THE BROKEN SABER

During my years of growing up in a county-seat town in central Illinois, the memory of Lincoln and the Civil War was still a near thing.

First, there was Decoration Day, when the graves of departed soldiers were decked with flowers and little flags. A few surviving veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic shuffled along in the march to the cemetery. I remember, too, when I was quite small, eyeing the green binding with gold lettering on the spine of my father’s two-volume Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant. The “U.S.,” I surmised, was doubtless an honorific title bestowed upon the general by a grateful nation. Later an old gentleman lectured in the assembly hall of the Carrollton High School and told of being present in Ford’s Theatre the night Lincoln was assassinated. In a dramatic closing of his recital, he held up a discolored handkerchief. He said it was stained by the blood of the martyred President. One does remember an experience like that.

But most vivid of all is the recollection of my grandmother Kemper holding a broken cavalry saber and telling me of her two brothers, Napoleon Bonaparte and Thomas Jefferson Kemper, one fatally wounded in a skirmish on the Rapidan River, the other shot as he carried his brother from the scene. Even after fifty years her grief was unassuaged. The memory of her pain still stirs me, and I think of the words and hear the tune of the state song of Illinois: Grant and Logon and our tears, Illinois, Illinois,/Grant and Logon and our tears, Illinois.

The broken saber, with some six inches missing from the end of the blade, now hangs in my living room. 1 do not know whether it belonged to “Poly” or to “Tom.”

—Gerald Carson, Contributing Editor, American Heritage. An article by him appeared in the first issue of the magazine in 1954.

SHANE’S FATHER

Growing up as a small boy on a farm in Ridgefield, Connecticut, was for me a lonely experience. A brother four years older had his own world, in which there was no room for small fry. Living more than five miles from the village and three miles from my nearest schoolmates, I was isolated- except for Shane, a younger boy on the neighboring farm. In retrospect, I realized that he was as lonesome as I and that I was encouraged to come to Brook Farm, as it was called, to provide companionship for him.

I often crossed the back fields to his house, and we would spend many exciting hours together. He lived in a wonder world, with a large house to be explored when his parents were absent, an apple orchard with challenging tree trunks to climb, dark woods in which lurked unknown dangers, a mysterious pond, a great, friendly Irish wolfhound named Finn large enough to ride, and a galaxy of wonderful toys and illustrated books and magazines.

We discovered wild strawberries at the pond’s edge and learned about poison ivy the hard way, caught frogs and fish occasionally, and fought mock battles, taking turns being King Arthur or a favorite knight. I recall that one day when Shane’s parents were gone, or so we thought, we crept up the stairs to investigate the forbidden second floor, only to encounter his father sitting up in bed in his room, writing. Shane said that he did that all the time. His father’s glare was sufficient to make us hastily seek safety out of doors and far away. On another occasion, when investigating the attic, we discovered his grandfather’s trunk, filled with wondrous costumes and crowns and fabulous jewelry, all of which looked very real. Later, to my disappointment, I learned he had been an actor.

My visits did not always end in pleasure, of course. Several years younger than I, my friend invariably had to have his own way. If not, his loud screaming would bring his father, to me a fearsome figure. We were told he needed quiet and must never be disturbed under any circumstances. I remember seeing him on many occasions—tall and thin with black hair and mustache and a forbidding expression—and I never saw him smile. He was certain to appear when my young friend and I made too much noise, either engaged in one of our mock battles too near the house or chasing Finn, or when our friendship was about to end in mayhem. His sudden, silent materialization promptly resolved all conflicts, and we magically disappeared to undertake another adventure.

One day, engaged in the dangerous pursuit of destroying wasp nests, we ventured into the upper regions of the garage. In making our escape, we tumbled into a huge loft, and into serious trouble. There was his father sitting in a chair while another man was making a clay portrait bust that looked just like him. The bust tottered precariously from our onslaught but was saved in the nick of time.

It was not until many years later that I understood why my young friend’s father required so much quiet while writing in his room. My friend’s father was Eugene G. O’Neill.

—Silvio A. Bedini, Keeper of the Rare Books, Smithsonian Institution.

A GENIUS IN THE FAMILY

My grandfather had a ritual he performed with each of his grandchildren soon after they were born. He would strike a note on the piano and eagerly wait for us to sing it back to him. He was hoping, once again, to discover a prodigy in the family.

