My Distant Mirror
by Not Sure
14 June 2026
My mother was born in the middle of the Great Depression, in the panhandle of northern Florida, to parents with no money and with four boys ahead of her. My grandfather was a brick mason and stonemason, but not a Freemason. He was of Scottish and Irish descent with a bit of American Indian mixed in. In his young days, during Prohibition, he and a couple of his buddies had been ‘rum runners.’ We hear that term less than ‘bootlegger,’ but rum running was the illegal smuggling of alcoholic beverages into the United States via sea, from places where alcohol was legal, such as Canada, Mexico, the Bahamas, and Cuba. I’d heard a couple of whispered stories about this part of my Granddaddy’s life, but finally on the day of his 100th birthday, I sat next to him on the back steps of his humble home and asked him about it. He told me a few stories about ‘going down to Cuba’ but when I asked if I could put it on my new video camera, he got quietly ornery and said I was trying to ‘steal his soul’ and he wanted no part of having his ‘image captured.’ I put the camera in its bag, but by then his lips were sealed.
My mother’s mother was a short, stout, sour woman. I believe she died when I was in my early teens, but I have a few vivid memories of her. We were there for a celebration of their 50th wedding anniversary, and that day was captured on still film. Granny and Grandaddy stood behind their table, covered with a plain, white tablecloth, and a simple homemade cake. On the wall behind them were some gold paper letters that read ’50.’ Granny was not smiling. I never remember her smiling, and neither do any of my brothers. Granny was of Scottish and Irish descent with a whole lot more American Indian mixed in. The tribes were Creek and Blackfoot and Cherokee.
Creek Indians were also called Muscogee or Mvskoke. They are a confederation of Indigenous peoples from the Southeastern Woodlands, primarily inhabiting present-day Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. They descended from the Mississippian culture (c. 800–1500 BC) and are one of the Five Civilized Tribes. During the early Federal period of the United States, a distinction was made between ‘civilized’ Indians and ‘wild’ or ‘savage’ Indians. George Washington believed that the only way Indians could live alongside whites was if they were ‘civilized’ and adopted the ways of Anglo-American culture. In practice, this meant that the men gave up hunting and took up farming, supplanting the role women had traditionally served, who in turn became housekeepers, caring for children, and weaving cotton. The Five Civilized Tribes in the Southeast included the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee (Creek), and Seminole.
Granny’s family were two parts Civilized and one part Savage. The Blackfoot Confederacy were powerful warriors and hunters whose territory ranged from Montana up into Canada in Alberta and Saskatchewan. In the early 19th century, they acquired firearms and horses, and traveled far, hunting bison. The Southeastern Woodlands were not their territory, and I don’t know where in Granny’s line someone met up with a Savage; one of my mother’s brothers was honorary Chief of a large confederation of Creek Indians and was the keeper of that part of the family history.
My Grandad was an excellent farmer, as was the brother who was Chief. Their two houses were on either side of a large farm plot where they grew corn, beans, tomatoes, peppers, muscadine grapes, and peanuts. After my Grandad died (either just before, or just after his 101st birthday), my uncle the Chief, dedicated a large section of the land to raising worms to sell to fishermen.
The house my mother was raised in was built by her father. It was quite small, a simple wood-sided house with a stone siding that ran from the ground up about a meter. There was a porch swing, where I sat reading for hours as a child, sometimes accompanied by another member of the family. Every summer for all my childhood, we made the long drive from Texas to northern Florida where we stayed for a couple of weeks. The books came from my parent’s home. I can’t recall any books in my grandparent’s home except the Bible. After my Grandad gave up rum running to become a stonemason and raise his family, he became quite sternly religious.
I do not remember my Granny outside the kitchen, ever. Their kitchen was the size of a very small bathroom or large closet. It consisted of an oven with a stovetop, a deep metal sink, and a narrow strip of counter about a meter long. There were a few cupboards above the counter, and a few below. These were covered with homemade cotton curtains. In this tiny, humble closet of a kitchen, my Granny made the most incredible feasts, three times a day. When I was not on the porch reading or running down past the giant garden to play with my cousins, I was in Granny’s kitchen watching her cook, asking her questions, and helping when she let me. I think she liked me, but she was never affectionate, and you already know she didn’t smile.
For breakfast, there was bacon and sausage and scrambled or fried eggs and toast from homemade bread, with muscadine grape jam. For lunch, there were sandwiches with homemade pickles, or battered fish and fries. For dinner, there were pork chops, and corn on the cob, and green beans and sliced fresh tomatoes and cucumbers. If someone in the family or neighborhood didn’t hunt it, catch it, grow it or can it, it wasn’t on the table. That included milk and butter, which my grandparents didn’t make, but it came from somewhere very local. Sadly, I never had any of the bacon, sausage, fish or pork chops, because my parents had decided to live as vegetarians (later when I was gone, as gluten-free vegans). My mother carted cans of soy and wheat gluten meat substitutes from Texas to Florida and she prepared those for her family. To this day, my three brothers believe this was better for us than meat.
