January 2011

Growing up as a small boy on a farm in Ridgefield, Connecticut, was for me a lonely experience. A brother four years older had his own world, in which there was no room for small fry. Living more than five miles from the village and three miles from my nearest schoolmates, I was isolated- except for Shane, a younger boy on the neighboring farm. In retrospect, I realized that he was as lonesome as I and that I was encouraged to come to Brook Farm, as it was called, to provide companionship for him.

I often crossed the back fields to his house, and we would spend many exciting hours together. He lived in a wonder world, with a large house to be explored when his parents were absent, an apple orchard with challenging tree trunks to climb, dark woods in which lurked unknown dangers, a mysterious pond, a great, friendly Irish wolfhound named Finn large enough to ride, and a galaxy of wonderful toys and illustrated books and magazines.

Many, many years ago a college classmate and I were touring Europe in his new convertible Oldsmobile, Quelque Chose. Driving down a long diagonal slope, top down in the sunny Alpes-Maritimes, I heard my friend shout, “Look out!” Too late I saw a wire dangling across the road from a pole on the right side. Brakes screaming, we slammed into it. By good luck the windshield held, the wire snapped, and we were not decapitated.

A look down, and there far below was what seemed to be the whole French army climbing toward us. A look up, and a small advance party was staring down at us. Standing up, we used our best French body language of hands and shoulders to express our abject apologies. The leader shrugged and threw out his hands too. Tant pis. After all, these were summer games.

On to northern Italy, then through the passes to Switzerland and Bavaria. Night in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. It was drizzling.

My grandfather had a ritual he performed with each of his grandchildren soon after they were born. He would strike a note on the piano and eagerly wait for us to sing it back to him. He was hoping, once again, to discover a prodigy in the family.

Grandpa played the violin in a village cabaret in prerevolutionary Russia, and music was his passion. He married my grandmother not because she was the village beauty but because she was the only woman he’d ever met who played the trumpet.

In 1934, during my sophomore year at Harvard, I sold a story to MGM, and that June, at the age of nineteen, I traveled from New York to Los Angeles by Greyhound bus to turn the story into a screenplay at MGM’s Culver City studios.

It was a wearying, four-day trip, with only brief “comfort” and eating stops and pauses at major-city terminals to change buses. After two sleepless days and nights I was almost comatose, and I dozed most of the rest of the way. Passing through Kansas, we had to stop a number of times for clouds of brown, windblown soil that roared toward us, enveloping and obscuring everything until they swept past us. I thought nothing of the storms and dozed on.

In New Mexico and Arizona, on Highway 66, the desert landscape, new to me, was interesting. At times we passed old cars puffing along in our direction and filled to overflowing with people of all ages, bedsteads, luggage, and other possessions. I paid no attention to them but gazed dreamily at the sagebrush and distant mesas, populating them in my mind with Indians and conquistadors of an earlier day, until I again dozed off.

I’ve had quite a few brushes with history, courtesy of the historians who wrote it. Without them we none of us would have been the wiser, except for oral tradition, stories passed down by word of mouth.

Take the Civil War. I was fortunate enough as a boy to see those white-haired men who had fought in that long-ago war, riding in open cars on the way to the cemetery on Decoration Day. Yet I suspect that it was not my glimpse of them that was a brush with history, but knowing and reading the likes of Bruce Catton and Allan Nevins, who somehow captured the sum of their stories and put them together in such a way that I began to understand the war of which those old men were a part.

I’ve had no “brushes” with history. One collision, of course. At the time, Pearl Harbor seemed a deliberate attempt by the Japanese to aim all of world history directly at myself. I survived. Lots of carryings-along, a sense of being hurried forward by events that I tried very hard, but not altogether successfully, to dignify with the shape of history. Even now, when I look back on what has happened, the great question that it poses to me is, What is “history” and what are simply events for which I can find no rationale, explanation, excuse, or justification? Perhaps that is what is meant by having “brushes” with history.

Long-established institutions tend to place themselves at the center of world history. This can charm or exasperate, according to your own involvement with the institution. Wartime memories of Oriel College, Oxford, are a case in point for me.

I was there for a year and a half, from the fall of 1940 to the spring of 1942, trying to read history while also preparing to be a soldier. In those crimped conditions it was hard to imagine what peacetime college life could be like. But I was gratified, indeed awed, to find myself a member of a foundation in company with the likes of Sir Walter Raleigh, Matthew Arnold, and Arnold’s poet friend Arthur Hugh Clough. I first heard of this last figure one night in the blacked-out porter’s lodge, where a little crowd had gathered around a wireless set to hear a broadcast by Winston Churchill. We were quietly attentive until the prime minister began to quote poetry. “Say not the shtruggle naught availeth. … ” A shy, elderly don shouted out, with extraordinary pride and glee: “Clough! Arthur Hugh Clough! Oriel man!”

On December 4, FBI agents arrested nineteen men, most of them members of the Ku Klux Klan, on charges of conspiracy to murder three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi. The disappearance in June of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman had alarmed the nation because the three young men had been working to register black voters in Mississippi. Schwerner and Goodman were white. The discovery in August of their bodies revealed they had been murdered and put pressure on the federal government to prove that it could enforce civil rights laws in the South.

The greatest challenge for the editors of this magazine since its beginnings thirty-five years ago has been to make the events and personalities of the past come alive again. But for this special anniversary issue we decided it would be appropriate to remind ourselves that history is as much a province of the living as of the dead—we all have been touched by events and forces that link us to the great patterns of meaning that historians will eventually ascribe to our age. To this end we asked a number of eminent writers, historians, and public figures to recall a moment in their lives that might be labeled “a brush with history.” There were so many excellent responses that we were forced to select only those that, taken together, create a kind of mini-history of the past half-century. We also included two longer pieces that were submitted by readers who, although of no public fame, remind us that each of us is a child of history.

—The Editors OUT OF THE BLUE ONCE IN A LIFETIME TRIUMPH AND TRAGEDY

In 1929, Germany announced that the mighty new dirigible Graf Zeppelin would fly around the world. This stirred a great deal of excitement in the United States, not only because such gigantic airships were thought to be the future of aviation but also because the newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst had put up $200,000 to finance part of the Zeppelin’s flight and was promoting it aggressively.

Hearst had insisted that the journey begin not in Germany but in America, with the Statue of Liberty as the starting point. The Germans agreed, and on August 7, 1929, the Graf Zeppelin left Lakehurst, New Jersey, passed over the Statue of Liberty, and headed east—across the Atlantic and on to Poland, Russia, and Japan. Finally, on August 25, it was spotted just west of San Francisco approaching the Golden Gate.