Contents

• Introduction / Simon Jenkins
• Editor’s note / Colin Webb
• The 1940s
• The immigrant strain
• Damon Runyon’s America
• Roughing it
• Joe Louis
• Washington, DC
• The fall of New England
• Letter to an intending immigrant
• The 1950s
• The summer bachelor
• It’s a democracy, isn’t it?
• The European’s America
• Getting away from it all
• The court and the Negro
• The colonel of the plains
• HLM : RIP
• The road to Churchill Downs
• Politics and the human animal
• General Marshall
• The 1960s
• Beizbol
• Robert Frost
• The father
• The assassination
• LBJ
• Has the world gone to pot?
• John McLaren’s folly
• The well-dressed American, man!
• A lonely man
• Vietnam
• A bad night in Los Angeles
• Making a home of a house
• Telling one country about another
• Pegler
• ‘Eternal vigilance’ - by whom?
• The 1970s
• The letter from Long Island
• Give thanks, for what?
• The Duke
• The end of the affair
• I’m all right, Jack
• No cabinet officers need apply
• Christmas in Vermont
• Mr. Olmsted’s park
• The retiring kind
• Two for the road
• The spy that came down in the cold
• A letter from Long Island
• The presidential ear
• The 1980s
• Bringing up baby
• Attempted assassination of President Reagan
• The Fourth of July
• Old man Reagan - - Inaugurals - on and off
• Memories of 11 November
• Miss much - no regret
• Expert witness
• The drugs blight
• Time to retire
• Martin Luther King - the black Washington
• Fred Astaire
• Origins of American slang
• Mayor Koch at work
• Hurricanes
• Chaplin - the last word
• San Francisco earthquake
• The 1990s
• Presidential ghosts
• The end of the eighties - great or greedy?
• Fighting in what?
• Riots in Los Angeles
• White House style
• The Irish in New York City
• ‘Give me your tired, your poor …’
• Thirtieth anniversary of Kennedy assassination
• Boston
• Trick or treat
• Fiftieth anniversary of VE day
• O.J. - the verdict
• The old rocking chair
• Silver Watergate
• The end of civilization
• The Kennedy missile tapes
• The evolution of the grand jury
• The president will address the nation
• New words for objects new and old
• Loneliness, male companionship and the hunt
• Park Avenue’s colourful Christmas
• 2000 - 2004
• The death of the old media
• Running mates and carpetbaggers
• The day of judgement
• The origin of the continental blow-out
• America’s day of terror
• America on standby
• The stars and stripes
• Messiah at Christmas
• Ringing the changes
• Arise, Sir Rudolph
• The day the money stopped
• Memory of a true great
• The last of the old-time gangsters
• Farewell to San Francisco
• Remembering a dear friend
• Meeting the stars
• The pledge of allegiance
• Towering glass and steel
• Charlie Addams
• The Democrats’ growing confidence