the baby boy

Today, a black-and-white photo of a young Marine in Saipan.

He stands on the side of a hill, holding a naked baby.

It is a boy, maybe six months old.

Dark places freckle the baby’s thigh, abdomen, shoulder, face.

And the baby is still.

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a grand hotel

When fashion tastes changed and the demand for animal furs dropped, John Jacob Astor invested the fortune he had made from the fur trade in New York City real estate.

He became the city’s first real estate mogul.

Astor built the city’s first great hotel.

And like moguls are wont to do, he named it after himself.

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be perfect

At twelve noon on January 20, 1945, the Marine Band struck up “Hail to the Chief.”

Franklin Roosevelt stood on stiffly braced legs and gripped the arm of his son, James.

Together, they walked through the doors of the White House South Portico as eight thousand people, standing on packed snow on the South Lawn, watched his slow walk to the podium.

All had come to witness FDR’s fourth presidential inauguration.

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hard lessons

In 1959, Fidel Castro came to power in an armed revolt which overthrew the Cuban dictator, Fulgencio Batista.

Castro quickly aligned with the Soviet Union, seized American and foreign-owned assets, and declared himself a Communist.

Alarmed, the Eisenhower Administration approved a plan devised by the CIA in 1960 to train Cuban exiles to infiltrate Cuba and start a revolution.

The goal was to overthrow Castro and install a non-communist government friendly to the US.

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on this day

During stressful times, it helps to look back at other times of national trial.

And May 23, 1944, eighty years ago today, was such a time.

The D-Day invasion, which would put 160,000 Allied troops in Nazi-occupied France, was then two weeks away.

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gilding the lily

It is the bane of interior designers to see their work torn out and replaced when a new family moves into an upscale residence.

So it was with Louis Comfort Tiffany, the prolific decorative artist known for his pioneering work in opaline stained glass.

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bringing closure

45,000 Union prisoners were held in the Confederate prison at Andersonville, in southwest Georgia, during its fourteen months of operation at the end of the US Civil War.

And nineteen-year-old Dorance Atwater, a former store clerk from Terryville, Connecticut, known for his fine handwriting, is considered the most significant.

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the sickness

Andrei Sakharov’s break with his government began in 1961, when the Soviets detonated “Tsar Bomba,” the most powerful nuclear weapon in history.

At the time, he was forty years old and had been at the forefront of the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons program for thirteen years.

It was Sakharaov who had developed the model for controlled nuclear fusion which had made the Soviet hydrogen bomb work.

And he had believed in this effort.

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seeing is believing

It’s often painful to confront the truth.

But doing so is the only way forward.

The truth is right there in front of our eyes, if only we’ll have the courage to see.

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no place is safe

When war came again in 1939, British parents knew that hard decisions lay ahead.

Most had been children during the Great War twenty years before.

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