January 2011

About twenty years ago I was a guest at a dinner party on the West Side of New York City and was seated next to an elderly man with a crew cut and a foreign accent, whose name, for some reason, I hadn’t heard during the course of the evening. We fell into conversation about modem Russian history—a subject on which I have always thought myself to be knowledgeable—and I eventually found myself explaining to him how the Russian Revolution might never have happened if Denikin’s troops had moved faster on their way to relieve Petrograd.

“It wouldn’t have mattered,” he said, in a guttural voice.

“Of course it would,” I replied.

He shook his head. “No, no,” he said sadly. “You see, they’d left their artillery and their machine guns behind. Even if they’d arrived when they were supposed to, they wouldn’t have been any use to the Provisional Government.”

Something about the old man’s authoritative tone made me ask what his name was.

There was a pause. He smiled at me. “Aleksandr Kerensky,” he said. “Head of the Provisional Government.”

In 1952, my junior year at Wellesley, it was common knowledge among English majors that an assignment to interview the visiting poet was a reward for excellence. Only you wouldn’t have known it from the way my poetry professor, Roberta Grahame, presented it to me. “Remain after class,” she instructed, and later left me standing before her desk for a full five minutes while she read a student’s poem.

Although I knew nothing of Miss Grahame’s background, I perceived her to be one of a breed: a New England spinster educator—careful, aloof, impassive. She wore the requisite tweeds and no makeup and had written a slim volume of poetry, entitled Last Bell at Midcentury.

She told me to report to her office at six the following evening and we’d go together. “I assure you, you’ll find it interesting. Extremely interesting,” she remarked cryptically.

In the mid-1960s I was one of the principal interviewers for the John Foster Duties Oral History Project, which meant, simply, that I went around the country, armed with a tape recorder, interviewing people who had known or worked with Duties during his lifetime.

In March 1965 my Columbia University colleague and longtime friend Dick Hofstadter invited me to join a group of U.S. historians on the final day of the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama—to show national support for the voting-rights bill demanded by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and to express outrage at police brutality in Gov. George Wallace’s domain. The idea for a delegation of historians, I was told, had come from Walter Johnson, a professor of history at the University of Hawaii at Manoa who believed that professors who had spent a lifetime teaching about constitutional liberties in the classroom should be prepared to make a public witness at this critical time.

As I consider the generally lackluster early months of the Bush administration, I wonder how much of the impression is due to the increasingly regimented relationship between the Oval Office and the press. Is it the fact that all images are combed and primped primarily for the TV cameras, or is it that the personalities themselves have been combed and primped and supplied with brush and blush?

When I consider by contrast my impression of Lyndon Baines Johnson during his early, uneasy months in office, I must conclude that this was not a man who could be camouflaged or regimented.

First, he wanted to show that he belonged in the White House. Shortly after taking office, he invited half a dozen editors of the biggest magazines (I was editing McCall’s at the time) to have lunch with him in his small private dining room in the White House so that he could explain his plans for pushing through all the great social changes that he figured JFK failed on.

During the summers of 1965 and 1966, when I was a student in high school, I worked for several months as a messenger in the White House. I brushed up against a good deal of trivia masquerading as history, such as the extraordinarily elaborate preparations for Luci Johnson’s wedding. But I also attended an event that I knew, even then, was genuinely momentous. I understood that partly because this was one of the only presidential speeches during my months in the White House to take place in the East Room and because there was an unusually large crowd of reporters, television technicians, and White House minions. Lyndon Johnson was announcing his decision to send American ground troops into Vietnam.

The closest I ever felt to the pulse of history was on the morning after Dr. King was shot. I had flown to Memphis the night before and went from the motel where he was shot to the police station, where I found out which funeral home was preparing his body. When I arrived there after midnight, there were only two other journalists in the home’s reception area (both from out of town, a writer and a photographer for Life ). No local people joined us as we waited for dawn, listening to the morticians on the other side of a thin partition complaining of the way they would have to build a jaw replacement of plaster for the lower part of Dr. King’s face that had been blown away. On the black radio station that the morticians were playing, King’s live voice was audible, giving speech after speech. When the body was brought out, we three had a close look at the face before the manager of the home pinned a gauze over the top of the coffin. It was the first time I had seen Dr. King except in pictures. I thought he was dead, but I was wrong.

At times a brush with history can be a brush with the future—and even with historians. As an editor I’ve had the luck to know six Presidents, in casual conversations or working relationships. One pertinent conversation dates to 1965, when I went over the last pages of Dwight D. Elsenhower’s presidential memoirs with him.

We were in his Gettysburg office. I asked what he thought of a recent poll of historians, ranking American Presidents, in which he had come out way below normal.

Late one night in 1970 in Independence, Missouri, I was working in the Harry S. Truman Library, helping Margaret Truman gather research material for her biography of her father. We had lunch and dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Truman every day, and after two weeks I had gotten to know them pretty well.

That night, after dinner, Mr. Truman began talking about the importance of a strong Presidency. He ticked off the Presidents he admired—Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR. “What did you think of Roosevelt personally?” I asked.

Mr. Truman paused. Then, weighing every word, he said: “Inside he was totally cold. He didn’t give a damn for you or me or anyone else in the entire world, as far as I could tell. But he was a great President. He brought this country into the twentieth century.”

I felt a swish—even a swat—of history’s wings.

In 1954 Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, accompanied by Roy Cohn, flew to Madison to deliver a lecture at the University of Wisconsin. I was his student host and met him at the airport. He and Cohn were drunk; they continued drinking from a whiskey bottle as we drove to the campus. On arrival, I told the senator he had a hour before his talk; I asked if there was anything he would like to see.

The card catalog in the library, he replied. I took him there. He marched to the M section, pulled out three drawers covering works by and about Marx, and demanded to see the director. I took him there. He and Cohn all but threw the drawers down on the director’s desk.

"This is a goddamned outrage,” the senator roared. “The good children of Wisconsin shouldn’t be exposed to this crap. I want all these books burned.”

“I can’t do that,” the director replied calmly. “Those books are state property.”