Much of the history we present in this magazine seems, as a child might say, “all over.” The stories are concluded, the dead buried. The settings tend to become variously “shrines” or restorations —although, as the venturers on our new American Heritage Society tours have been noticing, in privileged peeks beyond the velvet ropes, these monuments also change, along with our views of history. Looking through this issue, one might observe that the GI’S of other times, caricatured so deftly by Peter Copeland, have all tossed their last sloppy salute; that the polluting horses are gone at last from our cities; that the lonely, insecure little niece of Theodore Roosevelt “found romance” (as they say in the women’s magazines) in an affecting Victorian way, married her fifth cousin, and became, whatever you thought of her, a Formidable Lady. And died. It is, as the child said, all over.

Or perhaps not. Our soldiers and sailors today have new problems of discipline, morale, and drugs, and want to change their uniforms. As for the horse as an urban polluter, have you heard about the automobile? And Eleanor Roosevelt, the shy debutante who became the Social Force, did she not stir up the minorities, the “underprivileged,” and even Women’s Lib? And did she not marry the man, “that man,” who hated war, and would not send our sons into one—but did?

Separating past and present, in other words, grows complicated. Just as we were getting ready for our next issue a detailed article on the trial of John Peter Zenger in 1735, that first American landmark in the battle for the freedom of the press, the issue came up again—the very same principle—in the case of the New York Times and other newspapers that had begun publishing the now famous Pentagon Papers. With their revelations from documents of the Defense Department, the National Security Council, and other sources they traced a very different picture of our growing involvement in Vietnam than that set forth in public by several Presidents and their spokesmen. Here, for example, was President Johnson addressing the people on September 25, 1964:

“There are those who say, you ought to go north and drop bombs…. We don’t want our American boys to do the fighting for Asian boys. We don’t want to get involved in a nation with 700 million people and get tied down in a land war in Asia.”

Privately, as the Times summary of the Pentagon study revealed:

“The Johnson Administration reached a ‘general consensus’ at a White House strategy meeting on Sept. 7, 1964, that air attacks against North Vietnam would probably have to be launched, [the Pentagon study] states … ‘What prevented action for the time being was a set of tactical considerations.’ The first tactical consideration, the analyst says, was that ‘the President was in the midst of an election campaign in which he was presenting himself as