January 2011

By Joseph E. Stevens; University of Oklahoma Press; 326 pages.

“Another great achievement of American resourcefulness, skill, and determination” was how President Franklin Roosevelt described the Hoover Dam upon its dedication in September 1935. Five thousand men had worked through extremes of heat and fatigue seven days a week for more than four years to build the 726.4-foot-high wedge of concrete between the sheer rock banks of the Colorado River. Their labor, combined with brilliant engineering, had brought this —“the great pyramid of the American West,” as Joseph Stevens calls it, “fount for a twentieth-century oasis civilization” —to completion two years early and millions of dollars under budget. Today it is still the largest dam in the United States, and a major tourist attraction.

I was dismayed to read the poor ratings given to President Harry S. Truman. These criticisms were based on his alleged encouragement of the Cold War and the use of the atomic bomb on the Japanese people. To blame Truman for the Cold War is like blaming a homeowner for defending his family against armed intruders. To offset brazen Soviet threats against the badly weakened free nations of southern and western Europe, Truman fashioned the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin airlift, and the creation of NATO, actions that stopped Stalin’s master plan of aggrandizement in its tracks. This is why the world statesman Sir Winston Churchill paid Truman this massive compliment: “You, more than any other man, have saved Western civilization.”

Regarding the use of the A-bombs, author Richard Rhodes, in his widely acclaimed book The Making of the Atomic Bomb , shows us a far more ambivalent Truman than we have known, less certain than many of the scientists about the wisdom of using the bombs.

The most underrated American is not only underrated but virtually forgotten. He is Robert Morris, sometimes called the “Financier of the American Revolution.” It was his calm and steady management of the finances and logistics of the Revolution that allowed Washington to succeed on the battlefield and Franklin to succeed in gaining essential French support. All this was accomplished while Morris fended off the calumnies of his compatriots.

Your article was great fun, but I’m appalled, or perhaps embarrassed, by some learned professors listing Ronald Reagan as most overrated. History has surely not judged him yet—and won’t for many years. With all of history to consider, these men of letters show little perspective and considerable prejudice.

Perhaps instead of your inquiry to “historians,” with a preponderance of professors from the East, you should have opened your quest to your readers, from whom you might have had as many thoughtful, if not more illuminating, responses.

As a history buff and occasional freelancer, may I add American Heritage is fantastic. It has an exceptional range of topics from remarkable authors. Every issue is outstanding.

Most Overrated : Professors Davis, Lamar, and Woodward of Yale University for their shrill, ideological invective against President Reagan.

Most Underrated : The American People, who, in their collective wisdom, have recognized Ronald Reagan’s personal qualities and principles and the overall good he has brought to America.

The critical remarks about JFK simply missed the point. Nobody, even the most devout Kennedyite, can gloss over the failures of the Kennedy administration. But the fact is that John F. Kennedy’s real contribution to American history will always be the public spirit of his administration—not the cosmetic spirit of Camelot. This is what those who heard his first inauguration speech passed on to their children. The vision Kennedy gave to Americans (and bequeathed to them after Dallas) was that it was their civic duty—an honorable duty—to serve their country and to better the lot of those who were less fortunate than they.

It was this selfless spirit that led to the freedom marches in the South, the civic martyrdom of Schwerner, Chancy, and Goodman, and the birth of the Peace Corps. Later it contributed to the end of the Vietnam War, when those who were mere children when JFK was President reached political maturity.

It was a typical motorcade. Cecil W. Stoughton had been in many like it. A 43-year-old veteran of the Signal Corps, Captain Stoughton had so impressed John F. Kennedy with pictures of his inauguration that the new president, through his military aide, appointed him his official photographer. In the course of 34 months, Stoughton had made more than 8000 photographs of Kennedy and his family. Beginning on November 21, during the president’s much-publicized autumn visit to shore up his political position in Texas, Stoughton recorded receptions at San Antonio, Brooks Medical Center, Kelly Field, and the Rice Hotel in Houston, and a testimonial dinner for Rep. Albert Thomas at the Houston Coliseum. The photographer mainly relied on two cameras: an Alpha Reflex and a 500 C Hasselblad. The Alpha was a 35-mm SLR, usually used with a wideangle 35-mm or a 180-mm telephoto lens. But Stoughton preferred the other camera. “The Hasselblad was my tool, an extension of my right arm. I used it every chance I got. It had interchangeable magazines. You would put black-and-white in one, color in one, transparency film in one.”

Broadway,” wrote the British journalist Stephen Graham a year or so after the picture below was taken looking south from Fortysixth Street, “is the mother of Broadways all over the world, mother of the lights of Piccadilly Circus and of the Place Pigalle.…The Great White Way is the greatest white way.…” The buildings were not marble, of course; the white was all lights, great sheets of them put up in the dawn of electric signs and codified by a 1916 zoning law that made specific allowance for the blazing acreage above Times Square.

The advertisers wanted their signs here because no place in Manhattan drew bigger crowds more regularly. Every night, when the shows broke, “pirouetting, pushing half-dazed men and women,” said Graham, would pour into the streets, where “their concentrated footlight stare melts to the grandeur of a vaster better-lit stage.”

In the crowded months between the beginning of the 1860 presidential campaign and the attack on Fort Sumter, it is easy now to see the emergence of Abraham Lincoln as something preordained, as though the issues had manufactured a figure commensurate with their importance. Or at the least, one might imagine a dramatic, hard-fought campaign with Northern and Southern states rallying around their respective candidates. But that’s not quite how it happened.

There is drama enough in the 1860 campaign, but most of it does not spring from the election itself. The moment Lincoln was nominated, the issue was settled: He would become the President; he would be faced with the dissolution of the federal Union. The crucial steps on Lincoln’s road to the White House came earlier, during the most important party convention in our history—a convention that seemed, at the time, certain to nominate William Henry Seward as Republican party candidate for President of the United States.