Today: a perspective on gifts.

It is Tuesday, June 6, 1944.

Norman Brown, a B-17 radio operator, is writing in his diary:

Tuesday, 6th

This is it.

D-day.

We were in the first wave of heavies [B-17s] over the coast.

It was the greatest sight a person could see

and if I lived to be a thousand

I could never forget it.

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Big Tim Sullivan was the lord of New York City’s Bowery and Lower East Side.

At the turn of the twentieth century, he controlled jobs, extortion rackets, prostitution rings and gambling operations while owning legitimate interests in real estate, theaters, nickelodeons, racetracks and athletic clubs.

Big Tim had grown up in these neighborhoods and had started out shining shoes and selling newspapers as an eight-year-old.

By his mid-twenties, he owned interests in several saloons.

Tammany Hall, the political machine which then controlled the city, put him in charge of their political operation in the Lower East Side.

And Big Tim excelled at this job.

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Reading the paper on December 21, 1944.

At least thirteen German motorized and infantry divisions have driven through a fifty-mile-wide gap in Allied lines in Belgium and Luxembourg in an offensive of mounting intensity.

The German columns are cutting through Allied defensive lines and isolating pockets of Americans as they loot and destroy supplies and cut off communications.

There are reports of German troops employing ‘dirty tricks’ to kill Americans, such as waving a white flag of surrender only to advance to a favorable position, drop down and open fire.

German radio claims ten thousand Americans have been taken prisoner.

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It is 1915.

And the poet, Robert Frost, is writing from his new home, a wooded farmplace in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

A stranger has come from the city and is asking about his trees.

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It is August 1942.

And a young Marine, aboard a vessel in the Eastern Solomon Islands, is writing in his diary:

“6/8/42

Well, we finally found out the dope this morning.

We are attacking Tulagi Island and Guadalcanal Island, two islands of the Solomon group.

By what we were told it might not be such a hot picnic.

All of my gear is ready to go ashore!

The tension is extremely high.

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It is June 17, 2000.

Arthur Miller, the playwright, is reflecting on his contempt of Congress conviction and Hollywood blacklisting during the McCarthy era of the 1950s.

Miller had become a target of the US House Un-American Activities Committee after the staging of his play, “The Crucible,” a story about the Salem witch trials of the 1690s.

In the play, Miller had drawn a parallel between the conviction and execution of Salem women on baseless charges of witchcraft and the persecution of people accused of being communist in the 1950s.

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It is November 16, 1918, five days after the World War I armistice was signed.

Allison LePontois, a college student before the war, is in France where he serves as an ambulance driver.

Here is his diary entry for that day:

“On the night of Nov. 9th I stood in front of the dressing station in Beaumont,

the town formed for the last French battle prior to Sedan in 1870,

watching the glow in the horizon where Sedan was burning.

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What makes America great?

Theodore Roosevelt explains.

“We cannot be content to rot by inches in ignoble ease within our borders,

taking no interest in what goes on beyond them,

sunk in a scrambling commercialism.

If we are to be a really great people,

we must strive in good faith to play a great part in the world.

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Reading the paper on Dec. 14, 1941

On the topic of the Pearl Harbor attack, a week ago today, the newspaper has little to say.

The Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, is on his return trip to Washington after traveling to Hawaii to inspect the damage.

He has refused to answer reporters’ questions, saying he’ll make no public statement until he has conferred with President Roosevelt.

Yesterday, the Japanese War Minister, General Tojo, warned the Japanese people against ‘intoxication by initial victories,’ saying that, even though ‘right is on our side,’ a long war lay ahead.

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A parable from Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac on clinging to promises well-known to be false.

“[T]here are among us great numbers of honest artificers and labouring people, who,

fed with a vain hope of growing suddenly rich,

neglect their business, almost to the ruining of themselves and families,

and voluntarily endure abundance of fatigue in a fruitless search after imaginary hidden treasure.

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