January 2011

THE BOOK reached me in Argentia, Newfoundland, where my squadron, VP-84, was on antisubmarine patrol. The inscription, “To Ev—this incontestable evidence of performance,” had a special impact, as my brother knew it would. Aircraft performance, along with flying ability and luck, are what a pilot lives by in war. But it was a different performance, the kind evident on every page of Stephen Vincent Benét’s John Brown’s Body , that my brother was referring to in his gift marking my twenty-sixth birthday.

THERE’S NO REAL REASON why past events should take on an added piquancy just because they happened exactly a century ago. And yet they do. All the usual questions somehow become more interesting: what was happening, what did people wear, what did they eat, what made them laugh, what were they reading, what were they earning?

A century ago next month, 56,500,000 Americans woke to face the New Year. Many people, then as now, spent some time wondering what it held in store for their lives—which were, for the most part, rural ones. Although America had already established herself as an industrial power among nations, the majority of her citizens lived on farms. Of a labor force of 17,380,000 by the most recent census, 8,920,000 were farmers, and only 3,290,000 worked in industry. A handful of these latter tended the electric power stations that were beginning to operate in the Eastern cities, but steam was still the muscle that made things run—steam and the horse: Americans were using 15,500,000 horses to pull their streetcars and plow their fields.

To witness Franklin D. Roosevelt—on the night of December 7, 1941, as the news came in. Who brought him the dispatches? How did he react? Whom did he turn to? Whom did he call? When did he begin to word his “day of infamy” speech? When did he find time to be alone, and think before they carried him up to bed?

The scene is not America, it is London. It is late evening of December 7, 1941, and Winston Churchill has just heard the news of Pearl Harbor. “So we had won after all,” he said, “England would live, Britain would live; the Commonwealth and the Empire would live.… Once again in our long Island history we should emerge, however mauled or mutilated, safe and victorious we should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end. Hitler’s fate was sealed, Mussolini’s fate was sealed.” The next day he went to the House of Commons to make the announcement. That is the scene I should most like to have been a part of, the address I should most like to have heard.

I would like to have witnessed the explosion at Alamogordo, on July 16, 1945, for at that moment the history of the past met the history of the future as the two had never met before. Science had then achieved its most visible and awful triumph. On that account, a knowledge of history became indispensable as the surest way in which men and women might learn to understand their limitations—though they have yet to do so—and might thereby prevent the extermination of life on this earth.

I would like to have been present on that post-election morning in 1948 when Harry S. Truman heard that he had won over the invincible Thomas Dewey.

I would love to have seen his face and heard his feisty remarks. His victory was so personal and so double-edged it proved how wrong we all were about the man. In the campaign he was underestimated and demeaned. We were oblivious to his nature, his strong characteristics. He refused to accept defeat, he came out fighting. He had faith in himself and his purpose, he ran a remarkable underdog campaign. He captured the imagination of America and pulled off one of the most amazing campaign upsets in American history. We should have learned from this victory never to underestimate this man again, this haberdasher from Independence, Missouri, who grew in the job and made the tough decisions at a time when our nation needed tough decisions.

On the Korean battlefield in the closing days of December 1950, there occurred the most remarkable display of leadership in the history of American arms—the resurrection of the 8th United States Army by its new commander, Lt. Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway.

It was an army defeated and demoralized by the unexpected intervention of Chinese Communist Forces that had sent it reeling back hundreds of miles in confusion and disarray. The situation was precarious, and the total evacuation of the Korean Peninsula was being seriously considered. But if the 8th Army was defeated, its new commander was not. Dismissing plans for further retreat, General Ridgway ordered the 8th Army to prepare the attack. Within days he had seized the moral initiative and begun to dominate the battlefield. Three months later, Seoul had been recaptured, and the Chinese and North Koreans pushed back across the South Korean frontier.

I would like to have watched Lyndon B. Johnson sign the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I make this choice because I was there—in spirit, at least. I have always been somewhat split between North and South, by parentage if not conviction. It happens that I was visiting Louisiana relatives that weekend, or whatever it was, that included July 4, 1964—the act was passed in June, but the actual signing took place July 2. On that day some of the rektives had taken me out yachting, and we were anchored at Pass Christian. Some people were talking about the civil rights workers who had disappeared. Somebody said they were probably buried a long way down in Mississippi soil. I was not sure if the speaker thought that good or bad: I was busy trying to make out the strange flags that were being flown by a lot of our neighbors.

“What’s that?” I asked at last. “What’s that funny flag on that launch over there?”

They scoffed at me. “It’s the Confederate flag,” they explained at last.

Then word came through on the radio about the signing.

My taste as to scenes which I would like to have witnessed varies from the morbid to the wonderful. Years ago I thought I would like to have been a fly on a wall of the bunker watching the last days and hours of the Third Reich, a terrible but engrossing sight. But no longer. For the last decade I have yielded entirely to the wish that I could have been there in the White House on that day when Richard Nixon decided to resign his Presidency and knelt with my old friend Henry Kissinger to pray. And how God, too, must have wondered!

Among the thousands of baseball games I would give an eyetooth to have seen was the third game of the 1932 World Series. Little rode on the game itself: the New York Yankees, nearing the end of the RuthGehrig era, would take four straight games from the Cubs, outscoring the Northenders 37 to 19. The august New Yorkers, winners of seven pennants in twelve years, disliked the Cubs for their tightfisted treatment of an ex-teammate, Mark Koenig; they hoped to humiliate them.

This was the setting for Babe Ruth’s appearance at the plate in the fifth inning. The Wrigley Field faithful cheered encouragement to Cub pitcher Charlie Root. Ruth, belly advancing in front of his dainty feet, walked to the plate and dug into the lefthanders’ batter’s box. (I have a seat behind the third-base dugout with an unimpeded view of Ruth’s round face.) One strike; then another.