What's Left

Sunday night

FDR had recently died, and I was standing in his bedroom in the White House, having a good look around. I saw all of the framed pictures on his walls, and then I looked at his night table, to the left of his bed. His eyeglasses were still there. I thought to myself, "These should go to [his] museum." To the left of his glasses I saw that he had been reading a three-volume paperback biography of Winston Churchill; one of the volumes was written by Robert F. Kennedy. Each book had a yellow cover, and they had a distinctive look, because all of them were taller than they were wide -- maybe 6 inches by 3 & 1/2 or 4 inches. I opened one of the books, and found that the inside cover and facing page featured a large photograph of a newspaper, announcing the end of the war in the Pacific. The headline read, "U.S. K.O.'s JAPS."

*****

An interesting dream, if jumbled historically. Churchill outlived FDR by 20 years or so, and Roosevelt did not live to see the end of the war. Robert Kennedy certainly knew a great deal about Churchill, and probably met him, since his father was U.S. Ambassador to England in the late 1930s. RFK and his family met with FDR the day of the president's second inauguration in 1937.

This dream may be dredging up some memories of home in Arlington. My dad had some paperbacks about World War II history that he kept in a table to the left of my parents' bed. At least one of them was "The Rise of the Third Reich" by William Shirer, but there was probably a book or two about Churchill, or maybe a copy of Churchill's history of the war...