October 2020

On a sunny and crisp Saturday morning last month, at a rest stop on New Jersey’s Garden State Parkway, there was a clandestine handoff of “the Holy Grail of broadcast journalism.” 

Casey Murrow, the son of legendary CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow presented the President of the National Press Club Michael Freedman with several of his father's personal possessions and agreed to loan the Club the historic BBC microphone used by Murrow for his CBS Radio broadcasts from London during World War II. 

See also: “This Is London: Murrow Broadcasts During the Blitz” by Bob Edwards in this issue 

“Modern broadcast journalism was literally invented on that microphone,” said Freedman, a former general manager of CBS Radio Network. “It is indeed the Holy Grail of the profession." 

Editor's Note: Bob Edwards is a Peabody Award-winning journalist formerly with NPR and Sirius/XM Radio. He is author of Edward R. Murrow and the Birth of Broadcast Journalism, among other books. 

By September of 1940, Nazi Germany had conquered most of Europe and was now focused on a planned invasion of Britain. Before it could launch Operation Sea Lion, Germany would need to control the English Channel—and to do that, it would have to have superior air power.   

Editor’s Note: The author was a longtime columnist and senior editor at Newsweek, and since has been a television commentator, documentary filmmaker and author of three New York Times bestsellers. Portions of this essay appear in his latest book, His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life.

Throughout Jimmy Carter’s long life, classmates, colleagues, and friends — even members of his own family — found him hard to read. The enigma deepened in the presidency.

Editor’s Note: Scott Dawson, founder of the Croatoan Archaeological Society, has been the driving force behind ten years of archaeological excavations on Hatteras Island that have led to a new understanding of what may have happened to the abandoned settlers. His recent book, The Lost Colony and Hatteras Island, reveals his team’s important discoveries. 

Given the widespread ignorance about American history, one would think it helpful for American Heritage to disseminate trusted information about our nation's past to as many people as possible, as we have for 70 years.

But social media companies such as Facebook and Google make it difficult and expensive to disseminate this important information, while, at the same time, promoting frivolous and unvetted writing by amateurs.

To the Editors:

I am an Eisenhower-Reagan historian and offer a different perspective on Susan Eisenhower's characterization in your recent October 2020 issue of American Heritage of Eisenhower as a "moderate."

After a spring 1962 GOP marketing-strategy meeting held at his Gettysburg farm, Eisenhower created a GOP publicity recording entitled, "Mr. Lincoln's Party Today." This recording was lost to history until I discovered it during my research for my book, Reagan's 1968 Dress Rehearsal: Ike, RFK, and Reagan's Emergence as a World Statesman.

After being introduced by brand-new Republican Ronald Reagan, former president Eisenhower explained his most deeply-held basic political philosophy:

Editor's Note: In one of our most popular features last issue, Susan Eisenhower points out that her grandfather, Dwight Eisenhower, appointed moderate, conservative, and progressive justices to the Supreme Court, believing the judicial body should represent all American people. Here are some of over 450 comments we received from readers in response. Don't forget to sign up to follow us on our Facebook page, where we constantly publish new material.

Culture War

But these appointments were before Roe and many other decisions that were way out of bounds and poorly supported by the Constitution.  Not a very good comparison. Now with a full blown culture war a lot of us would like to go back to the 60’s. The well has been poisoned.

-- Bob Shillingstad, Hayden, Idaho

Anti-racists in the White House

Editor's Note: Mark Walczynski is a retired professor at Illinois Valley Community College and the park historian for the Starved Rock Foundation, located at Starved Rock State Park in Utica, Illinois. His latest book is The History of Starved Rock (Cornell University Press, 2020), in which portions of this essay appear.