Reading changed for me over the torrid summer of 1968. Which was just in time for the rest of the world to change too. A child braves the wider world in his own way, mercifully unaware of the storms that grownups natter about while tossing back highballs and filling rooms with loud opinions and cigarette smoke—though my parents’ friend Chuck, who had parachuted into Normandy a quarter century before on the eve of D-Day, added cigar smoke, which has had me thinking well of cigars ever since. Note to the righteous young: Good people still smoked around children in those days and remained good people, though my mother did bring out the Ozium spray as soon as everybody left to neutralize the lingering effects, an aroma that still recalls to me the sudden and sad stillness attending the departure of large voices and the laughing elation of adult banter.
There was a lot to talk about that year. Turbulence had been buffeting the United States with multiple traumas. The world seemed to be coming apart. The Vietnam War, a distant conflict that made little sense to a child—and, as I started to learn, to many adults around me—had smoldered and flamed interminably, making a president with a sleepy drawl into a villain, and young men I knew as lifeguards at our swim club begin to disappear the summer before into the armed forces. The news kept showing images of something the microphone people were calling “race riots,” and for the first time in our lives we saw soldiers sent not only into rice paddies on the other side of the world—what did they have against rice?—but into parts of town we usually didn’t drive through anyway. They weren’t real soldiers, we were told, they were National Guardsmen, but they looked real enough to us; they had guns. And two political assassinations that spring and summer poisoned an already poisoned well, rolling aftershocks in the wake of an even bigger assassination that had happened a few years before, which some of us couldn’t remember.
Many books have been churned out on American life in the 1960s, but a book remains to be written on what it was like to be a child during that time, in those days before the tyranny of algorithmically-ordered screens when children were allowed to range outside and spend hours of unsupervised time in the woods, climbing trees and getting wet in creeks, and then turning up for supper just in time to avoid harsh words for being late as we took off muddy shoes before padding into the house (taking off muddy shoes without being told showed you were growing up). TV was for the most part dull even when we were allowed to watch it, though the music that scratched out of my brother’s transistor radio seemed agreeable enough. But everywhere we looked, in newspapers, magazines, and on TV, we kept seeing flag-draped caskets, and it is that image of caskets draped with flags that has provided me with my dominant visual picture of that larger world in which the adults worked, laughed, and drank.
Still, a child’s mind tends to protect him from that larger world as he is too busy acclimating himself to his smaller world.
The Christmas before that hot summer, I received an odd gift: a small typewriter that I don’t recall asking for. Perhaps my mother saw what my future would become and sought to quicken it. More likely, though, she despaired over the fact that her youngest child would always be hopeless with proper penmanship—probably a painful thought for her since she wrote in a flowing, clear hand—and writing conveyed in type might be the only way she would ever be able to read anything I put out in the world.
I adopted that typewriter. Not that I wrote anything of my own. What was there for a seven-year-old to say? I simply took books off shelves and typed out words and sentences that had already gained legitimacy simply because they were printed in real books. And so real books became a mental refrain. I aspired one day to read “real books,” the kind of books you read more than once and talked about with whoever would listen, not the dull kind you got saddled with in school, books which were spent as soon as you put them down. School books weren’t “reading.” Reading was what you did at home, on your own, and, most deliciously, when nobody was looking. It was a solitary pleasure, and whatever you read about became a part of your own world.
One of the books I copied from with that typewriter had been another gift from the year before called Presidents of the United States, a De Luxe Golden Book. I think a teacher owned a copy of this book and I must have asked to look at it so many times that my mother just bought me a copy of my own out of embarrassment so I would stop bothering the teacher. So began my adventure with those thirty-six men—at that time—who had held that exalted office. I liked their names, their faces, and their peculiar attire in the illustrations and photographs. Mostly, though, I liked the way they were written about. They mattered. They had weight. They had done important things. And there they were, elevated to print. It’s one thing to do the writing, I gathered, but quite another to be worthy of someone else’s writing about you. For my part, I was happily hunkered at the bottom of the hill, neither writing nor being written about. I was just the copy boy paying homage to all those men whose names rang like bells.
So as the summer of 1968 approached, I knew who the presidents were. I could not have named them off in order yet, but I could look at the pictures and place each in his century by, as I thought of it, costume. I also knew that I was an American who belonged to the same country they did—that I, in some sense, belonged with them. Those men, all but three of whom were dead by that summer, provided checks with which to mark distant time, which is one little-noted advantage of imbibing history: one becomes a citizen of Time, an honorary habitué of periods he never saw for himself but developed enough imagination to see nonetheless. One may be planted decisively in one’s own era, but that era remains, in the end, just another era for the student—formal or informal—of history.
