Divide and conquer.

Nixon had gone to Camp David to be left alone.

For days, he had carried a yellow pad and pen and sat in empty cabins for hours at a time.

On the yellow pad: a scribbled speech defending his Vietnam War policies which he intended to deliver in a televised Oval Office address.

The speech would rebuke the antiwar movement which had brought fifteen million protesters into the streets of America’s cities two weeks earlier.

And it would call on the rest, the ‘silent majority,’ to give him their support.

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The long road home.

Bob left college at the end of the spring semester in 1941 and enlisted in the Air Force.

It seemed like all young men were enlisting then, and it made Bob’s dad, a former Army engineer, proud.

No more talk of going to Hollywood to become a movie star.

Bob was sent to the Philippines to help push the Japanese out of Southeast Asia.

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Taking the plunge.

It is August 27, 1905.

And the nation’s leading newspapers are aghast.

President Theodore Roosevelt has ridden down to the bottom of the Long Island Sound in a submarine!

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‘The ballot or the bullet.’

It is August 26, 1863.

Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia have been driven from the battlefield in Gettysburg and have retreated south across the Potomac.

Confederate forces will never again cross into Union territory.

Vicksburg has fallen to the relentless General Grant.

The Mississippi River, the Confederate supply lifeline, is now under Union control.

In Washington, Lincoln has received an invitation from his longtime Springfield friend, James Conkling.

He asks Lincoln to return to Springfield to address a large meeting of Democrats opposed to the Civil War.

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Paris is Free.

Reading the paper on August 24, 1944.

“Yesterday a Frenchman burst into Lieut. Gen. Omar Bradley’s headquarters.

“He was the chief of the French Forces of the Interior in Paris and he had a staggering, incredible story to tell.

“He said that he had concluded an armistice with the German forces in Paris.

“The people of Paris had risen and had so hounded the Germans that the German commander had requested an armistice.

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The Second Great Fire of London.

It’s Sunday night, December 29, 1940.

And the German Luftwaffe’s bombing campaign against Britain is in its fourth month.

American journalist Ernie Pyle is standing on a London balcony watching as 100,000 incendiary bombs fall on the city.

From his report:

“It was a night when London was ringed and stabbed with fire.

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Okies.

About 440,000 people in Oklahoma packed up and left the state during the 1930s.

Most of them went to California.

But Oklahoma’s farmers had been coping with tough conditions long before the Dust Bowl hit in 1934.

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Proving your worth.

It is September 12, 1918.

The first day of the American fight to push back a triangular German bulge into the Allied lines near Verdun in northeast France.

The bulge is 25 miles wide at its base and 15 miles deep and is called the Saint-Mihiel salient.

The Germans had fortified the salient with dense entanglements of barbed wire, trenches, machine-gun nests, and artillery emplacements. 

This would be a significant operation.

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Finding yourself.

It is 1872.

And in Paris, the artist Edgar Degas, age thirty-eight, is a demoralized former soldier in the French National Guard.

The Guard had been charged with the defense of Paris against the onslaught of German troops under the leadership of the Prussian Army.

But, despite four months of heroic effort, the Guard had failed to break the Prussian Army’s siege of the city.

Paris had fallen and the victorious Prussian Army had paraded through its streets.

The emperor, Napoleon III, had been captured and the French government had fallen.

Paris was in turmoil as the French people struggled to stand up a new government.

But Edgar’s younger brother René had come home from New Orleans to visit his family.

A happy interlude.

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Voting for a madman.

His quest for absolute power had begun years earlier.

Probably sometime after November 1918.

Hitler was then an embittered soldier in Germany’s defeated army.

He was temporarily blind from a mustard gas attack suffered near Ypres, on the Western Front, in the waning days of World War I.

And, as he recovered, he learned of the German government’s capitulation to the punitive demands of the victorious Allied powers.

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