January 2011

I am proud that most of my ancestors came from the British Isles, but 1 am even prouder of being an American. And as an American who has four Revolutionary War ancestors, I bitterly resent (and I’m not DAR, though I’m eligible) the fact that the British Embassy in Washington has hung a picture of George III on our soil (“The British View,” May/June).

My God! England! How insensitive can you get!

Editor’s note: Actually, by diplomatic custom, the ground on which the British Embassy in Washington stands is considered British soil.

What a magnificent article that was by Sir Oliver Wright, “The British View,” that you ran in your Constitution issue. As the author wrote, “Who can fail to be moved by [the Constitution’s] language, poised as it is halfway in time between Shakespeare and Churchill and with the cadences natural to both?” Who can read this and not be moved not only by the writing but by the spirit and understanding it conveys?

Perhaps I’m wrong, but I like to think that the British have a marvelous sense of humor. George III presiding over the British Embassy in Washington, D.C.! I will never see it, but I cherish the picture.

Is there something in the nature of the American Presidency that leads itself to the type of behavior described in “The Presidential Follies” in the September/October issue? Or is there something in landslide political victories that leads presidential staffs into the extreme arrogance shown by those you describe. Grant, Harding, Nixon, Reagan—all won landslide victories. And you can add to this list the efforts to pack the Supreme Court during Roosevelt’s second term and Johnson’s rapid escalation of the Vietnam War after his overwhelming victory.

The feeling perhaps is that the country liked you, or liked your candidate, overwhelmingly over the “other guy,” so it will tolerate anything. Hubris is right, an arrogant and prideful belief in being the elect rather than just the elected.

Your article by Irwin F. Fredman entitled “The Presidential Follies” was most interesting, but in connection with incidents of which I have specific knowledge, it was inaccurate at the least but clearly defamatory in its conclusions as they relate to Maurice Stans, former Secretary of Commerce, and Chairman of the Finance Committee of the Nixon campaign during the period involved.

The objectionable and inaccurate language specifically referred to says, speaking of Watergate, “Secretary of Commerce Maurice Stans, who collected the money that made it all go , was fined five thousand dollars.”

Also, throughout the balance of the article, you lumped Stans together with those who were convicted of clear-cut Watergate offenses, for example, as one of “twenty-four directly linked to the White House.”

Shortly after noon on the third day at Gettysburg, Confederate troops were still massed in the woods below Cemetery Ridge. While they waited for the artillery to open up and George Pickett to give the order to charge, Shelby Foote writes in the second volume of his monumental trilogy The Civil War: A Narrative , a Tennessee sergeant “walked forward to the edge of the woods, looked across the wide open valley at the bluecoats standing toylike in the distance on their ridge, and was so startled by the realization of what was about to be required of him that he spoke aloud, asking himself the question: ‘June Kimble, are you going to do your duty?’ The answer, too, was audible. ‘I’ll do it, so help me God.’”

That sort of small, shrewdly observed detail, so easily overlooked in the rush of titanic events, so evocative of the sort of men who met on that battlefield that day, is what helps set Shelby Foote’s books apart from most writing about the Civil War, what helps make his trilogy, I believe, a modern classic.

Villains are important, and an institution that supplies us with villains performs an essential service. Take the Harvard Business School. Others may scoff, but I am prepared to believe that the Harvard Business School is responsible for everything that has gone wrong in American life in the past thirty years, from the decline of the automobile industry to the cancellation of “Captain Kangaroo.”

Imagine my excitement, then, when I learned that the Harvard Business School Press planned to publish a major new history of the school. Of course, I approach the writing of any column in a spirit of perfect objectivity, but even before I had read one word of it, I knew that Jeffrey L. Cruikshank’s A Delicate Experiment: The Harvard Business School 1908–1945 would give me a chance to indulge in a pair of eternally popular pastimes, M.B.A. bashing and Harvard bashing. How delightful!

A sidelight on the shooting of Theodore Roosevelt during the presidential campaign of 1912 that was described in “The Time Machine” (September/October): The Democratic candidate, Governor Wilson, announced that his campaign would remain on hold until Roosevelt was back in action. As far as I know, American politics has offered nothing like that since.

In Howard Mansfield’s article “Elm Street Blues” (October/November 1986), he describes the devastation caused by the Dutch elm disease and the resultant demise of the American elm tree as an urban focal point. He also mentions various communities across the country known for either their past or their present elm tree grandeur. Noticeably absent, however, was any reference to an intact stand of Ulmus americana , almost two hundred in number, that stretches for seven uninterrupted blocks along Luzerne Street in Westmont Borough, a suburb of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. According to senior residents of the area, the trees constitute the longest continuous row of American elms east of the Mississippi.

by Judi Culbertson and Tom Randall; Chelsea Green Publishing Company; 405 pages; $16.95.

Who hasn’t been fascinated by an old cemetery? A graveyard can be not only a place for hallowing the dead but also a gallery of good and atrocious art, an exhibit field of curious poems, a final stage for the pageantry of vanity, and an epigrammatic museum of forgotten lives—all in a pretty park. Yet many of us either find cemeteries faintly morbid or tend to overlook them. Here, to show us what we’ve been missing, is an excellent guide to the cemeteries of New York, by the authors of a similar Baedeker of Parisian burial spots.

by Clark G. Reynolds; Pictorial Histories Publishing Company; 355 pages; paperback; $14.95.