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A future President was tested in conflict seventy-five years ago, but his role goes unmentioned. July 28, 1932 saw the US Army mobilized to drive the “Bonus Army” of World War I veterans out of Washington. At least three veterans died. Douglas MacArthur commanded the soldiers, but who was his deputy?

Dwight Eisenhower goes unmentioned by the Associated Press and the Washington Post.

It’s as Ike and his acolytes would want it. Historian Wyatt Kingseed describes the Supreme Allied Commander’s creation of a minimal role for himself:

“By the time he published At Ease 30 years later, Ike portrayed himself as a frustrated hero of sorts, claiming that he tried to dissuade MacArthur from personally leading the charge. He advised him that Communists held no sway over the marchers, and he reiterated the old claim that his boss ignored White House orders to halt operations. Interestingly, Ike waited until after MacArthur’s death in 1964 to present this version. If it distorted history, MacArthur was not around to contest it.”

The Eisenhower Memorial Commission goes along with the story in one document on it’s site:

“Ike was appalled, for he had counseled MacArthur to avoid unnecessary provocations in confronting his fellow World War I veterans. While publicly defending his chief, Ike was privately bitter about the Army’s attack upon its veterans.”

But there is no mention in the Commission’s vast “legacy ” document that usual suspects Michael Beschloss and Richard Norton Smith lend their names to.

Is downloading porn a problem in the Kennedy Library reading room?

A presentation to teachers on using the web to teach build citizenship skills dissolved into bad

comedy when the library’s Internet filters blocked the presenter from accessing YOUTUBE.

Andy Carvin was trying to make a point about citizenship and the glories and impact of “user generated content” [and don’t that just roll off the tongue!] when the JFK Library’s mighty Wurlitzer failed. Up popped up an “inappropriate” message rather than the Macaca video.

So wrong.

The new Nixon tapes deepen our knowledge of the late President’s “complex” relationship with the Jews. Now Nixon’s “House Jew,” Leonard Garment, has spoken out on his ex boss’s thoughtful utterances.

Garment writes the New York Times that Nixon wasn’t so much anti-Semitic as abrupt. “Let him be the house Jew” is a “characteristic piece of cynical Nixonian shorthand.”

Almost Churchillian in it’s brisk brusqueness!

America, your need for Oval Office Reproduction will not be denied!

Coming soon to Oyster Bay New York, Washington DC, Cambridge Massachusetts, or some berg they can persuade to front the cash, it’s another Presidential Museum!

“Newsday” previews the relentless action:

“It will be a museum where visitors can enter Theodore Roosevelt’s White House Oval Office and witness holographic advisers arguing his options during various crises before seeing how the 26th president handled them.”

Which will be all the more impressive since the Oval Office was only created after Roosevelt left office, under William Howard Taft.

Planners envision something on the order of 80,000 to 100,000 square feet. To give you some perspective, the yet to be built Bush Library is only slated to run 145,000 square feet.

Theodore Roosevelt Association President James Bruns tells “Newsday” that the nation cries out: “The museum sort of rights the wrong that there is no one place that really highlights Theodore Roosevelt’s contributions to the United States and the world.”

And for only fifty to one hundred million this grievous wrong can be corrected. The Association boasts that they are part way there, with twelve people pledging $10,000 each.

Only a few tens of millions to go!

Look for the Teddyists making a virtue of virtualness to their hoped for half million annual visitors, since they’ll have nothing. Harvard and the Library of Congress have his papers, and the museum may be reduced to

operating a high end “Build a Bear” outlet.

“Boss” Tweed Roosevelt wants his great granddaddy’s museum in Anytown USA.

Gerald Ford and the Congressional Path to a Bottle of Dr. Ed Condon’s Feel-Good UFO Elixir

One Robert Barrow returns us to a more innocent time, when a youthful Representative Gerald Ford responded to constituent concerns about mysterious lights in the sky by pressing for federal investigation of UFOs.