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Ordinary Horrors

A Small Error in Robert Caro's The Passage of Power

5/18/2012

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UPDATE below....

I found an error in Robert Caro’s The Passage of Power.

It’s in the section on JFK’s fatal trip to Texas in November, 1963. On page 300, Caro states, “The President was set to land at San Antonio’s Bergstrom Air Force Base at 1:30 on Thursday afternoon.” Then he says, “…the Johnsons left the ranch in their Beechcraft Bonanza for the short flight to Bergstrom, where they would greet the President….” The following paragraph says, “The President’s arrival at Bergstrom brought with it more trouble for Lyndon Johnson….” Then, on page 301, Caro describes Kennedy aide Ken O’Donnell being angry about John Connally and the Texas political situation and exiting Air Force One and “…[coming] down onto the Bergstrom tarmac….”

Okay. Bergstrom Air Force was in Austin, not San Antonio. (Bergstrom closed in 1993, was repurposed, and is now the site of Austin Bergstrom International Airport).

When I read this I thought Caro might have gotten the city wrong, that he might be saying that Kennedy landed at Bergstrom in Austin, then drove to San Antonio for his visit to the medical center and the motorcade, etc. Even though that would be totally impractical. But Caro says the motorcade to the hospital was 16 miles. Driving from Bergstrom would be 90 or so miles.

So I did a bit of poking around and found a map of the Kennedy visit to San Antonio on November 21, 1963.



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Kennedy's San Antonio Motorcade (photo from Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library)
You can see that Kennedy arrives at San Antonio International, then drives to the medical center, then drives to Kelly Air Force Base, where he departs for Houston.

Caro’s placing the landing at Bergstrom is a small error—an error of fact-checking or research. Caro’s notes are unclear on his sourcing—he says the bit about O’Donnell’s “rage” toward Connally comes from his book, "Johnny We hardly Knew Ye": Memories of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Maybe O’Donnell had the arrival details wrong, and Caro didn’t bother to check? Don’t know. I don’t think the errors imperil Caro’s argument about the character of Lyndon Johnson, or his narrative about the assassination of Kennedy, or his overall picture of life in mid-20th century America. But I can’t help but wonder if other errors snuck in somehow….

At any rate, I really love this brilliant series of books. I’m on the downhill side of The Passage of Power now, and I am going to be sorry when it’s over.



May 19.... UPDATE!

On page 503, the first page of Chapter 21:

“From Bergstrom Air Force Base, outside Austin, three big olive-green Army helicopters lifted off and wheeled west.”

Caro has the base in the correct city now. And, apparently, he’s using different sources: “Much of the description of these two weeks on the ranch comes from the many hours of newsreel footage, including outtakes, taken at these events” (683). For the description of the flight from Bergstrom to the LBJ Ranch, he is also using a book by Frank Cormier, LBJ: The Way He Was.

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Walt Whitman's Birthday, Observed

5/12/2012

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Had a typically wonderful time at the annual Walt Whitman Birthday Bash Thursday in Conroe.  The main performer was Bruce Noll, who offers a “dramatic interpretation” of Leaves of Grass. He was very good—a true pleasure to hear the words recited, acted, not just read.

For my part art the Gathering of Poets, I read a segment from the Preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass:

The American poets are to enclose old and new, for America is the race of races. Of them a bard is to be commensurate with a people. To him the other continents arrive as contributions . . . he gives them reception for their sake and his own sake. His spirit responds to his country's spirit . . . . he incarnates its geography and natural life and rivers and lakes. Mississippi with annual freshets and changing chutes, Missouri and Columbia and Ohio and Saint Lawrence with the falls and beautiful masculine Hudson, do not embouchure where they spend themselves more than they embouchure into him. The blue breadth over the inland sea of Virginia and Maryland and the sea off Massachusetts and Maine and over Manhattan bay and over Champlain and Erie and over Ontario and Huron and Michigan and Superior, and over the Texan and Mexican and Floridian and Cuban seas and over the seas off California and Oregon, is not tallied by the blue breadth of the waters below more than the breadth of above and below is tallied by him. When the long Atlantic coast stretches longer and the Pacific coast stretches longer he easily stretches with them north or south. He spans between them also from east to west and reflects what is between them. On him rise solid growths that offset the growths of pine and cedar and hemlock and liveoak and locust and chestnut and cypress and hickory and limetree and cottonwood and tuliptree and cactus and wildvine and tamarind and persimmon . . . .and tangles as tangled as any canebrake or swamp . . . . and forests coated with transparent ice and icicles hanging from the boughs and crackling in the wind . . . . and sides and peaks of mountains . . . . and pasturage sweet and free as savannah or upland or prairie . . . . To him enter the essences of the real things and past and present events---. . . . For such the expression of the American poet is to be transcendent and new. It is to be indirect and not direct or descriptive or epic. Its quality goes through these to much more. Let the age and wars of other nations be chanted and their eras and characters be illustrated and that finish the verse. Not so the great psalm of the republic. Here the theme is creative and has vista.

In my literature class this past semester, some of the students (not many; a couple or so) didn't much care for Walt.

"He's a know-it-all," one student said. "He thinks he's smarter than everyone else."

"Well, sure," I said. "He's a cosmos!"

This student also thought Thoreau was a know-it-all.

Oh, well....

A couple of things to investigate:

Here's someone writing about the Preface

Here's Bruce Noll’s website


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The Ghosts of Blocker Building

5/8/2012

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Bartleby explained....
One of the things I’ve been doing recently—one of the many things I’ve been doing—as this semester winds down, and my time at Texas A&M winds down, is saying goodbye to the classrooms I’ve taught in over the years.

All these rooms have ghosts, right? Memories. These were rooms full of good students and rotten students, nice students and rude ones. Sometimes I did some good teaching. Many times education happened!

Some pictures….


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Blocker 110
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Blocker 121
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Blocker 106
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Blocker 105
The first classroom I ever taught a class in was Blocker 105, and I’ve written elsewhere about that first day—how I stood there, going over the syllabus for my composition class, and I looked up and out at the back of the classroom, and there was this—stain—on the wall. Stains. Big damn grease stains from where the heads of bored, sleepy students had been bumping and staining the wall—for years. A feeling of futility filled me right there and then! All those generations of bored students! But as I thought about it, I decided to be a teacher whose students weren’t all bored and falling asleep. And I sort of think I have been….

At any rate, the Blocker 105 was remodeled a couple of years ago, and the grease stains were painted over—and now, I guess, the grease stains are ghosts, too.


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    Lowell Mick White

    Author of the novels Normal School and Burnt House and Professed and That Demon Life and the story collections  Long Time Ago Good and The Messes We Make of Our Lives.

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  • Home
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