THEN AND NOW America First was a provocative movement in 1940 and it remains controversial eighty years later. America First as advocated in 1940 was incompatible with genuine American exceptionalism. Likewise, the 2020 version of America First is often confused with the original movement. But it is different. Therefore, let …
NATION OVER PARTY STATESMANSHIP Unlike Wendell Willkie, the 1940 Republican presidential candidate, many modern politicians and media appear institutionally incapable of objective reasoning. However, Willkie’s story proves that there was a time when bipartisan statesmanship was possible in Washington. Furthermore, we misunderstand the isolationist opposition to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s …
AMERICA GOES NUCLEAR At 5:29 a.m. Mountain War Time on July 16, 1945, the United States detonated the first nuclear weapon, an atomic device code named Trinity, in the Jornada del Muerto desert about thirty-five miles southeast of Socorro, New Mexico, on the Army Air Forces’ Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery …
RESOLVE AND RESTRAINT We remember Korea as an example of American resolve and restraint. Firstly, seventy years ago, in January 1950, U. S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson implied that the Korean Peninsula lay outside the defense perimeter of the United States. Then, on Sunday July 25, 1950, at 4:00 …
DEFEATING THE INVISIBLE ENEMY PANDEMIC CHALLENGES COVID-19 is certainly not America’s original invisible enemy. The deadly 1918-20 Spanish Flu pandemic certainly comes to mind. The nation that defeated infantile paralysis in the 1950s (and other childhood afflictions) will conquer our current challenge. Although an American president must rely upon medical …
HOW GLENN MILLER’S MUSIC DEFINED A GENERATION “Moonlight Serenade” is my essay appearing in the November 2019 edition of Smithsonian Magazine. It honors Glenn Miller and his famous recording. Moreover, it appears on the seventy-fifth anniversary of his disappearance. Here is a link to my Smithsonian essay, which also appears …