Late that spring or very early that summer—about the time, as I recall, of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, a grotesque reminder after the murder of Martin Luther King two months before, even to a child, that we were not living in normal times—my mother and I walked into one of those small-scale department stores, a sort of five-and-dime, that we used to see more of back then. On a long table display, their covers face-up, lay a set of books, The American Heritage Book of the Presidents and Famous Americans. I picked up volume one, a red book with the prominent painting of George Washington we all knew staring out (American children knew Washington by sight back then), flipped through it, closed it, held it in my hand, felt its weight, and flipped through it again with a little more care to read a few sentences and look at the pictures.
“I want this,” I firmly declared to my mother, who didn’t take orders and was maternally resistant to all such demands.
“You already have a book about the presidents,” she said. “Besides, this book is about just the first two presidents. You get them all together, but I’m not buying the whole set.” (That last phrase—I’m not buying the whole set—was one of the saddest of my young life.)
Yes. Twelve volumes. I was asking her to commit to buying my first set of grown-up books of history, which was certainly a commitment on her part, however small, but she would make the purchase my commitment too or no deal.
After delicate negotiations and promises to be a better child than I was ever capable of being even on my best days, she agreed. “But only the first book today.”
“But,” I protested, “it’s a set. You can’t get just one. You said so.” (Where do children learn to do this?)
“I can do that today and I will,” she shot back. “We have to see whether you really want them. If you throw this one in a corner as soon as we get home, then we’ll know.”
Maybe I thought my honor had been impugned, but the battle was joined. The deal turned out to be slightly more complicated, though. I could have volume one now, and if I truly read it, in my fashion, page by page, and could then tell her facts—many, many facts—about George Washington and John Adams after a week or so, then we would go back to the store, buy volume two, and run the same course before buying volume three, four, and so on.
And so my presidential summer began. While the rest of the country was struggling with an endless war, sweltering in civil unrest, and wondering what would become of doped-up youth taking over college campuses, I was setting myself to the serious business of reading and immersing myself in American history when not playing outside and learning to swim. Those books were richly anecdotal, and I was memorizing facts, real facts, about presidents and their times, the spouting of which could make me amusingly entertaining to the adults (though only very briefly) when they dropped by to visit.
Eventually, the terms of the deal were fulfilled and I collected the entire set, earning my way through each one until, by the end of August, I had all twelve.
As I look back on that summer now, the sharpest memories of which are attached to the words and images of those books, I suspect I was taking in my first shallow draughts of adulthood. I was not homeschooled, but this deal between my mother and me was much like a homeschooling project: read, learn, recite—but, most of all, enjoy. Enjoy the sense of accomplishment with every name uttered, every birth year recalled, and every birthplace found on a map. (Oh, the joy of maps. Why do people resist geography?) Those men, along with their wives and other characters walking the stage with them, became something akin to friends. I could match names to faces. In the end, my mother really didn’t have to enforce the terms of that deal. I was a colt in clover, reading real books about grownup things, and I was doing so on my own.
The books in that American Heritage series, I hasten to add, were not really for children my age. They were clearly aimed at older young people, and a casual browse even now shows that they make decent reading for anybody of any age. Adults included. Read them today and you’ll know more about American history than you probably learned in high school; in college too—especially if you happened to major in history. I was punching well above my weight. But that was part of the fun. Because another friend from the shelves I made that summer was the dictionary, which was (and is) about as useful an item as useful gets. I learned new words, tried to pronounce them to see how they swished around in my mouth, and awarded to myself a private graduation certificate every time I used one of them in conversation, which must have made me annoying even to the indulgent. But that’s how we learn words, not simply by memorizing vocabulary lists—though that’s a fine place to start—but by doing commerce with them. We don’t know words fully until we have introduced them to our tongue.
Since that time, I have never laid aside my stubborn conviction that children should always be encouraged to read just above their ability. If they beg off, you can back off; timing differs for different people. But the world of adult reading should always be held out as a fruit, as a reward, not as a penalty for getting beyond picture books. Until words can make pictures for you too, you’re not reading, you’re deciphering. (Incidentally, children who never see their parents reading a book and who never hear the words “Not now, I’m reading—later” are having something precious withheld from them, which is the knowledge that they’re not sitting at the center of the universe at every waking moment.)
