January 2011

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.”

It was Labor Day 1952, and Sen. Joe McCarthy had come up to Stamford, Connecticut, to have lunch with me and my wife and with Brent Bozell and his wife (my sister). Bozell and I were doing research for our book on McCarthy.

During lunch the phone rang for him. He took the call and came back to the table, obviously concerned. “What’s the matter, Joe?”

“Well, that was the head of the Republican party in Massachusetts. He wants me to go to Boston and give a speech for Cabot Lodge. Trouble is, that’s hard to do. Joe Kennedy has always been on my side, and he contributed five thousand dollars to my own reelection campaign. If I go to Boston, Jack Kennedy will lose to Cabot Lodge, no doubt about it. That’s why they want me.”

We resumed lunch. And about fifteen minutes later McCarthy rose, excused himself, went to the phone, and was back in about five minutes, smiling broadly.

It was warm and sunny that commencement day at Harvard in 1947 and still early when I reached the Yard. There were not many people about, which may have been why my eye was caught by a tall, solitary figure standing in front of the yet unopened door of Massachusetts Hall. I recognized at once who it was. As chairman of the Committee on Honorary Degrees, which every spring went through the formality of approving for the Board of Overseers those proposed by the president and fellows, I knew that George Catlett Marshall, then Secretary of State, was to receive a Doctor of Laws.

As a young bachelor in New York in the years immediately following World War II, I was fortunate to be frequently an “extra man” at the small dinner parties of Judge and Mrs. Learned Hand in their house on Sixty-fifth Street (later the residence- speaking of brushes with history—of Richard Nixon). Judge Hand was a great man, the greatest it has ever been my privilege to know, and I hung on his beautifully articulated phrases. One night when I arrived, always the first, I found him reading a letter from Bernard Berenson, his friend of many decades, with whom he maintained a regular correspondence.

“BB wants to know why I always subscribe my letters to him in such hyperbolic terms as ‘Your devoted pupil’ or ‘Your disciple in art’ or Tour constant admirer.’” The judge put away the letter and glanced at me with his great, bushy eyebrows raised. “He asks why I never sign myself simply ‘Affectionately yours.’”

I paused, but I knew I had my cue. “Well, sir, why don’t you?”

“Because I don’t like him!”

Nor did he ever joke in such matters.

In the summer of 1944 I pointed my jeep in the direction of Pisa. The Germans were on the north side of the Arno River, the Americans on the south bank. My destination was a farmhouse that was the headquarters of an armored group—some tanks, artillery, and riflemen. A sign on the dirt road warned: SLOW— 10 MILES AN HOUR. DUST RAISES SHELLS. In the distance I suddenly came around a bend and saw the Leaning Tower. I wanted to gun the engine, but dust would be a telltale of movement for an observer on the other side of the river. I felt exposed and naked, for I had heard that the Germans were using the Leaning Tower as an observation post (OP). As I got a little closer, I could see small figures moving between the columns of the tower on its highest floors. And I instinctively felt they could see me. Naturally my windshield was down and covered with a tarpaulin; otherwise, it could mirror the sun from a distance.

It was V-E Day, 1945. By common consent the Office of Strategic Services staff in London was taking the day off, but somehow the whole occasion seemed anticlimactic. We recalled those flickering newsreels of Armistice Day in 1918 and wondered where those frenzied mobs were now. Piccadilly Circus was crowded but tame. At Buckingham Palace the king and queen—two tiny specks—dutifully waved from a balcony, and we dutifully waved back.

In 1945, with George Ball, Paul Nitze, other notables, and a staff of several hundred, I was assigned to the study of the effect of strategic air attacks on the German war economy—the United States Strategic Bombing Survey. The results were impressive. Great and extremely costly attacks on ball-bearing plants raised no enduring difficulty for the Germans. After the great RAF raids on Hamburg there was an easing of the labor supply as workers in banks, restaurants, shops, and places of entertainment that were not destroyed became available to the shipyards and submarine pens. After major attacks on all the German aircraft plants in 1944, aircraft production was promptly reorganized and in ensuing months greatly increased.

These findings were seen by the Air Force as deeply inimical to its mission. As a consequence, though published after acrimonious discussion, they were ignored. The further and historically important consequence was that strategic air attacks went forward on North Korea and North (and South) Vietnam with similar but perhaps even greater military inconsequence.

I was a young war bride in the summer of 1945. A slap-happy one, recently wed to my college sweetheart, a football star from Hardin-Simmons University, for whom I had waited while he flew twenty-five dangerous missions over Europe as a B-17 bombardier. That had taken at least a year; now he was back, we’d had our war wedding, and we were stationed at a base in Alamogordo, New Mexico. He was busy every day from dawn to sunset, training crews in the new B-29 bombers for the invasion of Japan. I worked all day as a secretary in something mysterious called air inspection. My life consisted of shopping for privileged goods in the PX, flirting with handsome grounded officers who couldn’t fly for one reason or another, and meeting my captain at night in the officers’ club for dinner and too many drinks. Sometimes we would go out to the White Sands at night, to bury bottles of beer deep in the ice-cold gypsum sand and sit on the dunes, watching the moon rise. It was a romantic, thrilling, mindless time. My husband wanted to forget the horrible things he’d experienced in the 8th Air Force. He never talked about his memories.

I remember him in 1962 half-walking, half-jogging over to my table at the MIT faculty club for our luncheon engagement. Warren K. (“Doc”) Lewis, the venerable MIT professor known as the father of chemical engineering, must have been in his late seventies then, but as always, he had a full and pressing agenda. This was our first meeting, and I soon learned what the agenda was: Doc Lewis was a great storyteller—a bearer of myths—and I, a historian, was to become the scribe. I soon found myself absorbed by his stories, for Lewis was present at the creation.

As a young Ph.D. student in Wilhelmine Germany and then as a young professor at MIT after the turn of the century, he had witnessed and played a leading role in the creation of the world’s preeminent technological nation. He vividly recalled having ridden in a horse-drawn carriage while dressed in top hat and swallowtail coat to receive the German Ph.D., then a sine qua non for any aspiring American academic chemist.