#jonathan darman

[contemplatingoutlander]

If Only More Americans Could See This Place | NY Times Opinion

By Jonathan Darman* | Nov. 11, 2025

Video modified from source. This is a gift 🎁 link so there is no paywall.

Eighty-one years ago this week, men from the advancing U.S. Army stood in a rain-soaked farm field in Margraten, the Netherlands, and established a cemetery. Over the winter and spring that followed, the bloody final months of World War II in Europe transformed that quiet stretch of land into a huge American cemetery, its soil turned over with thousands of fresh graves. [...]

Credit: Jan Staiger for The New York Times

There are fewer and fewer people still alive who lived through World War II. Margraten and the other cemeteries serve as reminders of the sacrifices that Americans made to free Europe. And, at a time when many Americans want to retreat from our responsibilities to the rest of the world, they offer us a warning.

The Netherlands American Cemetery in Margraten includes a map of Allied military operations in World War II. Credit: Jan Staiger for The New York Times

The American service members buried in the soil of Europe grew up in a country where many respectable politicians claimed America had no business preserving peace on the European continent or promoting freedom in the world. There was no NATO, no United Nations, no American-led global order.

When you stoop down on European soil to read an American soldier’s name on a grave, you see how policies sold as “America First” can lead to unthinkable suffering and loss. [...] Approximately 8,300 graves are at Margraten, one of a handful of out-of-the-way cemeteries for America’s war dead near the German borders of France, Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands. Many of the service members buried in these places died in the western Allies’ assault on Germany and its forces in late 1944 and early 1945. [...]

Credit: Jan Staiger for The New York Times

[See more under the cut.]

Margraten lies in the southern part of the Limburg region of the Netherlands, where American troops were billeted in the final months of the European war and where the role of the United States in liberating the country from Nazi occupation is fondly recalled. The Dutch people have long taken pride in the grave adoption here. In a tradition that stretches back to the first Memorial Day after the war, every service member honored in the cemetery has a Dutch adopter who brings flowers and visits his or her place of memorial. Some even correspond with the deceased’s family in the United States.

Every grave at the cemetery has a Dutch adopter. Credit: Jan Staiger for The New York Times

This has always been an essential task of the World War II cemeteries — shrinking the distance across an ocean through the memory of shared sacrifice. [...] In each of the World War II cemeteries, rippling rows of identical white marble crosses and Stars of David mark the final resting place of Americans killed. Each bears an inscription that includes the person’s name, rank, unit, home state and date of death. Some say simply: “Here rests in honored glory a comrade in arms known but to God.”

(Above left): The “Mourning Woman” statue represents women who lost loved ones in the war. (Above right): Restoring a gravestone inscription. Credit: Jan Staiger for The New York Times

Walking through these rows of graves, you feel the sorrow the war visited on every corner of American society. A service member from Oregon lies next to one from Pennsylvania who lies next to one from Arkansas. Dumas is next to Ulander, next to Giudice, next to Smith. [...] It is now more than ever, after all, that America needs the message of its World War II cemeteries. On a Veterans Day when optimism about the American experiment can be hard to summon, they transport us back to a moment when America was an essential force for good.

"The Mourning Woman" | Credit: Shutterstock

In today’s Europe, the need for such a partner remains. At Margraten that August morning, I spoke with a Dutch woman who’d come to visit the cemetery with her young son. He was learning at school about “the problems in the world,” she explained. He’s a little bit nervous, she said, about what would happen “if the Russians come.” She gestured at the rows of graves all around her: “So it’s very important to see everything.”

Not far from where we were standing was Margraten’s “Statue of the Mourning Woman,” a large bronze cast sculpture by the American artist Joseph Kiselewski. It depicts an outsize female figure, a trio of doves at her side, gazing down on an obliterated tree. All she sees is what too many of us have forgotten: the lonely, terrible sorrow that comes in the wake of war.

_____________ *According to The New York Times: "Mr. Darman, a journalist and historian, is the author of 'Becoming FDR.'” Note. The video and all photos were modified from their original source (i.e., the above New York Times article). The order of display for the first photo was changed. The last photo was added from Shutterstock.

[deadpresidents]

All his life, [Lyndon] Johnson had longed to be the central figure in a great drama. He came from a line of men who were expected to make their mark, and did...From his earliest days, young Lyndon was encouraged to think of himself as the natural heir to these men...Both of his grandfathers were Texas politicians -- one was a state legislator and a Texas secretary of state. His father, Sam Jr., served in the Texas legislature, where he passionately fought for policies to improve and transform the life of the forgotten little people in the isolated backcountry. In his early years, Lyndon would watch with wonder as his father, the politician, would enter and conquer a room, turning every eye toward him. Politics, young Lyndon understood, was power, and with power came respect, admiration, even love. He knew it could all be his. On the day of his birth, the family story had it, his grandfather had ridden a horse through the Hill Country, shouting: "A United States Senator was born today!"

Soon, the future senator was demanding the world's attention wherever he went. As a boy of only five or six years, at the Hill Country's Junction School, Johnson refused to read unless he was at the very front of the room, sitting in his teacher's lap, with all of his classmates looking on. In The Path to Power, the first of his definitive volumes on the life of Lyndon Johnson, the historian Robert Caro describes that young student in "Miss Kate" Deadrich's Junction School class: "When Miss Kate excused one of her students to use the privy out back, the student had to write his name on one of the two blackboards that flanked the back door. The other students wrote their names small; whenever Lyndon left the room, he would reach up as high as he could and scrawl his name in capital letters so huge that they took up not one but both blackboards. His schoolmates can remember today -- seventy years later -- that huge LYNDON B. on the left blackboard and JOHNSON on the right."

