1945.

The papers were signed, and suddenly the war was over.

We wanted to see the countryside and small towns and villages in a part of Japan untouched by war, at least physically. We settled on a train trip to Nikko, a lovely temple and shrine city in the mountains ninety miles north of Tokyo. Because several of the most magnificent shrines and temples in Japan were in a national park bordering the small city, it had been spared by the B-29s.

From 1965 to 1985 my wife and I and our two daughters lived in a modern house we had built in Bethesda, Maryland. Several years after ours went up, a house was constructed on the lot next door and put up for sale. It was a big Federal colonial that sat empty for some months and then was bought by the Japanese Embassy to house their finance minister.

These diplomats were good neighbors, though very formal. Each of them —there were three ministers in turn during the years we lived there—came to pay a courtesy call shortly after moving in, greeted us with warm formality whenever we saw one another outside, and had us over for at least one formal dinner party. I grew accustomed to seeing, while I was working on some chore at the head of my driveway, the ministers, members of their families, and various servants, men and women young and old, coming, going, or working about outside.

I especially enjoyed reading about Mr. Ford’s battle with the automobile manufacturers who were frightened by the Seiden patent. Everyone knows the outcome of the struggle, but now, through “The Power of Patents,” a portion of Ford Motor Company History is revealed to the world from another perspective.

Both Bill Merrell and your magazine deserve praise for the well-written and illustrated article “The Real Gold at Bodie” (April). Not only does it give an excellent sense of the power that this ghost town exerts on the visitor, but it also properly acknowledges the important and decisive role that volunteers and nonprofit organizations play in preserving and perpetuating the irreplaceble cultural resources of our nation. Such altruism in this case should also include the J. S. Cain Company, which very early recognized these values and sought to protect Bodie until California was able to establish the State Historic Park in 1962.

Unfortunately, the possibility of a modern gold mine on property adjoining Bodie may forever change the historic landscape and result in the loss of historic structures and sites. Just as it motivated the volunteers and the Cain Company, perhaps the spirit of Bodie will convince the mining companies that our common heritage is worth more than gold.