January 2011

As a veteran public relations man, I can smell a PR campaign a mile away. Your article “Why We Were Right to Like Ike” in the December 1985 issue is a piece of that nationwide move, wittingly or unwittingly, to portray one of our least remarkable Presidents as one of the greatest.

I lived through those days of Eisenhower’s administration. 1 can recall, for example, that in deference to Joseph McCarthy, Ike deleted a paragraph of praise for Gen. George C. Marshall, then under severe attack by McCarthy, in a major speech in Milwaukee.

So much for Steve Neal’s claim that Ike “worked behind the scenes to reduce McCarthy’s influence.” Those of us with longer memories recall quite clearly that it was the famous courtroom speech by the attorney Joseph Welch that burst the McCarthy “anti-Communism” balloon.

And where, anywhere, is a defense of General Marshall, who recommended the obscure Colonel Eisenhower for the top command of U.S. forces, by the recipient of that appointment, Dwight David Eisenhower?

To one who lived through the Eisenhower era and worked close to certain large issues in the nation’s capital, Steve Neal’s apologia for this President is pretty weak. He raised more questions than he answered.

Ike—with great power and prestige- controlled a burgeoning defense establishment for eight long years, so why did he wait until the very end to raise his famous warning about the “militaryindustrial complex”?

Why did this man scorn the proposed national health plan as “socialized medicine” when he had lived a whole life under that very system in the U.S. Army? Typical of his unthinking way. Why did he continue to endorse Richard Nixon? Was it not he who brought That Man into high office?

What proof has Neal that Eisenhower “personally approved” Francis Gary Powers’s ill-fated U2 flight? As a member of the team behind it, I doubt Ike knew of the flight beforehand, as he had no more control over the CIA than any other President and displayed a consistent lack of interest in such matters.

The poster called Comfort on the North Shore Line (“Chicago Transit,” December 1985) prompted me to write. When my mother was twenty-two years old, she landed a teaching job in Highland Park. She would teach until 3:00 P.M. and then hop the North Shore at 3:15 and be home for supper in Milwaukee. She and my father were dating at the time, and the whole business is an important and romantic memory for her. She is now eighty years old, and 1 hope to present her with this poster for her eighty-first birthday in June. It will be a great pleasure for her and for me.

Among recently published books that fall within our bailiwick, the editors of American Heritage have selected some outstanding titles.

Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History Main Street to Miracle Mile: Amarican Roadside Architecture The United States Navy The Lives of Lee Miller The First Liberty: Religion and the American Republic

In the wake of the centennial year of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s death in 1882, scholars, critics, and journalists in various parts of the country started to take a fresh look at the man and his works. They have found that the prejudices against Emerson expressed by H. L. Mencken and Ernest Hemingway persist to the present day. Mencken said in The American Mercury (October 1930) that “Emerson was always very careful to keep idealism within the bounds of American respectability. He incited to hope, optimism, enterprise, enthusiasm, but never to any downright violation of decorum.”

Who Liked Ike? Who Liked Ike? Birthday Present Benchley for GIs What Liberty, What Statue? Triangle Fire Memories Local History Local History More Great Cars Touché

This is the story of the efforts of naval officers to bring steam, coal, iron, steel, and high explosives together in satisfying combination during the last century. It was a time of transformation and change when the U.S. Navy made its way from the old sailing ships of the line to the dreadnought, also known in its first American version as the Skeerd of Nuthin. What we know of all this is still pretty much what the historian Frank M. Bennett told us in 1896 in his remarkable book The Steam Navy of the United States. But the subject is especially important today because it may serve as a latter-day cautionary tale when technology is more complicated, more powerful, and far more omnipresent than in the days of those old ships and sailors.

When Beatrix Farrand arrived to work on a garden, clients knew they were in the presence of someone extraordinary. Friends called her Queen Elizabeth, and she sat regally swathed in lap robes, dressed primly in English tweeds, as her chauffeur guided the Fierce-Arrow touring car up the drive. In the twenties and thirties a garden by Farrand was believed to open social doors for its owner, and the people who hired her—people with such names as J. P. Morgan, Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Mr. Edward Whitney, Mrs. Woodrow Wilson—were accustomed to the best.

Her actual achievements have for years been buried under this image of Farrand as society gardener to the very rich; only recently has her reputation as one of the best of American landscape designers begun to be restored.

In 1894 he was one of ten kids from a Scottish family just managing to squeak by in a small, gray town in the Highlands. A mere decade later he sat in the Waldorf-Astoria, in a cutaway suit, hobnobbing with some of the most powerful men of his time. My grandfather had come a long way—though not quite so far as it appeared.

He had left home at fourteen, armed with an eighth-grade education and a !burning ambition to be somebody. He worked as a clerk, as a printer’s devil, learned shorthand, and eventually landed himself a job as a reporter. Then it was off to the wider world, first to South Africa and then on to America. He had lived frugally up to then. But not long after he arrived here, he abandoned his good Scotsman’s ways and set himself up in style. Suddenly his hard-earned savings were being squandered on lavish rooms, cutaway suits, and card games. By all rights he belonged in a cold-water flat in Brooklyn, but his extravagance had a purpose. He was a business reporter, and he intended to succeed. And what better way to get to know his subjects than to live among them.

Great portraits are frequently caricatures. Think of van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Egon Schiele, Picasso, Max Beckmann, or Alice Neel. On the other hand, caricature is not portraiture. Well, not often. One exception, in my opinion, is William Auerbach-Levy. Unlike other caricaturists, he did not exaggerate facial features for comic or scurrilous effect. He used distortion to capture the persona in the same subtle way a good portrait painter does. And like a portrait painter, his drawings were done from life, although he frequently reworked sketches afterward in his studio. His caricatures were admired when I went to art school even by the fine arts students who looked down on commercial art. It was his apparently effortless draftsmanship that impressed us. His ability to catch facial idiosyncracies was almost beside the point.