January 2011

by Rod Kane; Orion/Crown; 314 pages.

Rod Kane is not a historian—his account of the Vietnam War chronicles few of that conflict’s actual events—yet Veteran’s Day is nonetheless an affecting historical document. Kane went to Vietnam in September 1965 as a combat medic for the airborne infantry. His father had fought in the Second World War and his uncle had been a paratrooper in Korea. “I was raised to be a soldier of Christ,” he writes. Kane saw action in the central highlands near An Khe and treated troops in forgotten hamlets in the Happy Valley and the Ia Drang. He was nineteen.

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Most American motorists take for granted the concrete and asphalt web of interstate highways that has penetrated so deeply into the nation’s economy and thinking. The 43,000-mile system of fouror-more-lane divided, limited-access roads reaches from the canyons of California to the beaches of Florida and the urban bustle of the Northeast Corridor. But of course there was a time when the superhighway idea was brand-new. In the United States, it all began with the Pennsylvania Turnpike—a road that, fifty years ago this October, profoundly changed the way Americans perceived time and distance. Not only was the Pennsylvania Turnpike the nation’s first major toll road, it was also, more significantly, our first long-distance, highspeed, limited-access, four-lane divided road —the direct conceptual predecessor of the interstate system. It was built with four 12-footwide lanes and wide, safe shoulders; long, level straightaways and gentle curves; and grades of no more than 3 percent (a three-foot rise for every hundred feet of forward travel).

Shame on Thomas Fleming (“The Big Parade”) for leaving out the soldiers of Indiana as participants in the Grand Review of May 24, 1865.

My great-grandfather, Benjamin Benn Mabrey, was involved in the review. He was a twenty-five-year-old corporal in Company K, 82d Indiana Regiment Volunteer Infantry. Following is an excerpt from a letter he wrote to his wife, Louisa Mabrey (I love his spelling!). The letter is headed “Near Washington” and is dated June 1, 1865:

The Civil War in Review The Civil War in Review The Civil War in Review The Civil War in Review The Army Colt Strange Classroom Strange Classroom High Hopes for School Reform

Wooden houses in Bodie, California, a metropolis of miners in the 1870s and now an extraordinary ghost town.

Fiorello La Guardia was indeed a “master of dramatics,” as Geoffrey C. Ward writes in his review of Thomas Kessner’s biography of the colorful New York City mayor (“The Life and Times,” February). I was present for one of his memorable performances.

The occasion was a summer concert of the National Symphony in Washington in 1939 or 1940. There had been no advance notice, but the orchestra’s founder and conductor, Hans Kindler, announced midway through the evening that a guest conductor would share the podium: Mayor La Guardia. Maestro Kindler reminded the audience that the mayor’s father had been a bandmaster and that the mayor himself knew band music. But, Kindler added, many of us might not be aware of the mayor’s deeper musical talents that went beyond marches into the classical realm. That evening, he told us, La Guardia would conduct excerpts from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The murmurs that rippled through the audience suggested we were both surprised and impressed.

James Thomas Flexner’s Washington mythology (“Postscripts to History,” February) is intriguing. As he points out, Washington was a deeply religious person. Yet Flexner’s assertion that he avoided the word God is debatable. Washington wrote the following about Shays’ Rebellion: “What, gracious God, is man! that there should be such inconsistency and perfidiousness in his conduct?” At his inauguration in 1789, after the constitutional oath had ended, Washington added his own declaration: “So help me, God.” And at the start of his last will and testament, he wrote: “In the Name of God, Amen!” It would seem that the documentary evidence is sufficient to show that Washington did indeed mention God.