Steve Goddard's History Wire

Happy Days are Here Again

Did you know that Ted Williams once managed the Washington Senators? On the day of the announcement that the nation's capital will again be home to major league baseball, MLB.COM trots out a pictorial archive of rich and half-forgotten memories.

Included among the photos are such well-known Washington Senators as Walter Johnson, Bucky Harris, who led the team to its only World Series victory; Joe Cronin, and Harmon Killebrew. Senators' President Clark Griffith is pictured with a lapful of electric light bulbs on the day in 1943 when he secured night games so that busy bureaucrats wouldn't have to play hooky during workdays. Also worth a look is a gallery of presidential first pitches from Taft to Nixon.

Down to the Wire

The American baseball season is going down to the wire in one of its closest and most suspenseful finishes in years, with pitched battles in the American League East and West, the National League West and the NL and AL wild card races. Photo-finishes like these make one think of such heraldic names as Bucky Dent and Bobby Thomson.

Baseball has been the mother lode from which some of our finest writers have drawn inspiration. Who can forget the stirring prose of A.J. Liebling, John Updike, Red Smith and Bart Giamatti? But in History Wire's opinion, they all pale when compared to the singular eloquence of Russ Hodges on Oct. 3, 1951 in calling the play by which Bobby Thomson's homerun defeated the Brooklyn Dodgers. His words send chills up baseball fans' spines even today because they were all anyone could say:

"The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!"

To tap into the memory, read and listen to the moment through the archives of Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, N.Y.

All That Jazz

Jazz lovers of a certain age recall the golden age of the Newport (R.I.) Jazz Festival, celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. Its legendary creator George Wein has created a three-CD compilation of Newport's best, entitled Happy Birthday Newport -- 50 Swinging Years.

Fred Kaplan of Slate says the title is a bit of a misnomer because a disproportionate share of the tracks are from the early years, a fact which will make it even more of a treasure trove for old timers:

"The tracks are arranged by musical style. Disc 1 features the old-timers (Louis Armstrong, Eddie Condon, Willie "The Lion" Smith, Duke Ellington, Count Basie). Disc 2 emphasizes those who straddled the divide between '30s swing and '40s bebop (Buck Clayton, Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Roy Eldridge, as well as the singers: Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington, and Billie Holiday). Disc 3 highlights the modernists (Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Sarah Vaughan, John Coltrane)."

And for a bonus, Slate invites you to listen to 9 selections, from The Sunny Side of the Street to My Favorite things.

All in the Family

Remember Billy Carter and Donald Nixon, presidential brothers who made their brothers....well, not proud. It's now revealed that Democratic Veep choice John Edwards has such a brother in his own family. In fact, Wesley Blake Edwards, John's kid brother, happens to be going to trial today in Colorado on a 10-year-old charge of driving under the influence.

The Los Angeles Times, in a commentary by Dalton Conley, examines the burdens and benefits (yes, there are some) for a high-profile candidate to have a problem sibling, using lessons from recent presidential history. Conley should know; he wrote the book The Pecking Order: Why Some Siblings Succeed and Why.

Benediction's the Real Deal

"May the Lord bless you and keep you; may the Lord cause his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; may the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and grant you peace." Those raised in the Christian or Jewish faiths can repeat these words like a mantra, their benediction a healing balm.

In 1979, archaeologists uncovered two silver amulets containing these words in a tomb outside Jerusalem and dated them to the late seventh or early sixth centuries B.C., some 400 years prior to the Dead Sea Scrolls. As such, it would constitute the earliest biblical passage ever found by archaeologists. But because of the age of the artifacts and the difficulty of reading them, the thesis that they indeed contained what is known as the Priestly Benediction was attacked by critics as being from a much later age, and a quarter-century war of words ensued.

Now, as The New York Times science writer John Noble Wilford reports, high technology has contributed photographic and computer imaging tools not available in 1979 to do a finer analysis of the words on the silver:

"The words still do not exactly leap off the silver. But the researchers said they could finally be "read fully and analyzed with far greater precision," and that they were indeed the earliest. In a scholarly report published this month, the research team concluded that the improved reading of the inscriptions confirmed their greater antiquity. The script, the team wrote, is indeed from the period just before the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C. by Nebuchadnezzar and the subsequent exile of Israelites in Babylonia."

Hispanic Alert!

Whether you're a Latino seeking to recapture your roots or an Anglo trying to learn about what is fast becoming a dominant culture in American life, the History Channel has a jam-packed program schedule in store during Hispanic Heritage Month, which happens to be September, but its programs continue into mid-October.

From Fidel Castro to Pancho Villa, from Pablo Picasso to Ponce de Leon, you have a video feast to go with the salsa, chips and sangria you provide. And throw in biographies of Gloria Estefan and Eva Peron to boot.

