With the death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, something seemed to die in each one of us. Yet the memory of that bright, vivid personality, that great ge… - Samuel Eliot Morison

Of course, what we should all like to attain in writing history is style. “The sense for style,” says Whitehead in his Aims of Education, “is an aesthetic sense, based on admiration for the direct attainment of a foreseen end, simply and without waste. Style in art, style in literature, style in science, style in logic, style in practical execution, have fundamentally the same aesthetic qualities, namely, attainment and restraint. Style, in its finest sense, is the last acquirement of the educated mind; it is also the most useful. It pervades the whole being. . . Style is the ultimate morality of mind.”

Even the earliest colonial historians, like William Bradford and Robert Beverley, knew that; they put conscious art into their narratives. And the historians of our classical period, Prescott and Motley, Irving and Bancroft, Parkman and Fiske, were great literary craftsmen. Their many-volumed works sold in sufficient quantities to give them handsome returns; even today they are widely read. But the first generation of seminar-trained historians, educated in Germany or by teachers trained there, imagined that history would tell itself, provided one was honest, thorough, and painstaking. Some of them went so far as to regard history as pure science and to assert that writers thereof had no more business trying to be “literary” than did writers of statistical reports or performers of scientific experiments. Professors warned their pupils (quite unnecessarily) against “fine writing,” and endeavored to protect their innocence from the seductive charm of Washington Irving or the masculine glamour of Macaulay.

Thus, for the neutralized but virtually impregnable Fortress Rabaul, the Allies substituted a better base behind the Bismarcks Barrier, further advanced along the New Guinea-Mindanao axis, more useful to the Allies and dangerous to the enemy. Algernon Sidney's motto, Manus haec inimica tyrannis, "this hand, enemy to tyrants," applied to a Manus that he never knew; for Manus in the Admiralties proved to be one of those air and naval bases, like Saipan and Okinawa, whose possession by the Allies rendered the defeat of Japan inevitable.