January 2011

LIKE MANY World War I fighter pilots returning from Europe in 1919, Wesley Smith hoped to find a career that would keep him aloft. He had flown missions out of England during the war. Afterward he settled in Philadelphia and found work as a pilot for the brand new Aero Service Corporation, which had been founded in July of 1919 and was struggling to survive by delivering packages and taking passengers on joyrides. The company would have failed several times if Miss Mary K. Gibson, a Main Line socialite, had not given generously of her faith and fortune. During even the hardest times, Miss Gibson treated her pilots to handsome leather jackets and helmets.

Raised in Maybrook, her father’s sprawling, castellated mansion, she knew well the pride Philadelphia’s families took in their estates. She soon hit on the idea of charging families like the Stotesburys and du Ponts one hundred dollars for aerial views of their mansions.

FROM THE OIL FIELDS of Indonesia to the tulip fields of Holland to the rice fields of Brazil, a traveler overhears conversations sounding something like this:

FIRSTNATIVE : “Unintelligible unintelligible unintelligible, okay?”

SECONDNATIVE : “Okay.”

The traveler has no idea just what it is these two people are talking about, except that the first one proposed something and the second agreed.

Thomas B. Morgan replies: I feel a new respect for Arthur Schlesinger’s tears, but what am I to make of the rest of his letter? My premises that Stevenson would win if Kennedy lost, that McCarthy was no Johnson man, and that the ticket was not immaculately conceived seem amply supported by political history, common sense, and recent interviews with key witnesses, including Schlesinger. Neither the nastiness attributed to Reuther and Rauh nor the belated bow toward McCarthy change anything. And, among other sources, Schlesinger’s own book about Robert Kennedy tells us it is no canard to conclude that the Johnson vice-presidential nomination was “already in the works,” put there—for one—by Philip Graham, publisher of the Washington Post . After all these years it seems that the tragedy of Johnson still haunts Schlesinger, as it must any man who says he was right to support Kennedy over Stevenson in 1960.

Returning home

from World War II, the GIs of Athens, Tennessee, found that the democracy they had fought for abroad was noticeably absent from their own town. They determined to defeat their corrupt local officials at the ballot box; the officials determined to ensure that this could not possibly happen; and the result was a surprisingly violent confrontation that seemed, in its way, as much a test of freedom as had been the war overseas.

Fine American antiques

were hardly appreciated in 1905 when a Lithuanian immigrant named Israel Sack opened his first shop; today they fill museums and are a very big business—and Sack’s firm, now run by his sons, remains at the top. Rebecca Martin traces the intertwined growth of Israel Sack, Inc., and the transformed field that it leads.

Shortly before D-day

To go one step farther than John Bowen, whose letter about FDR being the first television President appears in the August/September issue, I’d like to point out that the first U.S. President to appear on television was Herbert Hoover. However, to be fair about it, I must admit that his appearance was in April 1927, which was before he became President. Hoover, then Secretary of Commerce, appeared in the first public demonstration of television in a hookup between Washington and New York, with AT & T President Walter Gifford “doing his thing” at the Big Apple end.

I recall having seen a picture, some years ago, showing Hoover at the Washington end of the circuit, and the event is described in Telephone: The First Hundred Years by John Brooks.

Now let us sit back and await someone’s report that Millard Fillmore’s television appearance antedated those of Hoover, FDR, and Truman!

As a speechwriter for Adlai Stevenson in the spring of 1960, I particularly enjoyed Tom Morgan’s perceptive recollections of what you called on the cover “The Heartbreak Convention” (August/September issue). But I also feel impelled to add a few recollections of my own if only to emphasize that had the effort on behalf of Stevenson succeeded in July, the result would probably have been a heartbreak election in November.

Three weeks before the convention, I met with Kennedy and his wife at Ben Bradlee’s home in Washington. Having recently offered to make Stevenson Secretary of State in exchange for his support—and been rebuffed—Kennedy was understandably curious about “what Adlai was up to.” I told him Stevenson did not regard himself as part of a stop-Kennedy drive but simply wanted to remain available if the convention deadlocked with only Johnson and Symington as the alternatives. In that event I suggested that Walter Lippmann’s advocacy of a Stevenson-Kennedy ticket might make sense.

Kennedy shook his head. “I’m running for the Presidency, period,” he replied in a flat, hard voice.

Huck Ratings Adlai Arguments Adlai Arguments Adlai Arguments Earlier and Earlier Pro-Cool and Anti-Cool Pro-Cool and Anti-Cool Pro-Cool and Anti-Cool Helmetiana Wrong Bull Watergate Reactons Watergate Reactons Super Horses? Uniform Strategy Uniform Strategy Oath or Affirmation

FOR THE THIRTY YEARS between 1889 and 1919, Edward Bok and the magazine he edited—Ladies’ Home Journal—exerted a profound influence over middle-class American values. His message was direct: The Simple Life was joyous and good, and too many Americans, seduced by the clutter and false values of Victorian materialism, had drifted away from it.