Archives for History

Hail to the chief

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A delayed flight led me to a long conversation at the airport with a charming 70-ish woman, on her way home from her mother’s 90th birthday party. The event had been a smash: all six children and a couple dozen grand- and great-grandkids in attendance, along with 75 guests.

With my mother-in-law coming up on a milestone birthday this spring, I recognized this valuable opportunity to get party tips from an obvious expert. After we’d covered the menu, music, centerpieces and invitations, she told me about the final touch.

Mother, it seems, had been quite firm about not wanting any presents. She plans to live to 100, she assured her children, but she has all the slippers, perfumed soap, nighties and framed photographs she needs. But would it be possible, she wondered, for the guests to get gifts to mark the occasion?

So that was how each of the attendees came to find a commemorative plate at his or her place. The back of each plate had the name and birthday of the guest of honor. The front? A handsome portrait of President Barack Obama.

“My mother, a black woman with a grade-school education raised a family of college graduates,” the woman told me. “She has a picture of President Obama in every room of her house. She told the guests that the day he was elected was the best moment of her 90 years.”

I wish I’d been at that party.

Filed under Heroes, History, Real People, White House

Oct 21, 2009

More to say about Anne Frank

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The Diary of Anne Frank is one of the most revisited and analyzed books of our time. It turns out that there is much left to learn and say about it.

Author Francine Prose was working on a novel with a teenage character, and turned to the famous diary as background for the writing habits of a 13-year-old girl. What she found was a much more nuanced memoir that was the work of a surprisingly mature writer. The result is her book Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, the Afterlife (Harper), which examines Frank’s work with a literary eye. This is about Anne Frank, author, not Anne Frank, icon.

In the years since Frank’s diary first appeared, new versions have appeared, welcomed by critics as more authentic than the version first published by Otto Frank, the young author’s father. In fact, as Prose explains, Anne Frank herself undertook a deliberate and careful editing of the diary while still in hiding. Otto Frank had actually reinstated portions his daughter had cut, including personal sections in which the young woman meditated on her parents’ marriage and her own sexuality.

A very good interview with the author can be heard on the site of Tablet, billed accurately as “a new read on Jewish life,” and created by Nextbook, a leading publisher of Jewish books.

The publication of Prose’s book is bringing forth other new information about Frank–new to me, at least. A review on SFGate by Sara Houghteling answered my question about how Frank came to keep such a diary in the first place:

“On March 29, 1944, on the BBC program “Radio Oranje,” Gerrit Bolkestein, a Dutch minister in the exiled government of Prime Minister Gerbrandy, called for all Dutch citizens living under the Nazi occupation to save everyday documents – in particular, letters and diaries – for eventual collection in a national wartime archive…Among those listening to the broadcast, on a contraband radio, was 14-year-old Anne Frank.

In 1942, when Anne’s sister Margot received her summons for deportation to Westerbork, the family feigned flight to Switzerland and sequestered themselves, along with [four others] in the maze of rooms above Otto Frank’s former Opekta fruit canning company. Anne brought along the checkered journal given to her a month earlier by her father, in which she would famously recount her life in hiding… …The BBC broadcast awoke Anne to the possibility that her diary could be read by an audience outside of herself …”

The passages I’ve read that are quoted from Prose’s book are irresistible; the minute Powell’s World of Books has a used copy, I’ll embark on it. Stay tuned.

Filed under Books, History

Oct 12, 2009

Kennedy book is a keeper

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I just finished True Compass, Ted Kennedy’s autobiography, which was hurried to print following his death last month. It’s an engrossing read with good capsule histories of some of the biggest events of our time. It has one of the better concise treatments of the Vietnam war and the LBJ years that I’ve read in recent years.

It isn’t an historian’s work, although Kennedy provides a lot of new detail about his own campaigns and big moments in the Senate: civil rights debates, health care during the Clinton years, Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas hearings, to name a few.

It’s personal, but not tell-all. Most of the people Kennedy remembers with detail and skill are dead, but there is little or nothing in the 500-plus pages that would cause any spinning-in-their-graves. Think about that and ask yourself how often it happens. Answer: Not often. Most “celebrity” bios and autobios exist to set the record straight…from the author’s point of view, of course. The treatment of the Chappaquiddick disaster offers no new facts; it is convincing and sorrowful.