Grandpa played the violin in a village cabaret in prerevolutionary Russia, and music was his passion. He married my grandmother not because she was the village beauty but because she was the only woman he’d ever met who played the trumpet.

From the moment their first child, a boy, was born, my grandfather began scrutinizing him for signs of musical talent. He would twang a tuning fork close to the infant’s ear, watching for a reaction—and be rewarded with precocious gurgles of pleasure. At the age of two months the baby was listening raptly as his papa played him simple melodies on his violin. Soon the infant began to hum along—in perfect pitch. Convinced he had fathered a prodigy, Grandpa could barely wait to begin his son’s violin lessons, and he ordered a miniature fiddle. At six, dressed in short velvet pants and a ruffled white shirt, the boy gave his first concert at the music school in his native Vilna.

When the boy’s two sisters came along, they both were found to be musical—my mother later trained as a singer, and my aunt became a proficient pianist—but neither approached their brother’s genius.

At eight, because of his extraordinary talent, he was accepted as a student at the conservatory in what was then St. Petersburg, and despite the fact that Jews were prohibited from living hi big cities, his family was permitted to accompany him. By the tune he was twelve he was playing concerts all over Europe.

Ultimately it was because of the young prodigy’s growing fame and the demand for his appearance on an American concert stage that my grandfather’s family was allowed to leave Russia for the United States, never to return, soon after the revolution had begun. The boy was Jascha Heifetz.

Grandpa kept trying with his great-grandchildren too. He terrified my firstborn by creeping up on him to twang a tuning fork in his ear. All of us felt terrible about disappointing the man who wanted so fervently to discover another musical prodigy in the bosom of his family.

—Barbara Gelb, Eugene O’Neill scholar; author, most recently, of Varnished Brass: The Decade after Serpico.

HISTORIANS ARE HISTORY TOO

I’ve had quite a few brushes with history, courtesy of the historians who wrote it. Without them we none of us would have been the wiser, except for oral tradition, stories passed down by word of mouth.

Take the Civil War. I was fortunate enough as a boy to see those white-haired men who had fought in that long-ago war, riding in open cars on the way to the cemetery on Decoration Day. Yet I suspect that it was not my glimpse of them that was a brush with history, but knowing and reading the likes of Bruce Catton and Allan Nevins, who somehow captured the sum of their stories and put them together in such a way that I began to understand the war of which those old men were a part.

—Richard M. Ketchum, author, most recently, of The Borrowed Years.

DE GAULLE EXPLAINED

Long-established institutions tend to place themselves at the center of world history. This can charm or exasperate, according to your own involvement with the institution. Wartime memories of Oriel College, Oxford, are a case in point for me.

I was there for a year and a half, from the fall of 1940 to the spring of 1942, trying to read history while also preparing to be a soldier. In those crimped conditions it was hard to imagine what peacetime college life could be like. But I was gratified, indeed awed, to find myself a member of a foundation in company with the likes of Sir Walter Raleigh, Matthew Arnold, and Arnold’s poet friend Arthur Hugh Clough. I first heard of this last figure one night in the blacked-out porter’s lodge, where a little crowd had gathered around a wireless set to hear a broadcast by Winston Churchill. We were quietly attentive until the prime minister began to quote poetry. “Say not the shtruggle naught availeth. … ” A shy, elderly don shouted out, with extraordinary pride and glee: “Clough! Arthur Hugh Clough! Oriel man!”

At about the same time, General de Gaulle came to dinner in the college hall. All I now remember of that towering, cartoonlike presence was his uniform, his heroic nose, and the severity with which he responded to some undergraduate’s graceful little speech, in good French, with a few lapidary phrases in no doubt even better French. Long afterward an Oriel contemporary reminded me of the occasion. “That Oxford visit,” he remarked with calm certainty, “changed the subsequent course of the war.” How? I inquired. “Well, of course, it was hushed up. The thing is, somebody stole the general’s kepi—well, took it for a souvenir. It was terribly hard for him to find another. De Gaulle felt it was an insult. From that moment on he was anti-British, which also meant anti-American. Hence all the trouble the Allies had with him later on.”

I observed that the story did not do much credit to Oriel hospitality.

“Quite,” said my friend. “Of course, it couldn’t have been anyone from the college who stole the hat—probably some nearby outsider, from Merton or Christ Church. Still, it was historic, and it did happen in Oriel!”

—Marcus Cunliffe, University Professor, George Washington University.