A New Washington Attraction

Yes it's true that the opening of the National Museum of the American Indian on the Washington Mall underscores the fact that those who were on America's shores first are honored last. But as Philip Jenkins of The Boston Globe notes, the past century has shown a tremendous change in the way native Americans are viewed by the public. The newly-opened museum features not skulls and arrowheads, for example, but a living culture, including the ability of native peoples to hold actual ceremonies in the facility itself. It wasn't always so, as Jenkins recounts:

"Until the early years of the 20th century, confidence in American expansion left little place for the Indians, who were seen as a vanishing people. In 1896, travel writer Julian Ralph chillingly described Indians as "a dead but unburied race." Either Indians would adapt to white ways and survive physically, or they would maintain their stubborn heathen customs and die out. Museums of the period presented Indians as living fossils of a bygone world. This was the age in which America's great museums collected tens of thousands of Native skeletons, in order to preserve some material remains of people believed to be on the verge of extinction. When a lone Yahi Indian was discovered wandering in the northern Sierras in 1911, he was billed as "the last of his tribe," dubbed "Ishi" ("man" in Yahi), and sent to live in a San Francisco anthropology museum, where he died of tuberculosis five years later."

Pentagon Papers Redux

H.R. Haldeman, President Nixon's chief of staff, got a chill one June morning in 1971, in reading on newspaper front pages of the publication of the Pentagon Papers. And, says their author, Daniel Ellsberg, in a New York Times op-ed, that chill went way beyond the effect their publication would have on the nation's Vietnam policy; it drove to the core of the President's relationship with the nation. Ellsberg recalls Haldeman's reaction:

"Rumsfeld was making this point this morning,'' Haldeman says. "To the ordinary guy, all this is a bunch of gobbledygook. But out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing: you can't trust the government; you can't believe what they say, and you can't rely on their judgment. And the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because it shows that people do things the president wants to do even though it's wrong, and the president can be wrong."

Thirty-three years later, the same Rumsfeld is the embattled Defense Secretary, trying to plug leaks in his policies in post-war Irag. Ellsberg examines the parallels between him and Vietnam era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and how the lessons about trust that the Pentagon Papers taught have to be re-learned by each new generation:

"Like Robert McNamara, under whom I served, Mr. Rumsfeld appears to inspire great loyalty among his aides. As the scandal at Abu Ghraib shows, however, there are more important principles. Mr. Rumsfeld might not have seen the damning photographs and the report of Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba as soon as he did - just as he would never have seen the Pentagon Papers 33 years ago - if some anonymous people in his own department had not bypassed the chain of command and disclosed them, without authorization, to the news media. And without public awareness of the scandal, reforms would be less likely."

It's the Real Thing

Think globalization is a 21st century concept? Time Magazine, albeit thumping its chest, reminds us it was alive and well during the mid-20th century, as it touts its oft-copied 1954 cover, in which the globe appears to sip a classic Coke from the hand of a Coca-Cola purveyor:

"A cold summer in Europe and competition at home have been blamed for a bad run at COCA-COLA. In 1950, though, it was the king of soft drinks and a ubiquitous ambassador for the U.S. across the globe. In Brazil, some misguided people vow that it increases sexual prowess; others are under the delusion that it makes a man impotent ... Graceful gondolas carry it along the narrow canals of Venice, and sturdy, resigned burros tote it into the dusty Mexican hills. Bright red signs proclaim its worth beneath the blank, unastonished eyes of the great Sphinx."

Yes, you too, can own the iconic symbol of rising American economic might.

The Times They Have Changed

OK, we try to stay clear of anecdotes, but hey: in 1959, as a freshman at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, the thrifty college had drained its Winter Carnival coffers by the time we bought coffee and donuts. What would we ever do for entertainment? All right, someone said, "I know this girl singer down in Boston that I can get for $150, and she'll even pay her transportation. How bad could she be?" But then Joan Baez's crystalline sorprano set us all back on our heels. So when we saw her on our black and white TV screens four years later, teaming with another "Who?" named Bob Dylan at what has been known since as the Martin Luther King speech on the Washington mall in August, 1963, we had the first of many "where were you moments?" Three months later, we'd have another one....

Bob Dylan's long-awaited memoir, the Bob Dylan Chronicles, has arrived, folks, curiously elbowing its way through the here-look-at-me Bush/Kerry screeds. As Newsweek's cover promises, "Bob Dylan Opens Up." If so, it's about time. Newsweek's David Gates picks up, seamlessly, from where he left off with his last interview with Dylan in 1997:

"Dylan, 63, looks younger and healthier than he did when I spoke with him in 1997, the year his spooky, world-weary album "Time Out of Mind" re-established him as a vital contemporary—after what he claims was a quarter century of artistic "downward spiral"—and introduced him to a new generation of listeners. Back then, he was just recovering from a near-fatal infection of the tissues around his heart. Now, sitting at a small table with a view of the parking lot, sad little suburban trees and a lowering sky, he seems like a wiry kid eager to get outdoors—but he's also perfectly happy, as before, to shoot the breeze about music. "When I was talking to you earlier," he begins—as if it had been a couple of hours ago, rather than seven years. He gives a shout-out to Elvis Costello ("'Everyday I Write the Book'—I just did that") and to Carole King: "'You've Got a Friend' on some level means more to me than a lot of my songs do." He testifies to his admiration for Bing Crosby and for Willie Nelson, his informed skepticism about hip-hop."