Kennedy wrote with the pride of a long-serving public servant, the gratitude of one looking back at a much-chronicled and very privileged life; and the deep regrets of a man who is taking his own measure with death just around the next corner.

Filed under Books, Heroes, History, Politics

Oct 11, 2009

I couldn’t agree more

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I’ll be honest: There’s nothing quite as gratifying as hearing or reading strong opinions that mirror my own, voiced by folks who are better informed and smarter than myself.

To wit:

Columnist Maureen Dowd is a sharp and intelligent observer of the Washington scene she covers. (Her shrill tone irritates me, but there’s no denying the brainpower.) Her column on Congressman Joe Wilson’s outburst, in which he called the President of the United States a liar, gives voice to something we would all like to forget:

“But Wilson’s shocking disrespect for the office of the president — no Democrat ever shouted “liar” at W. when he was hawking a fake case for war in Iraq — convinced me: Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it.”

Likewise, when Doris Kearns Goodwin, one of the most accomplished historians of our time, was asked by 60 Minutes what she thought Sen. Ted Kennedy added to the historical canon with his just-released memoir, she didn’t hesitate.

She noted that in his book “True Compass,” Kennedy frequently cites his deep admiration for President Lyndon Johnson and his accomplishments. Kearns Goodwin seizes on those comments because they differ so from the Kennedy party line. (Both John and Robert made no secret of disliking LBJ, who energetically returned their disdain.)

To my mind, Kennedy’s comments are significant because they might just nudge a younger generation of readers to give LBJ the credit he deserves, and which has so often been denied by people my age and older. Strong feelings about the American disaster in Vietnam keep many baby boomers from recognizing the huge accomplishments of the Johnson administration, including the passage of civil rights legislation that helped Barack Obama get where he is today.

Filed under Authors, Heroes, History

Sep 14, 2009

Life changing

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We think we remember the feeling exactly, but we don’t.

The attacks on 9/11 were the sort of mind-freezing tragedies that human brains work hard to minimize. To remember it all precisely is too hard for most of us.

What comes rushing back to me is the memory of how urgently I felt pulled toward home that day. I was driving from a friend’s place on Cape Cod, skirting Boston to get to New Hampshire, where we lived at the time. My partner was at a conference in Boston, and left there just ahead of the orders to shut down the many tunnels and main highways. I knew it might not be the smartest move to be driving on major arterials not far from a big airport, but I was determined to get to that small nest of ours, with an address on “Liberty Street” of all places.

We both made it. We checked on all our New York loved ones. We sat glued to the television for what seemed like days.

Commentators today are remarking on the solidarity we Americans felt on that day in 2001, and for some weeks and months afterward. They inevitably get around to bemoaning the distance that grew up later, the way many things returned to the bad-old-days as the flag stickers on our cars faded and peeled.

I want to remember other things. The remarkable heroism of so many people at the attack sites. The gratitude I felt when we both got home. The decision we made soon after to move together to the Pacific Northwest, rather than live 3,000 miles apart for a few months while I started a job in Seattle. Instead of that admittedly more prudent plan, my partner left his job and we went together. Life is short, we said. We need to stick together.

Filed under History

Sep 11, 2009

Happy (?) Anniversary, Stonewall

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An ad in the New York Times Sunday Styles section commemorates the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, that legendary 1969 uprising in a Greenwich Village gay bar. Rousts by police were not uncommon in these settings, but a combination of especially swift police brutality and We’ve-Had-Enough patron sentiments resulted in a roaring riot. What we would now call the Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender crowd drove the police back and kept them there for days.

If such an ad didn’t say enough about the changed attitudes, the one below it sure did: A furniture and carpet store entreats:

Love love love…the partnership registry…co-create your home from the ground up.

A more cynical person might say that much of the progress towards acceptance of LGBT folks is, in fact, market driven. A really cynical person might say that the poor economy will push this acceptance to a new high. Retailers who want to survive will market across all lines: gender, class, shoe size.

I, however, am marking this historic occasion by shrugging off such thoughts, lifting my coffee mug and toasting the people who still worry that their sexual orientation or their place along the gender continuum might cause them to be fired, humiliated, hurt or killed. Sisters and brothers: I’m with you.