CHURCHILL WEEPS

It was V-E Day, 1945. By common consent the Office of Strategic Services staff in London was taking the day off, but somehow the whole occasion seemed anticlimactic. We recalled those flickering newsreels of Armistice Day in 1918 and wondered where those frenzied mobs were now. Piccadilly Circus was crowded but tame. At Buckingham Palace the king and queen—two tiny specks—dutifully waved from a balcony, and we dutifully waved back.

We wandered down Birdcage Walk to Whitehall and Parliament. It was growing dark now, but I was aware of a group of musicians apparently waiting for something. Suddenly, onto a floodlit balcony directly overhead strode Winston Churchill, complete with cigar. A great shout went up, and in a few seconds the whole street was packed with people. When the din had died down, Churchill briefly assured the crowd, “This is your victory,” and made his famous V sign. The effect shattered one of my pet theories. I have always held that no song falls as flat as “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” whether at a birthday, wedding, or political rally. Somehow it never goes over and always trails off in awkward embarrassment. I now know that it can succeed perfectly in certain rare circumstances—namely, if it is sung by thirty thousand people, accompanied by a ninety-piece band, on V-E Night, to a triumphant war leader, standing on the floodlit balcony of a flag-draped building. Under these conditions it can even move a crowd, including me and Winston Churchill, to tears.

—Walter Lord, historian and author, most recently, of Night Lives On.

ASLEEP AT THE CREATION: I

I was a young war bride in the summer of 1945. A slap-happy one, recently wed to my college sweetheart, a football star from Hardin-Simmons University, for whom I had waited while he flew twenty-five dangerous missions over Europe as a B-17 bombardier. That had taken at least a year; now he was back, we’d had our war wedding, and we were stationed at a base in Alamogordo, New Mexico. He was busy every day from dawn to sunset, training crews in the new B-29 bombers for the invasion of Japan. I worked all day as a secretary in something mysterious called air inspection. My life consisted of shopping for privileged goods in the PX, flirting with handsome grounded officers who couldn’t fly for one reason or another, and meeting my captain at night in the officers’ club for dinner and too many drinks. Sometimes we would go out to the White Sands at night, to bury bottles of beer deep in the ice-cold gypsum sand and sit on the dunes, watching the moon rise. It was a romantic, thrilling, mindless time. My husband wanted to forget the horrible things he’d experienced in the 8th Air Force. He never talked about his memories. He made lots of cynical wisecracks, such as “The last time I saw Paris, the sky was full of flak.” The truth was he had survived where others in his crews had not. He never mentioned Japan, but I knew he was dreading it.

I was too young, silly, and addlebrained to take anything—even his possible death—seriously. To me, Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo were cartoon characters who would be easily vanquished by American right and might in the end. My life was fun and games: getting gasoline coupons and keeping up with all the latest swing music, plus playing Myrna Loy in real life, without too much success.

In the predawn of July 16 a shattering blast literally blew us out of bed in the little frame house we were sharing with an Air Force officer named Moskowitz and his glamorous former Copacabana showgirl wife. (The house had been divided into two apartments for the housing shortage.) We all ran outside in our night clothes but couldn’t see what had happened. Later the Air Force issued a formal statement that an ammunition dump had exploded. We thought no more about it but learned that the blast had shattered windows eighty miles away in El Paso.

Three weeks later, on August 6, all was revealed. We had been present, asleep, in fact, at the creation. The first atomic bomb had been exploded in the Los Alamos desert near Alamogordo. The Manhattan Project, which none of us knew existed at the time, had reached fruition. My husband said musingly, “Remember, I told you there was something out there in the twelvemile area of the White Sands desert that they forbade us to fly over when we were training. It must have been the site of the bomb. I wondered what could be in that danged desert that was a secret.”

Now President Truman had ordered that one of the only two other atomic bombs in existence be dropped on Hiroshima, and in that terrible moment of epic tragedy we only knew it was good news. It meant my husband and thousands like him would not have to chance death in the invasion of Japan. We had never heard of John Hersey, radiation sickness, the apocalypse; but it was the end of innocence, and there was no turning back. We simply celebrated the end of the war.

Years later I went back to Alamogordo, a dusty, unassuming little town where only the bowling alley and the post office seemed to matter. I was surprised to find that the residents had proudly posted on the outskirts of town a sign reading ALAMOGORDO: HOME OF THE ATOM BOMB. By then I had learned that this was a dubious distinction. I was already living through what Margaret Mead came to call “the real Generation Gap.” She said it consisted of those born before and after the invention of the Bomb. She was right, of course.

