February 2011

On June 30, 2010, 14 boxes containing a treasure trove of more than 5000 personal letters, notes, and photographs from the Roosevelt administration and his family arrived at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York. The material—the personal archives of Grace Tully, Roosevelt’s last private secretary, who served him for 17 years—caused a stir among historians, who believe it may provide a hitherto unknown  glimpse into the Roosevelt years.

“There’s no one who has a closer, more intimate relationship with a president than his personal secretary,” says historian Douglas Brinkley, coauthor of FDR and the Creation of the U.N. “Tully was present for all the big moments of his presidency.”

In her 1948 memoir, Tully recalled FDR summoning her to the White House just four hours after the Pearl Harbor bombing: “Once more, he inhaled deeply, then he began in the same calm tone in which he dictated his mail. Only his diction was a little different as he spoke each word incisively and slowly, carefully specifying each punctuation mark and paragraph. ‘Yesterday comma December 7 comma 1941 dash a day which will live in infamy dash . . .’”

On October 2, 1950, my father signed with United Feature Syndicate, believing that his job was to help editors sell newspapers. He started in seven papers. Fifty years later, with the strip appearing in a record 2600 newspapers, Dad still went to work motivated by that same belief.

On Sunday, May 14, 1865, Benjamin Brown French, commissioner of public buildings for the District of Columbia, left his home on Capitol Hill to buy a copy of the Daily Morning Chronicle. “When I came up from breakfast I went out and got the Chronicle,” he wrote in his journal, “and the first thing that met my eyes was ‘Capture of Jeff Davis’ in letters two inches long. Thank God we have got the arch traitor at last.”

On April 22, 1775, three days after a British column marched out of Boston and clashed with militiamen at Lexington and Concord, the news—and the cry of Revolution!—reached Danbury, Connecticut, where 18-year-old Stephen Maples Jarvis was working on the family farm. Over the next several days, the young man would confront the hard, consequential choice between joining the rebel patriots or staying loyal to King George. He was not alone; all across the eastern seaboard, others were wrestling with the same dilemma.

 In the Trenches

Historian Edward Lengel was right when he wrote that the doughboys “came from rich, poor, and everything in between” in his article about the bloody World War I battle of Meuse-Argonne in the Summer issue.

In the fall of 1918, my father, Harry Brough, a telegrapher in the U.S. Army 5th (“Red Diamond”) Division Signal Corps, found himself in a trench in France trying to 

send telephone and radio messages. Lately the Allies had been experiencing difficulties with the German interception of battlefield communications. One day two unprepossessing soldiers appeared in his trench. They took up the transmitter and started communicating through grunts and gutteral noises, punctuated with shrugs and gestures. My perplexed father afterward learned that the pair was Native American and were transmitting critical information in a language no German could understand.

—Elizabeth G. Prall

Malta, IL

Editor’s Note:

On a little-remarked, steamy day in late June 1973, a revolution took place in Washington, D.C., one that would transfer far more power and wealth than did the revolt against King George III in 1776. On the 29th, a sweaty, angry majority of the House of Representatives and the Senate defied the president of the United States and voted to end armed American involvement in Vietnam.

Whether this was a day of ignominy or triumph, the cowardly abandonment of a small ally or the casting off of an albatross from around the Republic’s neck, is a matter of debate to this day. But what remains clear is that the vote was the Bastille Day of a major upheaval; on its heels came a series of laws asserting unprecedented congressional power, climaxed by the humiliating resignation of a president one step ahead of impeachment. Since that day, Americans have been living in—some would say enduring—another era of congressional government.

This issue we bring you essays on some important subjects: the 200-year-old seesaw struggle between Congress and the president, the unending fiasco in Korea, and the largely forgotten civil war our patriots fought with former friends and family who remained loyal to King George III.

On its 60th anniversary, the Korean War looks much like Vietnam, a pointless conflict that gained nothing for those who began it: North Korea’s Kim Il-sung and South Korea’s Syngman Rhee, with the consent of the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin and China’s Mao Zedong. Yet it was far worse than that: The bloodletting in that corner of northeast Asia was an exercise in human folly that cost all sides in the fighting nearly 4 million lives lost, missing, and wounded, not to mention the devastation of the peninsula from Pusan in the south to the Yalu River in the north. Not a single northern or southern Korean city escaped the ravages wrought by modern warfare. Public buildings and private homes were turned into piles of rubble, while thousands of refugees fled from the scenes of battle.

The Gun

By C. J. Chivers

The most lethal and influential weapon of the cold war, argues C. J. Chivers, a former Marine and now a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, was not the nuclear warhead and infrastructure behind it but the AK-47, a cheap, handheld, Soviet-made automatic weapon that could be used effectively by the “mechanically disinclined, the dimwitted, and the untrained” to “push out a blistering fire for the lengths of two or three football fields.” More than 100 million AK-47s and its derivatives have been made—making it the rifle of choice among guerrillas, freedom fighters, child soldiers, terrorists, and criminals the world over.

Back in 1965, Ronald Reagan published his first memoir, Where’s the Rest of Me?, borrowing the title from a line in the 1942 Warner Brothers film Kings Row. In the movie—Reagan’s favorite of all he starred in—he played Drake McHugh, a playboy whose legs have been removed by a sadistic surgeon. “Where’s the rest of me?” Reagan famously cried out when he came to, with thespian relish worthy of an Academy Award nomination.

Up until now, Reagan—like McHugh—hasn’t been whole. His legacy has been too rooted in Hollywood, Culver City, Pacific Palisades, Sacramento, Beverly Hills, Simi Valley, and the Santa Ynez Mountains. On the centennial of his birth in the tiny northwestern Illinois town of Tampico, the Midwest is determined to make Reagan whole again. The Tampico prodigal has become the Land of Lincoln’s new favorite son.