A recommendation to my blog readers: Go find a copy of “Stone Butch Blues” by Leslie Feinberg. (Other Feinberg insights can be found on the writer’s Transgender Warrior site.) You might have to get your favorite independent bookseller to order it for you, as it may now be out of print. This is a remarkable, heartbreaking book. (Along lines of “Fat Girl” by Judith Moore, another bit of painful genius in book form.) I could not put “Stone Butch Blues” down and it prompted me to get other works by Feinberg, including the essay collection “Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue.”

Feinberg isn’t the voice for all LGBT people any more than Ann Coulter is a spokesperson for me, another white female writer. But the story of oppression, uprising, triumph and hope is everyone’s story.

Onward!

Filed under Gender Mysteries, History

Jun 29, 2009

One small step

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The brief profile of astronaut Buzz Aldrin in the June 21 New York Times Sunday Magazine delighted me. He’s a hero of mine, and his dry sense of humor comes through in Deborah Solomon’s column.

When men first walked on the moon 40 years ago, it was big news at Camp Teela-Wooket in Roxbury, Vt. We were allowed to stay up and watch the one night of television we’d see during the month of July 1969. Most campers fell asleep before Neil Armstrong emerged for his walk; I was wide awake.

I was 10, away from home for the first time and for a month, wearing a uniform of stiffly starched light-blue cotton shorts, matching button-down camp shirt and precisely knotted red neck scarf. My mother, who suspected that even the Girl Scouts were a Fascist front, had allowed me to do this only because she was recovering from a near-death illness, and because I begged.

“But you’re sewing all those damn name-tags in your clothes,” she warned. I was probably 20 before I tossed out the last garment with that little blue-lettered KIMMIE MARLOWE tag sewn in with my ragged Frankensteinian stitches.

I fell in love with both camp and the space program that summer, and for some of the same reasons. Both transported me to a new place, the latter with nearly infinite possibilities.

If there has been any other event in my lifetime that’s appealed to such a broad swath of Americans, I don’t know what it is. Especially in the turmoil of the ’60s, it was rare for people in my world to agree on anything.

“If you were a boy, I’d shoot you in the knee myself to keep you from going to Vietnam,” my mother declared. My father wished our gutless enemies (any or all of them) would try to come ashore in New England where the flinty locals would set them straight. “They’d never get past the beach.”

Space travel, though, was fine all around. It was art, poetry, history, science, triumph (we kicked Russian butt!) and it united people in a way usually seen only during tragedies. There was a place out there without war or race riots or arguments over too-long hair and too-short skirts.

I’m surprised by the casual disregard for the space program now. Most of the time the launches and landings of our spacecraft are barely mentioned on the news. The idea of an orbiting workplace for scientists of both sexes and from many nations is no big deal.

It’s still a big deal for me. When I sit down at my computer in the morning, with its desktop background a NASA shot looking back at Earth, I get a tiny flash of what I felt in front of the TV that night the first big boot touched the powdery moon:

I am 10, my name-tags are securely in place; the heavens and the future are exactly the same thing.

Filed under Heroes, History, Science

Jun 21, 2009

President Obama in Cairo

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When I took Latin in high school in the 1970s, I stumbled through translating speeches written by brilliant men (and maybe some brilliant ghostwriting women) in Ancient Rome. I never got very adept at the process, but I did like the ringing brilliance that emerged once I (or the exasperated teacher) read them aloud in English.

President Obama’s Cairo speech will be studied centuries from now. The analysis of it so far has focused on the “something to make everyone mad/happy” angle, and that much is true. But more important are the courageous and intelligent stands taken on human rights, terrorism, women’s rights–and especially, the dangerous stereotypes of Muslim and Western peoples. It was a brilliant hour.

My message to the reluctant students of history who parse his transcript in the future: Hang in there, it will be worth it in the end. Oh, and if grades still exist, don’t panic if you get a C- in the course. Trust me, by the time you’re middle-aged, no one will know or care how bad you were at translating.

One of my favorite quotes from the speech:

“For human history has often been a record of nations and tribes — and, yes, religions — subjugating one another in pursuit of their own interests.
Yet in this new age, such attitudes are self-defeating.
Given our interdependence, any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail.
So whatever we think of the past, we must not be prisoners to it. Our problems must be dealt with through partnership; our progress must be shared.”

Filed under Government, Heroes, History, White House

Jun 5, 2009

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