-- Landslide: LBJ and Ronald Reagan at the Dawn of a New America (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) by Jonathan Darman

[deadpresidents]

you mentioned a book about a year ago called Landslide: LBJ and Ronald Reagan at the Dawn of a New America. Is it worth reading and would you recommend it?

YES! Landslide: LBJ and Reagan at the Dawn of a New America (BOOK | KINDLE) by Jonathan Darman is a must-read. Highly recommended!

[usnatarchives]

Landslide: LBJ and Ronald Reagan at the Dawn of a New America

In Landslide, author Jonathan Darman tells the story of two giants of American politics, Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan. From 1963 to 1966, these two men—the same age, and driven by the same heroic ambitions—changed American politics forever. From Johnson’s election in 1964, the greatest popular–vote landslide in American history, to the pivotal 1966 midterms, when Reagan burst forth onto the national stage, Landslide brings alive a country transformed—by riots, protests, the rise of television, the shattering of consensus—and the two towering personalities whose choices would reverberate through the country for decades to come. A book signing will follow the program.

Monday, September 29, at noon in the William G. McGowan Theater

The discussion will be streamed live on YouTube.

[deadpresidents]

Through the long telescope of history, then, the ground between Reagan and Johnson appears vast, the distance between two opposite visions from two opposite moments in time. And it is the distance, as well, between two opposite types of men. It is hard to think of two Presidents in modern history, after all, who approached the office more differently than Reagan and Johnson. Johnson was among the most hyperactive executives the White House had ever seen, always seeking to put his fingerprints on every last scrap of administration business no matter how large or small... ...That would never be Reagan -- an actor learns early the benefits of a good night's sleep. From his earliest days in politics, Reagan was supremely confident in his own abilities as an executive. He had come to prominence in a career in which he constantly had to give up control -- to producers and directors and studio bosses, to makeup designers and camera operators and press agents, to critics and millions of anonymous strangers who would form consequential opinions of him as they watched on distant screens. When he began his political career in the mid-1960s, he took to the disaggregated life of a political candidate quickly. Most first-time candidates struggle to adapt to the existence in which they must surrender control of their lives to other people. Reagan had been doing it for years. He understood an important distinction that Johnson never grasped: being in control and being successful aren't always the same thing... Each was a gifted performer and raconteur who could captivate an audience. But they excelled in different settings. Johnson was best in person. He was overwhelming, always, and his conversations hummed with transactional momentum. He told involved and engaging Texas tall tales, but he usually told them in order to drive home a pertinent point. He made use of his large girth and six-foot-three-inch frame. All the clichéd metaphors of politics -- glad-handing, buttonholing, back stroking, arm twisting -- were things Johnson actually, physically did in order to get his way. His greatest asset was his intuitive sensitivity to human emotion, his unmatched ability to spot people's highest ambitions and their darkest fears. Even Alabama Governor George Wallace, one of the twentieth century's most notorious racial demagogues, found himself mesmerized by an impassioned Oval Office conference with Johnson in the midst of a tense 1965 standoff over racial protests in Wallace's home state. "Hell," said Wallace afterward, "if I'd stayed in there much longer, he'd have had me coming out for civil rights." A conversation with Reagan, on the other hand, was usually pleasant and entirely superficial. In his early days as a politician, supporters would often walk away from first encounters with candidate Reagan disappointed. He'd told funny jokes, they'd laughed heartily, they'd had a ball. But they couldn't remember much if any substance to what he'd said. The problem wasn't that Reagan was an empty suit; rather, he struggled to connect with people when they came too close. Even his own children encountered a fog in their father's eyes when they greeted him in a room. He was friendly, but he gave the impression that he was meeting them for the first time. He was better with an audience watching him. Better still if they were watching him on a television screen from the comfort of their own homes. In these moments, he was great. He launched his 1966 campaign for governor with a thirty-minute television advertisement in which he pensively strolled around a comfortable living room. It was all so wonderfully familiar and authentic. There were pictures on the wall and a fire in the fireplace; Reagan's sharp, pithy summation of California's and the nation's problems seemed to come to him spontaneously, a kindly father figure opining on issues of the day. None of it was real -- the sentences were scripted and the living room was a studio set. But Californians didn't mind; they were starting to expect their politicians to be great performers on TV. Television was taking over politics in the midsixties. Anyone who'd lived through the Kennedy years could see that. Johnson could see that, and he worked tirelessly to adapt, but never with much success. As President, he obsessed over his televised press conferences, bringing in a shifting cast of experts for coaching on his diction, his posture, his eyewear. But his problem was fundamental: performing for a TV camera, he could never do what he did in person, he couldn't see his audience and adapt his personality accordingly. And that introduced a terrifying possibility: that the people watching would see him as himself. Johnson and Reagan, then, were both stars, but stars of different eras. It is difficult to fit them inside a single picture -- when the mind focuses on one of them, the other becomes a blur. Even in the lore of practical politics, where both names have assumed vaunted status in recent years, they inhabit separate realms. Reagan is the President that politicians from both parties publicly say they admire -- principled, noble, and strong. But Johnson is the President they secretly long to be -- ruthless, effective, a man who got big things done.

Landslide: LBJ and Ronald Reagan at the Dawn of a New America by Jonathan Darman (BOOK | KINDLE), Available Tuesday, September 23rd from Random House

[elliottholt]

I'm excited for LANDSLIDE by Jonathan Darman. Coming in September!