In 1878 Queen Victoria invited to lunch an elderly naval officer who was hard of hearing. For a time the two discussed the recent sinking of the naval training ship Eurydice. Then, to turn to a lighter subject, the queen inquired after the admiral’s sister.

“Well, ma’am,” he replied, “I am going to have her turned over and take a good look at her bottom and have it well scraped.”

“The effect of his answer was stupendous,” wrote the queen’s grandson, Kaiser Wilhelm II. “My grandmother put down her knife and fork, hid her face in her handkerchief and shook and heaved with laughter till the tears rolled down her face.”

On Nov. 24, 2004, sign language interpreter Nataliya Dmytruk was presenting a live news broadcast on a state-run Ukrainian television channel when the voice announcer (and her official script) declared that prime minister Viktor Yanukovych had won the recent run-off presidential election, a result widely believed to be fraudulent.

She signed, “I am addressing everybody who is deaf in Ukraine. Our president is Victor Yushchenko. Do not trust the results of the central election committee. They are all lies. … And I am very ashamed to translate such lies to you. Maybe you will see me again.”

Her act emboldened other Ukrainian journalists to stand up against manufactured news accounts and led to another election, in which Yushchenko, the opposition candidate, was declared the winner.

For her stand, Dmytruk received the International John Aubuchon Freedom of the Press Award. “After every broadcast I had to render in sign language, I felt dirty,” she explained later. “I wanted to wash my hands. Without telling anyone, I just went in and did what my conscience told me to do.”

Gerald Ford served as both vice president and president but was elected to neither office.

He was appointed to the vice presidency when Spiro Agnew resigned, and he succeeded Richard Nixon as president.

Letter from Richard Byrd to his son shortly after establishing Marie Byrd Land, Feb. 22, 1929:

Dear Dickie–

I have named a big new land after mommie because mommie is the sweetest finest and nicest and best person in the world. Take good care of her and be awfully sweet to her while I’m away.

I love you my dear boy.

Daddy
Little America
Antarctica

Supreme Court justice James Clark McReynolds (1862-1946) was known as “the rudest man in Washington.” In 27 years on the court, his behavior made this seem an understatement.

In choosing law clerks, McReynolds refused to accept “Jews, drinkers, blacks, women, smokers, married or engaged individuals.” A blatant antisemite, he refused to speak to Louis Brandeis, the court’s first Jewish justice, and in 1924 refused even to sit next to him for the court’s annual photo. After urging Herbert Hoover not to “afflict the Court with another Jew,” he pointedly read a newspaper during Benjamin Cardozo’s swearing-in ceremony. “For four thousand years,” he told Oliver Wendell Holmes, “the Lord tried to make something out of the Hebrews, then gave it up as impossible and turned them out to prey on mankind in general — like fleas on the dog, for example.”

McReynolds’ intolerance extended to everyone around him. When justice Harlan Fiske Stone remarked on the dullness of one attorney’s argument, McReynolds returned, “The only duller thing I can think of is to hear you read one of your opinions.” He objected to women’s wearing red nail polish and men’s wearing wristwatches, and he declared tobacco smoke “personally objectionable.” He once tried to defend his impartiality by saying he tried to protect “the poorest darkie in the Georgia backwoods as well as the man of wealth in a mansion on Fifth Avenue.”

Chief justice William Howard Taft called McReynolds “selfish to the last degree,” “fuller of prejudice than any man I have ever known,” and “one who delights in making others uncomfortable.” Even historians seem to hate him. In his biographical dictionary of the court, Timothy L. Hall calls McReynolds “the most boorish man ever to hold a seat there,” and Rebecca S. Shoemaker calls him “irascible and a racist.” He died alone at 84 — in Hall’s words, “unwept-for and unloved.”

In the wall of the north portion of the White House is a bell. On a recent afternoon, President Coolidge pressed this bell repeatedly, scampered quickly away. To the north portico rushed a detail of Secret Service men, to whom the bell’s ringing was a summons to come at once. From a distance, the President watched their confusion, heard them ask the Secret Service man on patrol duty why he had rung the bell, heard the patrolman’s denial of any bell-ringing. After the guards had dispersed, the President stole back, again pressed the button, again trotted away, chuckled as the previous scene repeated itself. Pleased, the President several times repeated his little prank. Eventually the Secret Service detail discovered the source of the false alarms, put in another bell in a spot unknown to the President. When this story became public, persons who question the existence of a presidential sense of humor flouted its accuracy. Yet Richard Jervis, head of the Executive Secret Service detail, vouched solemnly for it.

— Time, Jan. 21, 1929

On Jan. 7, 1941, eleven months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, ambassador Joseph Clark sent this telegram to the U.S. State Department:

A member of the Embassy was told by my ——- colleague that from many quarters, including a Japanese one, he had heard that a surprise mass attack on Pearl Harbor was planned by the Japanese military forces, in case of ‘trouble’ between Japan and the United States; that the attack would involve the use of all the Japanese military facilities.

Grew added, “My colleague said that he was prompted to pass this on because it had come to him from many sources, although the plan seemed fantastic.”

The U.S. did nothing, but it had already demonstrated its myopia. On Sept. 27, 1940, Douglas MacArthur had said, “Japan will never join the Axis.” Japan joined the Axis the next day.

On Sept. 13, 1862, members of the 27th Indiana Infantry were awaiting orders on a hillside near Frederick, Md., as Robert E. Lee’s Confederate troops approached from the south. One of the men noticed a package on the ground and discovered three cigars wrapped in a piece of paper. The men were rejoicing in their good fortune when a sergeant noticed writing on the paper — it was headed “Headquarters of the Army of Northern Virginia.”

They had discovered Lee’s battle plan. The orders had been issued to Gen. D.H. Hill, but one of his staff officers had apparently dropped them; Hill received a second copy from Stonewall Jackson and had not realized that the first set had been lost.

The plans passed quickly up the line, and that afternoon Union general George C. McClellan was wiring the president, “I have all the plans of the rebels, and will catch them in their own trap.” The battle of Sept. 17, Antietam, was the bloodiest single day of the Civil War. It repelled the rebel army and permitted Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation from a position of strength.

Lee later told a friend: “I went into Maryland to give battle, and could I have kept Gen. McClellan in ignorance of my position and plans a day or two longer, I would have fought and crushed him.”

In a 1772 letter to Joseph Priestley, Ben Franklin described a method “for arriving at decisions in doubtful cases.” He would divide a sheet of paper into two columns, labeled Pro and Con, and during the course of three or four days record all the motives for and against the idea. Then he’d assign a weight to each consideration. Where he could find arguments, sometimes in combination, that counterbalanced one another, he would strike them out:

Should I enter into business with Mr. Smith?

(This example is from Paul C. Pasles, Benjamin Franklin’s Numbers, 2008.) This exercise would show him where the balance lay, and if after a day or two of further reflection no additional considerations occurred to him, he would come to a decision.

“Though the weight of reasons cannot be taken with the precision of algebraic quantities, yet, when each is thus considered separately and comparatively, and the whole lies before me, I think I can judge better, and am less liable to make a rash step; and in fact I have found great advantage from this kind of equation, in what may be called moral or prudential algebra.”