—Liz Smith, columnist, New York Daily News.

ASLEEP AT THE CREATION: II

I was a GI in Germany, a three-and-a-half-year veteran, when I was told we had exploded an atom bomb in Japan. I said, “So what?” I was waiting to be shipped to Japan and do another three years. My friend explained, “The war is over; you won’t have to go to Japan.”

Despite a year in college, I had never heard of the atom. Was it good news or bad news?

—Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather.

TRUMAN RATES FDR

Late one night in 1970 in Independence, Missouri, I was working in the Harry S. Truman Library, helping Margaret Truman gather research material for her biography of her father. We had lunch and dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Truman every day, and after two weeks I had gotten to know them pretty well.

That night, after dinner, Mr. Truman began talking about the importance of a strong Presidency. He ticked off the Presidents he admired—Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR. “What did you think of Roosevelt personally?” I asked.

Mr. Truman paused. Then, weighing every word, he said: “Inside he was totally cold. He didn’t give a damn for you or me or anyone else in the entire world, as far as I could tell. But he was a great President. He brought this country into the twentieth century.”

I felt a swish—even a swat—of history’s wings.

—Thomas Fleming, novelist and historian; author, most recently, of Time and Tide.

JOE MCCARTHY VISITS BILL BUCKLEY

It was Labor Day 1952, and Sen. Joe McCarthy had come up to Stamford, Connecticut, to have lunch with me and my wife and with Brent Bozell and his wife (my sister). Bozell and I were doing research for our book on McCarthy.

During lunch the phone rang for him. He took the call and came back to the table, obviously concerned. “What’s the matter, Joe?”

“Well, that was the head of the Republican party in Massachusetts. He wants me to go to Boston and give a speech for Cabot Lodge. Trouble is, that’s hard to do. Joe Kennedy has always been on my side, and he contributed five thousand dollars to my own reelection campaign. If I go to Boston, Jack Kennedy will lose to Cabot Lodge, no doubt about it. That’s why they want me.”

We resumed lunch. And about fifteen minutes later McCarthy rose, excused himself, went to the phone, and was back in about five minutes, smiling broadly.

“Well, I took care of that one all right! I told his manager, ‘Sure, I’ll give a speech for Cabot. But he’ll have to ask me to do it.’” Big laugh. “Cabot Lodge would never ask me publicly. He’d lose the Harvard vote.”

And so John F. Kennedy beat (narrowly) Henry Cabot Lodge for the Senate and, in due course, became President.

—William F. Buckley, Jr., Editor in Chief, National Review; author, most recently, of On the Firing Line.

A COOL HAND

As a young bachelor in New York in the years immediately following World War II, I was fortunate to be frequently an “extra man” at the small dinner parties of Judge and Mrs. Learned Hand in their house on Sixty-fifth Street (later the residence- speaking of brushes with history—of Richard Nixon). Judge Hand was a great man, the greatest it has ever been my privilege to know, and I hung on his beautifully articulated phrases. One night when I arrived, always the first, I found him reading a letter from Bernard Berenson, his friend of many decades, with whom he maintained a regular correspondence.

“BB wants to know why I always subscribe my letters to him in such hyperbolic terms as ‘Your devoted pupil’ or ‘Your disciple in art’ or Tour constant admirer.’” The judge put away the letter and glanced at me with his great, bushy eyebrows raised. “He asks why I never sign myself simply ‘Affectionately yours.’”

I paused, but I knew I had my cue. “Well, sir, why don’t you?”

“Because I don’t like him!”

Nor did he ever joke in such matters.

—Louis Auchincloss, lawyer and author, most recently, of The Vanderbilt Era.

CANCELING THE POET

In 1952, my junior year at Wellesley, it was common knowledge among English majors that an assignment to interview the visiting poet was a reward for excellence. Only you wouldn’t have known it from the way my poetry professor, Roberta Grahame, presented it to me. “Remain after class,” she instructed, and later left me standing before her desk for a full five minutes while she read a student’s poem.

Although I knew nothing of Miss Grahame’s background, I perceived her to be one of a breed: a New England spinster educator—careful, aloof, impassive. She wore the requisite tweeds and no makeup and had written a slim volume of poetry, entitled Last Bell at Midcentury.

