January 2011

Start by calling the Colorado Springs Convention and Visitors Bureau (1-800-888-4748) for its visitor’s guide. Once you arrive, look for Marshall Sprague’s Newport in the Rockies , a lively local history.

If you stay at the Broadmoor, try to get a room in the main building, which is the older part of the hotel. If you prefer to stay downtown, try the Hearthstone Inn. Each room is furnished with antiques, the baked goods served at breakfast are a specialty, and Dot Williams, the proprietor, is an able guide. “Just remember the mountains are always to the west,” she told me my first day in town. That advice and the simple hand-drawn map she gives to guests are just the start you need.

Bernard A. Weisberger’s article (“In the News”) in the May/June issue about former Presidents carelessly omits a number of highly publicized facts about President Nixon and thus misleads your readers about his current activities.

Mr. Weisberger refers to the fact that former Presidents and First Ladies are entitled to lifetime Secret Service protection, but he neglects to note that President and Mrs. Nixon voluntarily gave up their protection in 1985 and 1984, respectively, decisions that already have saved taxpayers twelve million dollars. They now pay for their own security.

He writes that former Presidents receive “Treasury help in compiling the memoir for which [they] will receive a sturdy publisher’s advance.” As far as President Nixon is concerned, this statement is wrong. President Nixon has always maintained a separate personal budget to ensure that no government funds were ever used to provide editorial or research support for the preparation of the seven books he has written since leaving office.

Did our soldiers fight poorly in World War II (March issue)? No, they fought well in every theater of operations—and won!

Marshall is wrong to put a number on trigger pulling. How many men fired their weapons is not relevant, and neither are the arguments advanced in the article. What is relevant—and this is where Marshall is right—is the number of men who forced the action in each battle. This number was small . I know because I was an infantry squad leader in combat with an armored division in the European theater of operations.

The generals and colonels may have shouted, “Forward march—take this hill,” but this did not mean that the lonely squad, out there under the guns, was going to move, unless those few extraordinary men (privates, sergeants, and lieutenants) got up and started moving. They hoped the rest would follow. Thank the Lord we had those few brave men in nearly every action.

Clarke and Gavin and even Leinbaugh should know better than to claim that all men fired their weapons. They did not.

By Karal Ann Marling; Harvard University Press; 445 pages.

George Washington has been the constant figure in American life since the day he became President. In a witty, irreverent look at how Americans have viewed the father of our country, Karal Ann Marling traces Washington in our culture from 1876, the date of the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, to the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan recalled erroneously our nation’s first leader praying on his knees in the snows of Valley Forge.

Washington is a symbol of unity in an often divided society, and he has been since the Civil War. Marling shows him as a lover and a poet in the 1901 play Washington and the Lady and as the very model of the modern man in advertisements from the 1920s. His idealized rural boyhood was the blueprint for a generation of politicians; Herbert Hoover used it in the election of 1928. Following World War II Washington became a pop idol; today he serves both as an automobile salesman and as the benevolent patriarch who beckons us to sales in February.

by Hans L. Trefousse; W. W. Norton & Company; 443 pages.

The story of Andrew Johnson’s life reads like one of the Grimms’ more tragic fairy tales. Born in a log cabin in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1808, Johnson grew up fatherless and without formal education. After drifting into the tailoring business, he embarked in 1829 on a remarkable political career that took him from village alderman to U.S. senator, with terms as U.S. representative and Tennessee governor as intermediate political steppingstones. He was Abraham Lincoln’s running mate in 1864, ascending to the Presidency when Lincoln was assassinated the following year. Then, just as dramatically, Johnson lost it all, becoming the only Chief Executive in history to face impeachment proceedings.

Science fiction: the history

It is as old as the Book of Revelation, but its modern career in the United States began with a bunch of kids getting together in drugstores to talk about spaceships and Martians and time travel. Frederik Pohl was one of those kids, and he grew up to be a chief practitioner of the genre. Now he serves as its historian, tracing the phenomenal growth of sci-fi from the 1930s pulps with their lurid covers to a respected and powerful worldwide literary movement.

The Roosevelts’ honeymoon

Like so many of their era’s gentry, Franklin and Eleanor began married life with the grand tour. Geoffrey C. Ward follows the young couple through a tranquil Edwardian Europe—and shows how this sunny time in fact foreshadowed an increasingly strained and bitter marriage.

Getting the message—faster

When the filmmaker Ken Burns asked me three years ago if I’d like to write a documentary film about the painter Thomas Hart Benton, I signed on with enthusiasm for Burns’s work but serious qualms about the subject he had chosen. There really is no accounting for tastes, but Benton’s art has never appealed to me much—too broad, too sentimental, too self-consciously heroic. More important, from the viewpoint of a potential scriptwriter, aspects of Benton’s personality struck me as both unpleasant and inexplicable: Short and chesty, he insisted loudly on his own “genius,” felt compelled to hide his sophistication behind down-home pronouncements about art calculated to appeal to the smallest of small-town minds, and appeared frightened all his adult life of homosexuals, who, he believed, were universally bent on destroying him.

Montana is celebrating its centennial year in 1989, which serves to heighten the interest in your poignant story “A Message in a Bottle” (April). Thanks.

I really enjoyed reading “Powder River Country: The Movies, the Wars, and the Teapot Dome” in the April issue of American Heritage. It’s so much a part of Wyoming’s history.

As editor of The Powder River Journal , the publication of the 91st Infantry Powder River Division Association, I found Oakley Hall’s article quite fascinating. The Powder River has been associated with our outfit ever since 1917, when a first sergeant asked a bunch of recruits where they hailed from. They answered in unison, “From Wyoming!” and then cut loose with a thunderous “Powder River, let ’er buck!” That famous cry sounded across many a battlefield in World War I and through the mountains of Italy during World War II, and it is still being sounded by the oldtimers who attend our division reunions. Members of the present 91st, stationed at Fort Baker, California, continue the Western traditions of the division begun more than seventy years ago.