Most gratifyingly, those books also show 1968, despite all, still to be a patriotic time. Yes, the news was bad, almost unrelievedly so if you read, listened to, and watched it. But schools had not yet become madrasas of anti-American propaganda. America had not yet been reduced merely to the sum total of her sins. Primary schoolteachers taught patriotically, no matter their private views, which didn’t insinuate themselves into the classroom anyway. We were Americans being taught to revere our own country. Black spots on the canvas of our history, like slavery, were not denied, as I recall, and indeed they were taught, conspicuously. But those spots were not used as pretexts for tearing down a great country. We could oppose a war on the other side of the planet that summer and still attend Fourth of July parades, picnics, and fireworks displays and hoist up our American flags without fear of social media backlash. In short, as a country we had not yet become both ungrateful and stupid, which is a lethal mixture, culturally speaking.
That series of books put out by American Heritage should remind us all of what splendid work can be produced by a middle-of-the-road publisher out to serve middle-class Americans who feel pride in their nation and simply wish to know more about it without tendentious posing and “virtue signaling” by the kind of people who never had the luck to benefit from those books. Any such series of titles on American history released now would require vetting for noxious heterodoxy of the fraudulent “1619 Project” kind before exposing them to impressionable minds. Fortunately, no such worries vexed my mother that summer. For children, the world was still safe for reading new books.
And then there was the writing itself. Despite all the new and exotic words festooning the mind of a young boy, the prose in those books was, I think, middle-of-the-road as well, which isn’t as easy to achieve as some may believe. The American Heritage “style,” if there can be said to be one, was marked by a simple, direct clarity that made the reading smooth (at least for adults) without being condescending. It was unpretentious, mature writing.
Years after reading those books, I went on myself to write and publish about many things, history included, and I reckon that those books taught me more than a little about writing, about how to handle dense and sometimes intractable material that doesn’t always lend itself to easy understanding, and I learned not only about the obligation to be clear but to be, at least on a good day, engaging as well. With respect do I recall the stable of writers for the old American Heritage magazine—which had included the learned likes of Clinton Rossiter, Bruce Catton, David McCullough, and the redoubtable Barbara Tuchman—not only for their clarity but for doing the humble work of subordinating themselves to their material and not straining to be the star in every article. They didn’t write for tenure; they wrote to be read. They knew that history is about stories or it isn’t anything at all. And they knew what they were writing about, another assumption we can no longer make in this age of the “dead degree” where credentials are bestowed for minimal effort and mark, for too many, negative intellectual growth. American newspapers, journals, and internet news and opinion sites are now staffed almost exclusively by young zealots who know practically nothing about their nation or its past, denigrate what little they know, and who feel utterly free to pass facile judgments. These books did not grow out of that polluted soil.
My future began that summer with a long, sustained swim into the past, a past filled with names and dates and paintings and photos, but most of all with words—glorious words. That’s the year I believe I became an American citizen in full. Those books peopled my mind. I can still remember the very smell of the ink. Yes, it was too heady for a young child to take onboard all at once. But that’s what re-reading is for, and those books were read many more times over the next few years, until they were replaced by other books. But by few, I think, more worthy.
The summer ended, predictably enough, with riots disrupting the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and the garish images of bedlam splashed from the TV. But I let the adults think about all that over their cocktails. I had been given better, more enduring things to think about that summer. The future loomed ahead: Cub Scouts, swim teams, and, coming soon, something called Latin (though I was fairly sure this last item would play no large part in my life). September brought cool air, new pencils, and a return to the regimentation of homework.
We Americans have a history worth knowing and knowing well, one filled with unlikely heroes, gaudy scoundrels, and magnificent examples of lofty and arduous achievement—as well as instances of mistakes, blunders, and failures made good. Of course, the books I collected that summer cannot take you past LBJ, but it’s a nice jaunt until that point. No doubt some errors or occasional misstatements dot those pages, but the story is real, the mosaic shines, and young Americans should still have those books to hand when the electronic gadgets are shut down and a quiet room invites quiet reading.
The American Heritage Book of the Presidents and Famous Americans series has long been out-of-print, but one can still find second-hand copies of it online. Grab them. The young especially may need their companionship for the long march ahead to recover what has been lost.
Click here to read the entire 2024 Meliora publication, which includes a citation of sources for each article. Click here to purchase a print copy of Meliora.