She told me to report to her office at six the following evening and we’d go together. “I assure you, you’ll find it interesting. Extremely interesting,” she remarked cryptically.

When I arrived at the appointed hour, Miss Roberta Grahame sat just as I had left her, but this evening she was crying, her face blotchy, her eyes streaming with tears. When she saw me, she blew her nose vigorously in a Kleenex and announced, “We’re not going. They’ve canceled. They’ve sent him away.”

“But why?” 1 blurted out.

Miss Grahame shrugged; her answers were choked and fragmented. “I’m not certain of the details. There was a party. Some of our people were there. He was inebriated. He’s still young—only in his thirties. He touched a breast. Who knows?” She paused and then continued but in a voice I’d never heard before, one suffused with emotion. “They’re fools. They don’t know what they’re doing. The man’s a genius!”

I was too taken aback, too abashed by her unexpected passion and distress, to say anything appropriate. “Maybe they’ll let him come back later. Maybe next year,” I said.

But by the next year Dylan Thomas was dead.

—Barbara Goldsmith, author, most recently, of Johnson vs. Johnson.

LUNCH WITH LBJ

As I consider the generally lackluster early months of the Bush administration, I wonder how much of the impression is due to the increasingly regimented relationship between the Oval Office and the press. Is it the fact that all images are combed and primped primarily for the TV cameras, or is it that the personalities themselves have been combed and primped and supplied with brush and blush?

When I consider by contrast my impression of Lyndon Baines Johnson during his early, uneasy months in office, I must conclude that this was not a man who could be camouflaged or regimented.

First, he wanted to show that he belonged in the White House. Shortly after taking office, he invited half a dozen editors of the biggest magazines (I was editing McCall’s at the time) to have lunch with him in his small private dining room in the White House so that he could explain his plans for pushing through all the great social changes that he figured JFK failed on.

There was no doubt that the style of the White House had changed. No fine French wine was chilling at the table. No place cards signaled our importance. LBJ greeted us each with a heavy arm around the shoulders. “Now you all sit down and let me tell you how this government’s going to work.” And he did, not pausing for any questions and somehow not pausing even for the business of eating. The food came on platters and in big bowls and was intended to be filling. The President heaped up his plate and went on talking, and I’m not sure that he even paused to notice what the food was. It was ham and the rest of the menu that I’d grown up on. So there was no call to talk about the food.

As unlikely as it seemed at the time, I think that almost everything the man talked about got done. And it got done not because the programs were just and needed but because of the man who loomed and leaned at us from the head of the table. He wheedled and cajoled and entertained us with jackrabbit metaphors. He made his point on running the government more efficiently by jumping up to show how he had installed cutoff switches in the closets so that the lights didn’t burn endlessly and waste electricity. I thought of my father. In LBJ’s face and manner were all the poverty and dust of a Texas childhood, all the need to prove that he belonged, all the painful need to be loved, all the desperate ambition unequaled possibly by any other man in that office.

And then came the moment that I remember most vividly. While the rest of us were still being served, the waiter set down a huge pepper mill at the President’s plate. LBJ swooped it up and pushed a button on the side- a battery-powered pepper mill! The machine crunched and groaned and spewed pepper all over the President’s plate; then he set it back down without any gesture of sharing. After all, this was the President’s table. This was the President’s pepper mill. And this was the President.

—John Mack Carter, Editor in Chief, Good Housekeeping.

LBJ GOES TO WAR

During the summers of 1965 and 1966, when I was a student in high school, I worked for several months as a messenger in the White House. I brushed up against a good deal of trivia masquerading as history, such as the extraordinarily elaborate preparations for Luci Johnson’s wedding. But I also attended an event that I knew, even then, was genuinely momentous. I understood that partly because this was one of the only presidential speeches during my months in the White House to take place in the East Room and because there was an unusually large crowd of reporters, television technicians, and White House minions. Lyndon Johnson was announcing his decision to send American ground troops into Vietnam.

We now know, of course, that the United States had been sending troops into combat in Vietnam for many months already at that point. In a sense Johnson was simply acknowledging reality. But he was also signaling a major American escalation of the ground war, and the speech made me think—for the first time—that Vietnam might soon have a direct effect on my own life and on the lives of my contemporaries. Johnson, who usually spoke woodenly and even somewhat distractedly in formal settings, was making a special effort to appear forceful and presidential. But the speech was grim and curiously plaintive, peppered with mawkish readings of letters from soldiers and filled with references to the incomprehension with which he knew much of the public viewed this war. It was the summer of 1965, eight months after his remarkable landslide victory and at the zenith of the Great Society. But at that moment Lyndon Johnson looked, to me at least, like a defeated man.

