January 2011

Ronald Spector feels that many of the best books on the Vietnam War are not general accounts but memoirs, diaries, and monographs about some specific aspect of the fighting. But for those who want a general picture, he says that the two best so far are Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam: A History and George C. Herring’s America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam . The last three years of the war are best described in Without Honor: Defeat in Vietnam and Cambodia , by Arnold R. Isaacs. “In my own book Advice and Support: The Early Years of the U.S. Army in Vietnam, 1941–1960 ” Spector says, “I give a detailed account of the earliest years, the 1940s and 1950s.”

Ken Stein of Berkeley, California, has sent us an excerpt from an almanac published by Nathaniel Ames in Boston in 1758. Ames gives over the last few pages of his booklet to a discussion of “ America ”—“ Its Past, Present and Future State .”

At the time Ames was writing, the Present State looked none too bright to him: although the year would end with the British beginning to win the war against the French, it opened with the Colonies feuding and the future far from certain.

Therefore, writes Stein, “Ames’vision of the future is especially remarkable. Reading the closing words he wrote to all of us 228 years ago gave me a warm shiver. And perhaps, too, some reason for hope.”

So here are Ames’s good wishes; and with them come ours too.

AMERICA is a Subject which daily becomes more and more interesting—.—I shall therefore fill these Pages with a Word upon its Past, Present and Future State.

In the early 1900s, John White Alexander was considered one of the four preeminent American painters of his day, the peer of Whistler, Sargent, and E. A. Abbey. In 1905, he won a $175,000 commission to paint the murals at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh; in 1909 he became president of the National Academy of Design; and following his death in 1915, a commemorative exhibition of his work traveled to 11 cities. Then, for several decades, he was forgotten.

The saga of the YP-438 as related by Ellis Sard (June/July issue) must have tugged at the heart of every small-ship sailor in the U.S. Navy. Most of us did not have the series of increasingly frustrating and finally catastrophic events that befell his YP, but we had our moments.

I was an officer aboard the USS APc-42. The designation, in Navy parlance, stood for coastal transport. At 105 feet, the wooden-hulled APc class was said to have the smallest commissioned vessels in the Navy in World War II. Like the YP, we were powered by a single diesel engine that not only was idiosyncratic but also could be downright malevolent.

Regarding Mr. Baida’s article “Breaking the Connection” about AT&T (June/July), I believe it is a competent account done in a very short space.

My quoted statement that the “public’s desire for diversity in communications services and suppliers” was challenged as “not persuasive.” Further, the author says that the “decision to break up AT&T was made not by the public, but by government officials acting as representatives of the public.”

I’m not sure we are in disagreement, because that’s how the public makes decisions—through its representatives. But this is more than a quibble, because if we learn anything from the divestiture history, we learn that a series of events, one upon another under no specific or overall direction, culminated in the mindless destruction of a corporate masterpiece.

I was recently sent a well-argued report written by sensible people which insisted that a larger place must be found in our schools and colleges for instruction in mathematics and “quantitative thinking.” Scarcely had I finished reading it when a full professor came by to tell me that cliometrics (which applies statistical analysis and the theoretical explanations of social science to investigations of the past) was sweeping the country and threatening to destabilize all future tenure decisions in history departments. What worried him was that this “cognitive mode”—too much fooling around with numbers—would reduce the nature of the past and diminish its meaning. He was as disturbed as Bulfinch would have been if someone had used James Watt’s calculation of the work done when 33,000 pounds are raised one foot in a minute to explain what kind of horse Pegasus was.

"February 17, 1898. Left home this day for Alaska 4:35 P.M.” Thus did a 34-year-old Nebraskan named George Cheever Hazelet note in his diary his departure for the Klondike. Gold had been discovered along the Yukon River two years earlier, and thousands of prospectors were spilling into the immense, empty reaches of Alaska to get some. Hazelet thought it beat teaching high school. A year later, he was not so sure, and his melancholy, sardonic diary entry on the anniversary of his leave-taking is a perfect encapsulation of the usual luck of the gold fields: