January 2011

The occasion was the Japan Society’s annual dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel a few years ago, and the guest of honor was the prime minister of Japan. Titans of industry attend this dinner; the ballroom was filled with CEOs from Fortune 500 companies and their wives. In the half-dark, as the spotlight swept the three-tier dais, diamonds and gold studs twinkled in candlelight.

The place was full of Secret Service agents from Washington and security men from Tokyo, all in dinner jackets. The guards from Tokyo are tall; if Nippon ever decides to challenge the Boston Celtics, these lean, rangy Japanese could try out for the team.

I was standing at one side of the room, waiting to be called to a seat on the dais, and I began talking with one of the Japanese guards.

I lived through the Second World War in the middle of Europe. I saw the fiery retreat of the last German troops and the cautious advance of the first Russian soldiers on a dark, frozen morning. Twenty years later I went to Winston Churchill’s funeral. I saw the London house where he died; I walked past his bier in Westminster Hall; I knew that I was a witness to the last great moment of the British Empire. Another twenty-four years later I walked in the streets of the small town where Adolf Hitler was born one hundred years ago. I think I’ve had enough brushes with history; I do not wish for more. But I am eternally thankful to God for having allowed my puny self to work with an inadequate little brush of my own manufacture: trying to present what certain people in certain places and at certain times did and said and thought and feared and hoped for.

Notes from a Pittsburgh Fan Doing Just Fine A Dry Eye for Hood Marshall, Pro and Con Marshall, Pro and Con Undimmed Pleasure Lincoln’s Way with Words

It was the second of May, 1945, six days before the end of the war in Europe. We were members of Headquarters Battery, 608th Field Artillery Battalion, 71st Infantry Division—one of the spearheads of Ration’s 3d Army, driving south through a conquered Germany toward Austria, the last unoccupied part of Hitler’s Reich. Bridges over the Inn River, between Bavaria and Austria, had been wrecked by retreating German troops, but a large hydroelectric dam with a roadway on it was still intact, and that was our objective this beautiful spring morning.

There were four of us in the jeep. I was the driver, a 21-year-old private first class. Beside me sat a first lieutenant, not much older than myself, and on the rear seat were a staff sergeant and a corporal, whose job was to operate the .50-caliber machine gun mounted between the seats. This was an unusually large weapon for a jeep at that time; some jeeps had .30-caliber machine guns, but most had none.

In the spring of 1968 I covered Eugene McCarthy for a short period during his remarkable campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, which led to both President Johnson’s withdrawal as a candidate and Bobby Kennedy’s decision to be one. Shana Alexander, my close friend and colleague at Life, who has always had an uncanny instinct for spotting the real story, was sticking to Clean Gene like glue and writing about him frequently. A few weeks after Kennedy’s assassination an exhausted McCarthy needed a place to hide out and reinvigorate himself for the Democratic convention. I suggested to Shana my family place in Maine, and she passed on the invitation to Gene. That’s how little old Hancock Point, a finger of land in French-man Bay pointing across the water at Mount Desert, got a famous visitor early that July.

I worked for the election of Hubert Humphrey in 1968, a time when the Democratic party was badly split because of the Vietnam War. Supporters of Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy threatened to sit out the election. My campaign group planned an event to get out the liberal vote. On October 31, 1968, at a dingy union hall on West Thirty-fourth Street in Manhattan, a glittering array of liberal Democrats was invited to endorse the Humphrey-Muskie ticket. Coincidentally, the Nixon campaign had scheduled a major rally across the street at Madison Square Garden.

When Bruce Catton, our first editor, introduced American Heritage exactly thirty-five years ago, he said that “the fabric of American life is a seamless web. Everything fits in somewhere. History is a continuous process; it extends far back into the past, and it will go on—in spite of today’s uneasy qualms—far into the future.” That everything fits in somewhere is demonstrated, we submit, by “A Brush with History,” the major feature that fills this anniversary issue.

The germ of the idea came from our conviction that most people have at one time or another sensed they were in the presence of a historical event even if they did not immediately recognize it as such. To confirm our notion, we asked a number of historians, public figures, and journalists and novelists to recall any such moments—major or minor, pleasurable or horrendous—in their lives.

My brush with history was growing up in the South at the time of the civil rights movement. It was history as a force that I experienced, not history as a person or an event. I had absolutely no contact with any of the public events of the movement. I wasn’t even aware at the time that there were sit-ins and marches, and the organized white resistance of the Citizens’ Councils and the Ku Klux Klan was known in my world (the doctor-lawyer-businessman class in a big Southern city) only through vague rumors. I don’t know how I knew that some kind of sweeping change in race relations was under consideration, mostly by mysterious outsiders; I just knew it, and so did all my friends.

During one of my early visits to Poland, long before I even dreamed of writing about that nation, a counselor said, “If you want to catch the real spirit of this land, you ought to visit that tough little churchman down in Cracow,” and in this way I met the formidable Karol Cardinal Wojtyla. I had long talks with him and found him to be as promised, a clever, fighting clergyman, taller than I had been led to believe, and much better at English. I remember his sparkling eyes and the way he grew excited when those about him spoke of his long battle to protect Catholic Poland from the pressures of Communist Russia. I concluded from that first visit that here was an unusual man in a difficult position.

As an undergraduate student at Stanford University in the early 1960s, I frequently saw on campus the stooped, shuffling figure of Aleksandr Kerensky, who had briefly headed the Provisional Government of Russia, which was overthrown in the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917. Kerensky was then working on his memoirs while in residence at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, which houses an outstanding collection of materials related to the Russian Revolution.

When I traveled to the Soviet Union with a student group in the spring of 1961, all the Russians to whom I mentioned seeing Kerensky insisted that I was mistaken. He was long dead, they explained—and he was, indeed, as dead to Soviet historical memory as were the political figures who had been crudely chiseled out of the mosaics that adorned various Moscow subway stations.