Hey everybody, this is the 250th post here at The Strawfoot. It is one of two milestones: I began the blog one year ago this past Saturday. It has been an enjoyable and rewarding experience. When I first began I was typing on an old pc and we did not yet have internet access or television in our home (still no tv). To get online I had to sit on a stool in the corner to piggyback off our neighbor’s wireless, with his knowledge and permission I hasten to add. Now I’m typing these words on my Mac Air as I sit here listening to Simon & Garfunkel with a cup of coffee beside me. Before I began I did not even know the elementary aspects of how to start a blog; I relied on the expertise of some colleagues at work. Learning more about technology was an explicit, if secondary, purpose for my blogging. I reached a point where I felt the world was starting to pass me by in some ways. I still have much to learn, but I feel I am getting there.

The main purpose of The Strawfoot was to engage more actively in the Civil War sesquicentennial. Blogging has forced me to think harder and examine my thoughts and presumptions. Friends and relatives will give us a pass when we misspeak or say something with which they disagree. Do that on the internet, especially about a subject as closely examined and emotionally charged as the American Civil War, and people will call you on it. There is very little comfort to be found in studying history, which is why some people prefer folktales to the truth. I have tried to be myself and to speak as honestly as I can without succumbing to bathos or narcissism. We owe it to the people who came before us.

The person who I owe the most to is my wife. The Strawfoot takes a great deal of time on a weekly basis and she has been patient and understanding through the entire process. It has been a lifestyle change and comes with its satisfactions. It’s been rewarding watching the statistics increase month by month. I know from reading people’s comments and emails that some readers have been following the entire time. It fills me with humility to know that people make a few out of their busy day to read what I may have to offer. I am looking forward to another fun and productive year.

The name Sam Vaughan probably does not ring any bells, but regular readers of the Strawfoot are undoubtedly aware of the man’s work. Vaughan, who passed away earlier this week, edited Bruce Catton’s Centennial History of the Civil War (The Coming Fury, 1961; Terrible Swift Sword, 1963; Never Call Retreat, 1965) for Doubleday & Company. Civil War scholarship moved on in the ensuing five decades, but the unititated could do worse than Catton’s trilogy for an overview of the conflict. (Doubleday also published Catton’s Army of the Potomac series in the 1950s, but Vaughan had no hand in that project.)

Vaughan was a good friend of conservative pundit William F. Buckley. It was he who convinced Buckley to write his Bradford Oakes Cold War espionage novels. He also collaborated with Democratic senators and erstwhile presidential candidates Hubert Humphrey and Ed Muskie. In a cruel twist of fate, Muskie’s autobiography was released the same day the Mainer bowed out of the 1972 presidential race. (For those unfamiliar with the story, Muskie was forced out of the campaign when he was photographed with what were apparently snowflakes on his cheeks. It was reported that they were tears, and Muskie was branded too unmanly to be president.) Needless to say, Muskie’s offering did not reach the upper echelons of any best seller lists.

Vaughan began at Doubleday in 1951, and in 1970 he was crowned president and publisher. He had a distinguished career, but there were some misses as well. In the early 1960s Vaughn went to Gettysburg to edit Eisenhower’s presidential memoirs. Eisenhower’s financial security had been secured when Doubleday published his World War 2 memoir Crusade in Europe in 1948. The now former president teamed with Vaughan on the two volume White House series, Mandate for Change, 1953-1956 (1963) and Waging Peace, 1956-1961 (1965). If you are looking for examples of dry, less-than-revelatory presidential memoirs, these are exhibits A and B. I wrote my masters thesis on Eisenhower’s foreign policy and, while I admire the general and president in many ways, I can’t say I learned anything of value from these doorstops. Crusade was never going to be mistaken for Grant’s Memoirs, but at least there he had an excuse; in the late 1940s Ike was considering a bid for higher office and did not want to antagonize such figures as Churchill, de Gaulle, and Konrad Adenauer, with whom he might have to deal on the world stage. Crusade was a lesson in tact and diplomacy. By the time he left office in 1961, however, Eisenhower no longer had these concerns. He could have offered readers more insight into himself and the world he did so much to change, but did not. Vaughan might have pushed Eisenhower harder but, still only in his late 20s, was probably too intimidated.

In the 1970s Vaughan edited Duke Ellington’s memoir Music is My Mistress with similarly disappointing results. The Duke was known for his impenetrable public persona but even by his standards Mistress is a letdown. Ellington was an intensely private man and no one was expecting him to kiss and tell after fifty some odd years in show business. And make no mistake, after half a century of living the musician’s night life Ellington had done his share of, uh, kissing. Still, one would have hoped for more candor from a man in his seventies looking back on life. Here again Vaughan might have done more to draw a sense of who Ellington was but, frustratingly, either couldn’t or wouldn’t. Doubleday published Ellington’s memoir in 1973 and the composer died the following year.

Despite these failures, Vaughan had a long, distinguished career and many more successes than failures. That so few people know who he was, oddly enough, is a testament to his achievement.

(image/Open Library)