Three Great Letters

In the The House of the Spirits by Isabelle Allende, the author says that “Letters are a gift reserved for the living, denied to those in heaven.”  I think the author is close to the mark, for letters, at least good letters, are immortal and last long after both the writer and the recipient have left this world.

I like letters.  I like to plan letters in advance, then I enjoy writing them—after selecting the right paper and ink—then I like to mail them.  I would probably like to receive them, but that rarely happens any more.  For most people, letters have evidently been replaced by email, which is a sorry substitute.

There are multiple websites that list the ten greatest letters of all time, the five letters that changed history, or the dozen or so most important letters in politics—there are so many that I have no intention of competing with them.  For the last week or so, I have been thinking about three letters in particular—letters that aren’t important in most people’s minds, but letters that I thought were memorable.  They might not exactly be historic letters, but they are interesting.

After winning the election in November 1960, President John F. Kennedy began putting together his government and the newly appointed Ambassador to India was his former Harvard professor, John Kenneth Galbraith.  Galbraith, his wife, and their three sons would all be moving to India, much to the consternation of Peter Galbraith, the ambassador’s second son.

Ten-year-old Peter didn’t want to leave his friends and his school and he didn’t like the idea of leaving his home and moving thousands of miles away for a period of several years.  When the President heard about Peter’s unhappiness, he could understand how the boy felt, since his own father had been appointed Ambassador to the Court of St. James (England) more than twenty years earlier.

Though Kennedy hadn’t been in office for even three months, he took the time to write a personal letter to young Peter, telling the boy about his own experiences in leaving home and friends and moving to a new country.  

“More than twenty years ago, our family was similarly uprooted when we went to London where my father was Ambassador.  My younger brothers and sisters were about your age.  They, like you had to exchange new friends for old.”

Kennedy went on to tell young Peter to look forward to the exotic animals he would see in India, particularly the elephants.  After warning the boy to avoid the cobras, the president said that he considered the children of his ambassadors to be the junior members of the Peace Corps.

By all accounts the boy took the message to heart and felt easier about the move.  The New York Times reported about the letter on April 2, 1961 and the story has made into several books, including one by the ambassador.  What has never made the books, as far as I can tell, is that there was a second letter.

Peter Galbraith had a nine-year-old brother, James, who felt a little left out by the presidential attention that his brother was receiving.  After all, he, too, had moved to India, leaving behind his friends, his school, and his home.  When President Kennedy learned of the boy’s unhappiness, he wrote a second letter, this time to James, thanking the boy for his sacrifice and urging the boy to grow up to be a good Democrat like his father, but perhaps one not so inconveniently sized.  The president was making a small joke about the ambassador being 6’ 8”.

In 1945, a young agent for the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency, ran agents in Germany tasked with tracking, and in a few cases, killing high ranking officers in the German Army.  As Germany collapsed at the end of the war, the young agent made his way to the Bavarian mountaintop retreat of Adolf Hitler, helping himself to some of the Fuehrer’s personal stationary.

On May 8, 1945, VE Day, the young agent took the time to write his three-year-old son a letter commemorating the end of the war.

“Dear Dennis, The man who might have written on this card once controlled Europe—three short years ago when you were born.  Today he is dead, his memory despised, his country in ruins.  He had a thirst for power, a low opinion of man as an individual, and a fear of intellectual honesty.  He was a force for evil in the world.  His passing, his defeat—a boon to mankind.”

The young agent, Richard Helms went on to become the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 1966 to 1973.  The letter still exists and is on display in the OSS Wing of the CIA Museum, a facility that is not open to the public.

The last letter is my personal favorite, you’ll have to forgive me for being a little biased.  My father was born in West Texas, the son of a poor farmer with eleven children, in an area hit hard by the Great Depression.  To survive, my father left home to join the Civilian Conservation Corps, working to build highways and parks near Fort Worth.

After Pearl Harbor, those young boys, already outfitted with khaki uniforms, were more or less just marched into the nearest recruiting office and enlisted into the Army.  My father ended up as an engineer on a B-25 bomber—something that still astounds me, since my father was many wonderful things, but he was absolutely incapable of doing anything mechanical.  At any given time, there was a large collection of inoperable lawn mowers behind our garage, because my father had no idea how to change a spark plug or clean an air filter.  I still have his maintenance manuals for his plane and have no idea how he managed to do any of the routine tasks the book describes.

While stationed for training in Fort Worth, my father met my mother at a skating rink after she managed to fall down in front of him enough times to catch his attention.  They fell in love and planned a wedding after the war.  Shortly after becoming engaged, my father was sent to the Pacific Theater for the duration of the war.  Surprisingly, for a poor ol’ country boy with hardly any formal education, he was a prolific letter writer, writing whenever he could—but at least once a week—and those letters are now in my possession.  

Reading the letters is an emotional roller coaster and often requires a little research to understand the cultural references.  The letters were censored, too, so at times, it is impossible to determine where my father was stationed when he wrote a letter.  My father was very young, and this was the first time in his life that he had left Texas, so the letters reveal almost constant amazement at the new, wider world he was experiencing.  The most common topics of the letters are returning to my mother, his hopes for a life after the war, his hatred of traveling by ship, and a general loathing of everything the Army gave him to eat.  

“Oh, darling, I can’t wait to get back to you.  When I get back to Fort Worth, we can celebrate.  I want to take you to a really nice restaurant, you know, the kind where they bring the food right out to your car.”

I can’t be absolutely certain, but I don’t think my father was joking.  My biggest question is who he was going to borrow the car from.