October 1954
In This Issue
Explore the October 1954 print edition below. Or to discover more writing from the pages of The Atlantic, browse the full archive.
Articles
When Lenin Returned
The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington
The Dark Is Light Enough
The Limits of Foreign Policy
Forerunners to Everest
Accent on Living
Two-Sword Hombers
HUGH A. BURR was first employed as a young stenographer for the FBI, served in the Army from 1944 to 1947, and teas graduated from Harvard in 1950. Recalled as a reserve officer, he was stationed in Korea and Japan, and is now freelancing in upper New York State.
So Long, Folks! Off to the War!
Ameaningful Experience
CHARLES BOEWE grew up in West Salem, Illinois, took his A.B. and M.A. at Syracuse University, and is now working for his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin.
Record Reviews
She Can Prove It
LOYD ROHENFIELD began free-lance writing while working far an oil company in Tulsa. He is now living in Mexico City. “Here,”he tells us, “I only write.”His light verse has appeared several times in these, pages.
The Squirrel
Baseball in Spain
After his graduation from Trinity College in 194-9, ROBERT H. BOYLE took an M.A. at Yale and served for two years as an officer with the Marines. On leaving the service he lived in Barcelona for a year, and he is now a Sports writer for the United Press in New York.
Fancier Mr. Fenn
Norway and Denmark
Rome
Letters to and From the Editor
The Oppenheimer Case
Professor of American history at Harvard, ARTHUR M. ScHLESIVGER, JR., was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in History for his book, The Age of Jackson, which was published in 1945. A Jacksonian Democrat, he has been commissioned to do The Age of Roosevelt. His preparation for this big undertaking, as well as the outspoken anti-Communism which has won him bitter condemnation on the far left, qualifies him particularly to analyze one of the most absorbing and portentous volumes in print. the 992-page report on the Oppenheimer hearing.
World's Record in a Jet
JACQUELINE COCHRAN is the first woman to pass through the sonic barrier to beat the speed of sound. Already the holder of most of the men’s world speed records for propeller-driven planes, she made three new world’s records for men in jet planes during the summer of 1953. A waif who at the age of eight was working a twelve-hour shift in a cotton mill, Miss Cochran is today the owner of three cosmetic firms. She was the recipient of the Billy Mitchell Award for 1937, has won the International Harmon Trophy for most of the years since 1937, and for her accomplishments in jet flying received in Turkey last month the Cold Medal of the f ederation Aéronautique Internationale. She is in private life a wonderful cook, a delightful hostess, and the wife of Floyd B. Odlum. Her autobiography, Stars at Noon, from which this chapter has been taken, will be published this month under the Atlantic-Little. Brown imprint.
German Militarism
The Tram
FRANK O’CONNOR, the Irish author who has been giving courses at the Harvard Summer School on the writing of fiction, was ashed how he approached his own short stories. Said Mr. O’Connor, “ With me it’s a difficulty of temperament. Mine is lyrical, explosive. I write a story with a feeling of slight regret for poor Shakespeare’s lack of talent and wake up with a hangover that makes poteen look like cold water, Then, having cursed life and forsworn literature, I start rewriting. If I can work up the Shakespeare mood often enough I may get it right in six revisions. If I don’t I may have to rewrite it fifty times. This isn’t exaggerationThe story which follows is one of a new collection, More Stories, to be published this month by Knopf.
The Strength to Win
In the past decade THOMAS K. FINLETTER, a New York lawyer, has come to know as much about our air power, and that of our enemies, as any man in the United States. He was appointed Chairman of the President’s Air Policy Commission in 1947, and the report which he and his committee members made was one of the most exhaustive studies of our national defense ever made in time of peace. That report established quotas of air power which we badly needed when aggression broke out in Korea; it pointed the way for a new strategic policy which, as Secretary of the Air Force, Mr. Finletter himself had the opportunity to implement from 1950 to 1953. That we can muster the strength to prevent a Russian attack is the kernel of his argument here and in his new book, Power and Policy, soon to be published by Harcourt, Brace.
Golf in a High Wind
The grandson of Charles Darwin and himself a writer, sagacious and charming, BERNARD DARWINwas for four decades the golf correspondent for The Times and one of the best amateurs in the British Isles. For going on sixty years he has known and played with the great competitors on the famous links and has watched their behavior under the most exasperating conditions when the wind was high and the greens fast as lightning. When not golfing — or thinking of golf— Mr. Darwin is the Justice of the Peace for Kent.
Public Schools Under Pressure
This is the first in a series of leading articles on the tmerican public schools. HENRY I. WILLETT, a native son of I irginia’s tidewater, has been head of the Richmond, I irginia. public school system since January, 1916. He served as a teaching principal of Sugar Grove School in southwest I irginia, as principal of combined high and elementary schools in Church land and Cradock, and as director of instruction in Augusta (.aunty schools. H hen war workers engulfed the Norfolk County area, bringing with them the problems of swollen enrollments and school and housing shortages, Superintendent II illett began dealing at close hand with urgencies tvliich are no less pressing today.
Directions for Farewell
The Ten-Dollar Bill
A student of economics now working towards his doctorate, RICHARD T. GILL is a Harvard graduate who finds the atmosphere of Cambridge conducive also to the writing of short stories. He has enjoyed the stimulus of working under Archibald MacLeish and Frank O’Connor, the Irish storyteller, and for the past two summers has been assisting Mr. O’Connor in his short story course at the Harvard Summer School. Mr. Gill’s first story, The Secret,” was published in the April Atlantic.
Status: Widow
The wife of Colonel Francis T. Spaulding, former Dean of the Harvard School of Education whose untimely death in 1950 robbed us of one of our most beloved leaders in education, SUSAN SPAULDING describes in the paper that follows the sensitive, often difficult predicaments with which she was confronted when suddenly left alone. As a Dean’s wife she had learned to hold her peace but to give advice when it was sincerely sought. There are many women who will thank her for what she says here.
The Gulfs of Academe
Pierre Emmanuel’s article in the August Atlantic, “Americans as Students,” seems to have occasioned some searching of hearts among our educators. One of them, HARRY LEVIN,while Chairman of the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard, was largely responsible for the invitation that enabled Mr. Emmanuel to gather his impressions. Meanwhile Mr. Levin, as exchange professor at the Sorbonne in 1953, has had a chance to make some counterbalancing observations.
Evelyn Waugh: The Best and the Worst
CHARLES J. ROLO writes “Readers Choice” in the Atlantic Bookshelf each month. He is the author of two war books and has edited a collection of the works of Aldous Huxley. The Atlantic has previously published his essays on Aldous Huxley, André Gide, and Thomas Mann. He now gives us a comprehensive appraisal of what is best and what is worst in the work of one of England’s leading novelists.
The Peripatetic Reviewer
Books: The Editors Like
Reader's Choice
