. . . and my father-in-law, Manoharan, who also passed on in 2012

Bernard Lansky, one half of the Lansky Brothers, the clothiers who dressed Elvis starting in the 1950s through his death in 1977, has died. Lansky helped define postwar cool for generations of black and white musicians, up to and including the present day. It is a quintessentially American story. Like Nudie Cohn, the Lanskies were Eastern European Jews who started small in the clothing business, did well, and eventually rendered their services to some of the buggest names in film and music. Besides the King, The Lansky client list included Carl Perkins, ZZ Top, the Jonas Brothers, Johnny Cash, Duke Ellington, B.B. King, Kiss, Dr. John, and Count Basie to name a few. It was Bernard Lansky who dressed Elvis for his Louisiana Hayride and Ed Sullivan appearances, and Lansky who selected the white suit and blue shirt in which Presley was buried. The Lanskies opened their original Beale Street shop in 1946 selling World War 2 surplus items. A version still exists today. Sad to know that one more person connected to the Elvis story is gone.

The Cold War presidents in Hyde Park, November 1962

Laura Delano, Nelson Rockefeller, Adlai Stevenson, Ralph Bunche, and Robert Wagner attend the Hyde Park funeral, November 1962

Eleanor Roosevelt died fifty years ago today. Among other achievements in her long and productive life she served at First Lady longer than any person in American history. Each of the last two years the Hayfoot and I have taken the train north of the city to Hyde Park. We skipped this year because the Park Service is undertaking major renovations and we thought we would wait until next summer. Next summer if it’s not too hot we may hike some of the grounds. What struck me about Eleanor after visiting Val-Kill was how modern she was, and I mean that in every way. Grover Cleveland was in the White House when she was born; when the Great War started she was nearing her thirtieth birthday. After the White House years she l still lived another seventeen years, writing, speaking, traveling the world, and always aware of events. The output of books, letters, and newspaper columns is inconceivable. I would write more but I don’t have to, this excerpt from an upcoming dual biography puts things into perspective.

(images/NARA)

I did not learn until yesterday that Richard Current died on October 26. He reached the century mark, passing on three weeks to the day after his 100th birthday, but a person’s death is always surprising. Current was part of the intellectual tradition just prior to and after the Second World War that debunked many of the myths we believe about Abraham Lincoln. At the same time he admired the 16th president a great deal. Anyone who takes on the bloviating Gore Vidal (for his terrible historical novel Lincoln) deserves a gold star. Lincoln’s Loyalists is one of the more important monographs in my understanding of the war; I had always known there were Southern dissenters against secession, but I did not know the scope and extent until reading his book. I see my copy on the shelf in front of me right now.

Not only did LL change how I think about the war, but how I spoke about it as well. Before reading Current I might have said “The South” did this or “The North” did that. “The South,” however, did not secede or fight the Civil War any more than “The North” fought to preserve it. Today when writing or discussing the war I speak of “The Confederacy,” or “the Union Army,” or “Southern Unionists,” etc. etc. It’s not a pedantic observation. Words matter. Subtlety and complexity are important if we are to understand truly. This is just one of the lessons reading Richard Current gave me.

Was so sad to learn this morning that Andy Williams has passed on.

That was Elvis’ mark–he conveyed his spirituality without being able, or needing, to express it. And all these adults with their more complicated lives and dreams and passions and hopes looked for themselves in his simplicity.

–Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley

Today is the 35th anniversary of Elvis’s death. I remember the day vividly. My parents had divorced two years earlier and my dad visited us every Tuesday and Saturday. August 16, 1977 was a Tuesday, and as you might imagine that was a large chunk of the conversation that evening. Neither my mom or dad were that into the King, or even rock ‘n roll for that matter. People reached adulthood much younger during their time and they missed the phenomenom by a few years.

I am a third of the way through Last Train to Memphis. What I love is the way Guralnick stays out of the way and lets the story tell itself. He is not writing about a myth or cultural artifact, but about a person. This is something too often forgotten when we discuss the life of Elvis Presley. I attached “Polk Salad Annie” because my favorite Elvis songs have always been the ones with which we are less familiar. Enjoy.

Military historian Sir John Keegan has died. I never met the man, though I did once see him speak at the 92nd Street Y. Personally and intellectually Keegan was a significant influence in my life. The first book of Keegan’s I read was A History of Warfare, which he released in 1993. After receiving my bachelors degree at the University of Houston  in May of that year I spent most of that summer hanging out with friends, playing wiffle ball, and watching the Astros. As summer gave way to fall we turned our attention to the Oilers. Yes, the Houston Oilers, that’s how far back this story goes. In the latter part of the year, after this extended period of laziness and general goofing around, I stumbled upon A History of Warfare in my local bookstore during the holidays, became entranced, and found my intellectual juices stimulated again.

A history of warfare was something of a misnomer; really it was an anthropology of warfare. It may not seem like much two decades on, but Keegan’s book taught many people the importance of taking an interdisciplinary approach to their scholarship. In Warfare, Keegan famously, or infamously, concluded that Clauswitz’s maxim that “warfare is politics by other means” is only partially correct. Keegan discussed the reasons men–and it is almost always men–have gone to war over the centuries and found parallels across cultures and millennia that went beyond the Prussian officer’s penetrating but more limited analysis. I always liked that the book was a history of warfare, and not the history of warfare. With the indefinite article Keegan acknowledged that even his own interpretations, however learned, were not final judgements. A History of Warfare, at least to me, was an invitation to join the conversation. It was in large part because of this book that I majored in interdisciplinary studies when I went back for my second masters degree a decade later in 2003.

Keegan was in the news a great deal in 1993 and 1994, plugging his book on the circuit and serving as a talking head in the lead up to the 50th anniversary of the invasion of Normandy. I remember him tutoring Bill Clinton about D-Day before the president went to France for the commemoration.

He played a role in my personal life as well. In 2008, fifteen years after Warfare’s release, yours truly was in a Brooklyn bookstore with the woman who would eventually become my wife. Still in the “getting to know each other” phase, we were browsing the shelves, occasionally pulling books we had read off the shelves and showing them to each other to give each other a sense of who we were. You are what you read. When I pulled Warfare off the shelf, I was surprised to discover that the Woman Who Became the Hayfoot was already well schooled in the works of Sir John Keegan. I only became more entranced. (That I had read almost the complete works of V.S. Naipaul had the same effect on her.)

Keegan’s observations often sprung up at unexpected times and in unexpected places. My eventual wife and I were in the medieval wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art looking at the swords, armor, and other objects one day when I remembered an anecdote of his: Keegan was once touring a similar museum with a friend when the acquaintance mentioned the beauty of the objects on display. When Keegan mentioned the purposes of the military accoutrements they were looking at, and what they were capable of doing to the human body, his companion suddenly became filled with revulsion. It had never occurred to him that what he had always seen as works of art were once something else entirely. The story is a helpful reminder that military history is not–or at least should not–be something that exists for our pleasure and edification.

Keegan continued writing, often well and with great insight, in his later years. He never managed, however, to rise quite to the levels he did in Warfare or in earlier efforts such as The Face of Battle (1976) and The Mask of Command (1987). Like Stephen Ambrose, he became  a little too famous and spread a little too thin. The books were published too often and too hastily, and the observations not quite as sharp. Perhaps this is inevitable with any famous person. Become too famous and you eventually loose control of even your own narrative. His 2009 book The American Civil War: A Military History was one of weakest efforts.

Still, Keegan had reached that point in his career where he had earned the right to have his voice heard. Sadly, it is a voice we will no longer hear.

(image from the Roger Mansell collection, published in A History of Warfare)