—Alan Brinkley, historian and author, most recently, of Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin and the Great Depression; Contributing Editor, American Heritage.

THE ASSASSINATION YEAR

In the spring of 1968 I covered Eugene McCarthy for a short period during his remarkable campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, which led to both President Johnson’s withdrawal as a candidate and Bobby Kennedy’s decision to be one. Shana Alexander, my close friend and colleague at Life, who has always had an uncanny instinct for spotting the real story, was sticking to Clean Gene like glue and writing about him frequently. A few weeks after Kennedy’s assassination an exhausted McCarthy needed a place to hide out and reinvigorate himself for the Democratic convention. I suggested to Shana my family place in Maine, and she passed on the invitation to Gene. That’s how little old Hancock Point, a finger of land in French- man Bay pointing across the water at Mount Desert, got a famous visitor early that July.

The Secret Service set up a round-the-clock watch, pitching a tent near McCarthy’s beach cottage as its headquarters. Even though it was amusing having law enforcement people behind every bush, Martin Luther King’s assassination in April followed by Kennedy’s in June made protection, especially for a candidate, no laughing matter. My big family loved Gene, and for several days we all played together on beaches and boats. Once on a picnic we anchored our lobster boat in a cove on the far side of a high-cliffed island, completely cutting off radio communications with the mainland. I can still see the ashen face of the Secret Service man who was accompanying us as he tried desperately to make contact.

My most vivid memory of the senator’s visit happened one night as we all were gathering for dinner. From the dusk outside, my wife’s mother spotted Gene silhouetted in the brightly lit dining-room window. Making her hand into a pistol, she took aim and said, “Row! I could knock him off so easily!” From the bushes at her side came a real pistol and a voice that contradicted her. “Oh, no, you couldn’t,” it told us in no uncertain tone. For me that voice and the pistol from the bush are still a stark reminder of that year, of King and Kennedy, and all the rest who were to come as we stepped into a new age of senseless violence, terrorism, and assassination from which we have not been able to escape.

—Philip Kunhardt, formerly Managing Editor of Life.

WHAT COULD NEVER CHANGE, CHANGED

My brush with history was growing up in the South at the time of the civil rights movement. It was history as a force that I experienced, not history as a person or an event. I had absolutely no contact with any of the public events of the movement. I wasn’t even aware at the time that there were sit-ins and marches, and the organized white resistance of the Citizens’ Councils and the Ku Klux Klan was known in my world (the doctor-lawyer-businessman class in a big Southern city) only through vague rumors. I don’t know how I knew that some kind of sweeping change in race relations was under consideration, mostly by mysterious outsiders; I just knew it, and so did all my friends.

The issue of integration was more or less continually under discussion throughout my childhood. Almost everybody I knew was against it. The spectrum of whites that I was exposed to ran from hard men who stockpiled guns to protect themselves from the organized black revolt they knew was coming, to purveyors of learned historical and biblical proofs of black inferiority, to people who weren’t haters but simply found the idea of contact on equal ground between the races unimaginable, at once comic and horrifying, to genteel, burdened paternalists, to a handful of (usually Northern-born) outright integrationists, like my mother.

Then, quite suddenly, the prevailing white attitude changed. It happened later than you’d expect, around 1969 or 1970. All prejudice certainly did not disappear, but, in an instant it seemed, nobody believed in a legally enshrined racial caste system anymore. The lasting effect of this on me, and on other Southern white liberals, was to make us optimistic about human nature; it’s just the opposite of the way that people who grew up in Europe in the thirties look at the world. What could never change, because it was the rock on which a whole society rested, did change. I’ll always believe the same could happen with other deeply ingrained wrongs.

—Nicholas Lemann, national correspondent for the Atlantic; currently writing a book on America’s underclass.

KERENSKY: I

As an undergraduate student at Stanford University in the early 1960s, I frequently saw on campus the stooped, shuffling figure of Aleksandr Kerensky, who had briefly headed the Provisional Government of Russia, which was overthrown in the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917. Kerensky was then working on his memoirs while in residence at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, which houses an outstanding collection of materials related to the Russian Revolution.

