January 2011

Last February, the White House was jubilant over the outcome of the election held in Nicaragua, where voters turned out the governing Sandinista National Liberation Front, which has run the country since 1979, as well as its president, Daniel Ortega. The new president is Violeta Chamorro, the candidate of the National Opposition Union (UNO), a coalition of anti-Sandinista parties backed by Washington as part of its long war against what the Bush and Reagan administrations styled a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship. In the days just after the results were published, however, conservative commentators expressed anxiety over whether or not there could be an orderly transfer of power.

In fact, such a peaceful transfer is rare. This country ought to know; we almost failed at it 113 years ago. And whereas in Nicaragua, in 1990, there was no doubt about the legitimate winner of the election, it was not certain who was going to become President of the United States on March 4, 1877, until 4:00 A.M. on March 2.

Readers are invited to submit their personal “brushes with history,“ for which our regular rates will be paid on acceptance. Unfortunately, we cannot corespond about or return submissions. The Flight of the ‘Vin Fiz’ Advice for MacArthur

The year was 1911, and I was fourteen, just emerging from a wonderful boyhood in Sheepshead Bay, New York. Even though Sheepshead Bay was part of Brooklyn, it was so rural in those days it might as well have been Kansas. At the time, we were living in a farmhouse on the estate of a millionaire horse breeder named James Ben AIi Haggin. Lucky for me, the house was right across the road from the racetrack of the Coney Island Jockey Club.

A few years before, Charles Evans Hughes, the governor of New York, had abolished betting at racetracks throughout the state. As a result the racetrack in Sheepshead Bay lay idle. However, it soon became an ideal flying field for America’s pioneer pilots. Aviation was just beginning to attract public interest, and fliers like the Wright brothers and Glenn Curtiss were being taken seriously.

It was June 1950. I was assistant secretary of the general staff at General MacArthur’s headquarters in Tokyo. I was a lowly captain surrounded by platoons of colonels and generals, and my grandiose title masked a job as “gofer,” or extra aide to the chief of staff.

The sudden North Korean invasion of South Korea came as a total surprise to the staff of the Far East Command. The inability of the South Korean army to hold ground was a grave disappointment. We needed the time they were supposed to buy and didn’t.

The first week was all improvisation. The chief of staff’s office became an impromptu war room. We broke out some maps of the area of conflict and began to post them in approved World War II style. Information from Korea, mostly relayed by radio, was skimpy and ambiguous. But it was clear that the South Koreans were being whipped.

General MacArthur maintained a remote and imperial peace in an office adjoining our own with only a small conference room between. We got fleeting glimpses of him as he strode for the elevator, a vigorous figure indeed, royal in demeanor.

In the autumn of 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt was spending what seemed to Washington insiders like a remarkable amount of time in the company of the congressman from the Tenth District of Texas, Lyndon Baines Johnson. The 32-year-old legislator’s reasons for cultivating the President of his party were not hard to ascertain, but FDR’s evident fondness for the big-eared Texan was less easily understood. To be sure, Johnson had first been elected to Congress three years earlier as a champion of the president’s doomed Court-packing scheme, and he had more recently demonstrated, as an assistant to the Democratic Congressional Committee, a precocious ability to find big money and distribute it where it would do the most good during the fall elections. Still, most of those whom Roosevelt sought out in his private moments were men of his own class and upbringing, not graduates of Southwest State Teachers College in San Marcos, Texas.

In mandating a national census every ten years, the framers of the U.S. Constitution envisioned a counting, not a bashing, of heads. Certainly the Founding Fathers could not have foreseen anything like the strife between a pair of Minnesota cities perched on opposite banks of the Mississippi River. But the intense rivalry between the twin towns of Minneapolis and St. Paul peaked a century ago during the 1890 census, and the tallying of their populations became a battle of neighboring police forces, lawyers, judges, and crooked enumerators.

The state capital and a center of business and rail expansion, St. Paul initially jumped to prominence as Minnesota’s largest city, and its population grew from 1,112 to 10,401 during the 1850s. Meanwhile, Minneapolis began primitively as a lumber town but blossomed in the 1860s as it gained the technology to tap the massive waterpower of the Mississippi for milling.

by Catherine Donzel, Alexis Gregory, and Marc Walter; Vendome Press; 255 pages.

Whether they admit it or not, most travelers find that the lure of a grand hotel is just as powerful as that of a great museum. As Paul Goldberger writes in his preface to Grand American Hotels , “It is an altogether wonderful paradox of the American grand hotel that it is, in fact, for everyone: if it is not for everyone to spend a night in, then it is for everyone to visit, to fantasize about, to celebrate in.”

The volume Goldberger introduces is designed to let us indulge these fantasies. The book’s large format, elegant appearance, and intriguing collection of photographs, luggage stickers, and other memorabilia allow the reader to sample hotels from coast to coast. Three-quarters of the book tells of American hotels; the remainder is given over to Canadian ones.

At the club Why he did it Plus …

A few years back, in a New Yorker cartoon, a father dolefully told his son that “we WASPs have no tribal wisdom to pass on.” In fact, WASPdom’s most durable contribution to American society (next to our system of government) may well be the country club. And as John Steele Gordon says at the outset of his lively history, “No ethnic group capable of developing a social institution as durable, adaptable, and now universal as the country club could be wholly lacking in tribal wisdom.” While the country club is, happily, no longer the sole domain of one class and race, the idea itself—that within every little democrat there resides a little aristocrat—continues to spread comfort, charm, and, of course, a considerable measure of resentment and irritation.

In 1775 he marched his company of militia to Boston at the first alarm, then led the expedition that nearly took Canada. In 1776 he built a battle fleet on Lake Champlain that saved the Revolution. In 1777 he led the charge that turned the tide at Saratoga. In 1780 he tried to sell George Washington and West Point to the British and, failing that, fought savagely on the British side. He was Benedict Arnold, and he went to his grave believing himself the true hero of the American Revolution. Willard Sterne Randall tells why.