January 2011

"Memoirs,” Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter once told young Richard Goodwin, “are the most unreliable source of historical evidence. Events are always distorted by refraction through the writer’s ego.” Sage advice, duly reported, but not systematically applied in its recipient’s own memoir, Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties. Richard Goodwin’s ego suffuses his otherwise admirable book, which combines a persuasive and moving account of what it was like to serve two of the most interesting presidents of the century with an eloquent reminder that beneath the turbulence of the 60s breathed a humane, hopeful spirit that we dismiss at our peril.

A brilliant, driven Boston boy whose family had survived hard times in the Depression, Goodwin sped to the top of his class at Harvard Law, served as clerk to Justice Frankfurter, helped lay bare the quiz-show scandals of 1959 as a congressional investigator, and joined Senator John F. Kennedy’s staff—all by the age of 27.

One of the more amusing moments in recent American history came in 1978, when Alfred E. Kahn, the flamboyant head of President Carter’s Council on Wage and Price Stability, made the mistake of suggesting that the nation might face a deep depression if inflation were not brought under control. When a spokesman for the president protested the use of the word" depression," Kahn promptly offered a substitute: banana.

Kahn will be remembered for more than his quick wit, however. Along with Charles Francis Adams, Jr., Louis D. Brandeis, and James M. Landis, he is the subject of a fascinating book by Thomas K. McCraw, a professor at the Harvard Business School with a special interest in government regulation of business.

When these lines appear, a new president will be learning his way around the White House, and the nation will be enjoying a post-inaugural respite from a year full of political commercials, polls, predictions, projections, and analyses. Likewise of spin control, attack videos, photo opportunities, sound bites, and other horrors of electronic campaigning. I apologize for seeming to prolong the agony, but historical reflection is in order.

Hollywood history They wouldn’t shoot The South’s inner civil war Plus . . .

Almost everybody has some ineradicable impression of the past that was fabricated on a movie set. Whether it is the wounded at the Atlanta yards in Gone with the Wind or one of DeMille’s teeming sagas, movies have as much to do with how we envision the past as do, say, the photographs of Mathew Brady. The editors have culled stills from dozens of films to display the breadth of the cinematic history of the United States from Columbus (Fredric March) to Watergate (Robert Redford).

When S. L. A. Marshall said that relatively few of our soldiers actually fired their rifles in combat in World War II, he spoke with the authority of being head of the Army’s Historical Division, and he backed his surprising claim with statistics gleaned from exhaustive after-action interviews with rifle companies. Marshall’s figures came to be widely accepted. But one ex-GI just didn’t believe him, and determined to find the real story. It turns out to be pretty amazing.

We tend to think of the Confederacy as being united in its battle with the North, but, in fact, all through the war Dixie was torn with dissension. The memory of this has been blurred by the myths that grew up around the Lost Cause in the decades after the war. Eric Foner pulls aside the curtain of nostalgia to reveal a bitter struggle within a struggle.

One of America’s greatest twentieth-century sculptors . . . the seventy-fifth anniversary of the first 1040 form . . . sailing Alaskan waterways . . . the return to favor of John Henry Belter’s exuberant furniture . . . and, in reminder of the unflagging richness of our shared past, more.

Since I have been a historian for more than thirty years, with considerable research and publishing of local history to my credit, I feel qualified to inquire whether or not Jack Larkin, in “The Secret Life of a Developing Country (Ours),” was aware of one specific fact of life during those particular years, a fact that could place our ancestors’ apparent shortcomings in a different light.

Few of the smaller communities in our country had resident ministers authorized to perform marriages in the early years. Licensed clergy reached small and remote areas perhaps four times a year or less often. It was vital for a man wresting a living from new lands to have a helpmate. Women commonly became brides at a tender age, sometimes for economic reasons as families struggled for survival during the harsh times.

Dr. James E. Marvel’s letter on Vietnam (“Correspondence,” November) joins a chorus of those who blame the American defeat on newsmen in Vietnam and at home. His hero, whom he describes as a “knowledgeable and experienced statesman,” is the only President of the United States forced to resign. What for? For lying to the American people.

As a former CBS correspondent who covered Vietnam in Vietnam from 1960 to 1967 on a constant basis and until the end of the war intermittently, I suppose I can be accused of helping contribute to what Dr. Marvel calls “the propaganda being put out as the history of the war by CBS, Time-Life, and others.”

Among the Vietnam correspondents who also helped are the Pulitzer Prize-winner David Halberstam of The New York Times , Neil Sheehan of UPI, and Charles Mohr, Halberstam’s successor, who, armed with an M-16, took part with the Marines in retaking Hue after the Tet offensive.