When I traveled to the Soviet Union with a student group in the spring of 1961, all the Russians to whom I mentioned seeing Kerensky insisted that I was mistaken. He was long dead, they explained—and he was, indeed, as dead to Soviet historical memory as were the political figures who had been crudely chiseled out of the mosaics that adorned various Moscow subway stations.

On returning to the Stanford campus in the summer of 1961, I found myself working at a campus job serving food in the cafeteria line at the faculty club. One day Kerensky appeared in the line, methodically pushing his tray along and selecting his lunch. I nudged the student working next to me and told him who the historical figure who was approaching us was. As it happened, my coworker was then enrolled in a course in Russian history and determined on the spot that he must conduct an interview with Kerensky.

Abandoning his place behind the mashed potatoes, he followed Kerensky into the dining room. No less derelict in the line of duty, I forsook the cubed carrots and followed. No sooner had the old gentleman settled laboriously into his chair than his white-jacketed interrogator loomed closely above him. Without ceremony or even introduction, he put the question to a startled Kerensky: “Mr. Kerensky, to what do you attribute the downfall of the Provisional Government in 1917?” Kerensky ended the interview with a glance at his plate and a single word: “Myself.”

—David M. Kennedy, professor of history, Stanford University.

MORNING IN MOSCOW

In June 1986 I was a foreign observer at the Eighth Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers in Moscow. I had visited the Soviet Union several times before, mostly to lecture on behalf of the U.S. State Department, and when the invitation came, I was of two minds about accepting it. My experience of Soviet functions had ranged from boring to terminally depressing: officials making self-congratulatory speeches, “voting” unanimously to elect hand-picked candidates, and a general feeling for the foreigner of being watched all the time. What persuaded me to go was that I was turning over in my mind the possibility of writing what turned out to be my novel Chernobyl, and it seemed a good chance to do some preliminary research.

The first day of the congress was just as predictable and lackluster as I had expected. The second day, though, was different. One after another, Soviet writers got up and spoke out on such questions as censorship, the refusal to publish writers like Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, the ways in which state projects were destroying the environment, corruption, and fraud in union elections—saying all the things that, now and then, a few Soviet citizens might have dared to whisper in private, behind their hands, but were now saying out loud and in public. I had never encountered anything like it. My translator had been urging me to leave early to attend an opera performance at the Bolshoi, but I couldn’t tear myself away—nor, it turned out after a while, could she, because she was as astonished at what was going on as I was. The whole congress came to a head when it was time to elect the new officers of the union. Then, for almost the first time in any union congress in the USSR, the election became a real contest, and when the votes were counted, the writers had deposed many of the old bureaucrats and replaced them with reformers.

I had never heard the words perestroika and glasnost until then, and this was one of the first times that either concept was put into practice. They both have gone much farther since, but that was where, for many people, they began.

—Frederik Pohl, winner of the Nebula and Hugo awards for science fiction; author, most recently, of Chernobyl.

THE TALL JAPANESE

The occasion was the Japan Society’s annual dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel a few years ago, and the guest of honor was the prime minister of Japan. Titans of industry attend this dinner; the ballroom was filled with CEOs from Fortune 500 companies and their wives. In the half-dark, as the spotlight swept the three-tier dais, diamonds and gold studs twinkled in candlelight.

The place was full of Secret Service agents from Washington and security men from Tokyo, all in dinner jackets. The guards from Tokyo are tall; if Nippon ever decides to challenge the Boston Celtics, these lean, rangy Japanese could try out for the team.

I was standing at one side of the room, waiting to be called to a seat on the dais, and I began talking with one of the Japanese guards.

I said, “You don’t often see this many powerful people in one room in America.” He asked me, in accented English, to explain. I spoke of the importance of our relations with Japan and said an invitation to dine with its prime minister, even in a crowded ballroom, was a social distinction. We stood in the shadows talking until my name was called, and I left him to walk up onstage and be introduced.

The next event was the introduction of the prime minister. I turned to watch, and there in the spotlight was my Japanese acquaintance, who wasn’t a security guard at all. He was Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone.

He paused and, with a smile, gave me a nod of recognition, a little bow.

The man next to me said, “I didn’t know you knew him.”

I said, “You meet all kinds of people in my line of work.”

—John Chancellor, Senior Commentator, NBC News.