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The Evolution of Perfection: A Mediterranean Cruise

April 5, 2023

I had to chuckle a bit at a glossy insert into one of my newspapers a few weeks ago. “Mediterranean Perfections, Oceania Cruises, Your World, Your Way.” The company Life Ultimate was advertising “2 for 1 Cruise Fares, FREE Roundtrip Airfare, FREE Airport Transfer” and other goodies. I think I would have liked “Cinematic Mediterranean, […]

How Not to Change a Latin American Government: The Bay of Pigs, Redux

May 26, 2019

How Not to Change a Latin American Government: The Bay of Pigs, Redux We have written about Cuba and the United States a few times in the past. There are remarkable similarities between the early 1960s and Venezuela and the United States today, giving some credence to the old adage that history does occasionally repeat […]

Travels to Spain

December 2, 2018

Long ago, in some old history textbook, I probably saw the name of Cadiz in Spain first mentioned. It didn’t quite resonate with me as much as other European cities I was learning about as I wandered through school. Berlin, London, Rome they all stuck out as places where big–often bad but sometimes stellar–history was […]

Thank You for Your Service

December 2, 2018

Today is Veteran’s Day, so thank you for your service. I don’t recall when that phrase started to become part of modern greetings, but I’m glad it did since I’m a Vietnam War period veteran, and the homecoming for many of the troops in the late 1960s and early 1970s was both insulting and humiliating. […]

Mr. Roosevelt and the Navy

April 15, 2018

Part of my summer reading a few years ago was a joint biography of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt written by a brilliant historian, Doris Kearns Goodwin. The book is about the Roosevelts during the World War II (1939-1945) years. It is rich in the details of a peacetime society — ours — preparing for war. […]

Veterans Day, 2017

December 4, 2017

This column is dedicated to all who have served in the military, or, for that matter, all who are now serving and will one day become veterans. It is a time to remember not those who have died in service — celebrated on Memorial Day — but recognize those still living. In my family, at […]

Watching the Vietnam War, Redux

November 29, 2017

I can remember watching Walter Cronkite on the nightly CBS news reporting on the Vietnam War, probably from 1968, the summer it seems that the world was crashing around our shoulders. The Tet Offensive launched by the North Vietnamese and their allies the Vietcong in the South was underway and all South Viet Nam appeared […]

In the Navy

September 14, 2017

The tragic accidents over the past month in the far Pacific, the home of the Navy’s Seventh Fleet, brought back my own memories of similar circumstances, although while in the Mediterranean, the home of the Sixth Fleet. Today we continue to have a presence in all the major oceans of the world. In the last […]