For most of my childhood, it was just the little area where Granny cooked where everything was done and stored, but in the last few years of her life, she got what was surely her pride and joy. Grandad added on a covered back porch to the house. On the screen side was a long, low freezer filled with meat, game and fish, and on the opposite wall, floor to ceiling metal shelves filled with her canned fruits and vegetables, preserves and pickles.
Everything Granny made was so good that to this day I can conjure a taste in my mind’s eye, but without a doubt my top favorites were her boiled peanuts and her skillet cornbread. Boiled peanuts are a Southern specialty, where raw, green peanuts are boiled in salt for several hours. The texture and briny flavor are so yummy. But even more remarkable was Granny’s cornbread. Now, this is important: Southerners despise Yankee cornbread, with its yellow cake-like texture and sugary sweetness. To this day, I’m disgusted by that and won’t even eat it for politeness’ sake. Southern cornbread done right is dense with a crispy crust. Here’s the basic idea, because I’m not going to get up and go downstairs and rummage for a recipe I don’t use.
Cast iron skillet, about 10”
Preheat the skillet in 450-degree oven
Whisk 2 cups of white cornmeal (yellow if that’s all you can find) and ¾ cups all-purpose flour with a tsp. baking soda and a tsp. baking powder and a tsp. salt.
(Years ago, I had one of my aunts ship me proper white cornmeal that can only be found in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and northern Florida; all the way from Florida to southern California, to the delight and astonishment of my friends).
¼ cup salted or unsalted butter, melt it - plus about 2 tablespoons butter
1 or 2 eggs, depending on size
2 cups of buttermilk wonderful, regular milk also fine
Whisk milk, eggs, ¼ c butter
Mix wet ingredients with dry. Don’t overmix.
Take pre-heated skillet out of oven and put 2 tbl. butter in it and melt it on your stovetop, low to medium heat. When skillet is coated with melted butter, pour in batter and cook on stovetop for about two minutes, three maybe. Don’t burn it. You are going for a sealing crust. Put it in the oven and bake it for about 20 minutes until the top starts to turn golden. Use hot pads, don’t burn yourself. Serve with plenty of butter. Don’t be a Yankee and gild the lily. This doesn’t need whole kernels of corn added to the batter. It doesn’t need jam or preserves. If you must, drizzle honey on it, preferably from your own hive, or that of a neighbor.
My mother was a self-made woman. The best piece of functional ‘furniture’ in her parent’s home was an upright piano. To my knowledge, no one in the family played it but my mother. Perhaps my Grandad got it to peck out hymns. As Mom told it, the piano was her refuge. I do not think that she considered her childhood home to be a happy place; she never said what she didn’t like about her family. She escaped the tension and drama by playing for hours a day. Her playing became so accomplished that she won a scholarship to university where she majored in music and met my father. She married him just credits shy of graduation and had four children before she was thirty; putting my father through grad school by teaching piano and playing the pipe organ at area churches. He got a master’s degree in music, and a PhD in Music Theory, which was a rigorous five-year doctoral program. We children weren’t impressed by the PhD which we called, “piled higher and deeper.” When my eldest brother was nearly through university, my mother returned and they graduated the same year. Then she got a master’s degree in history and taught music and history at the high school level until she ‘retired’ to her church job playing organ.
Mom was the smartest woman I ever knew, at least up into my teens. Looking back on it, I’m sure she knew nothing about Physics or Mathematics or Engineering, but there wasn’t much that she didn’t have deep knowledge of, especially related to music and history. Whistle a few bars and she’d tell you whether it was Brahms or Chopin, and what the symphony or movement was. If you asked her the name of a flower or shrub she would give you the Latin name, genus species, Rosa gallica. She loved history and she instilled that in all four of her children. It seemed to me that she knew everything, but her areas of greatest expertise were American and English history. I’m not sure why Mom loved the English so much, but I suspect that there was some association in her mind of English people and English history with refinement. They were older than Americans. They came first. They gave the world William Shakespeare and Geoffrey Chaucer, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Daniel Dafoe, Virginia Woolf, and Jonathan Swift. Saint Anselm of Canterbury, Roger Bacon, Thomas More, and John Locke. Her devotion didn’t stop with English writers, philosophers, or royalty. She loved All Creatures Great and Small, Downton Abbey, and Yes, Minister. Brideshead Revisited, and I, Claudius. Absolutely Fabulous and Inspector Morse. She loved Two Fat Ladies Cooking and of course, Fawlty Towers. As to décor, English chintz and cabbage-roses. You could call my mother an Anglophile.
But she never quite polished out the Savage. True story. One time, we were headed to Florida during the Thanksgiving season which was not a customary time for us to visit her family. She looked up at a billboard advertising a turkey shoot at an upcoming fairground. The event was to start within an hour of our passing through the area. “Oh, honey, lets stop. I want to enter the turkey shoot.” My father replied, “Well, dear, you don’t have a rifle and we don’t eat turkey.” She prevailed. We stopped at the fairground and my mother signed up for the competition and rented a rifle. I had never seen my mother with a gun in her hands. There were no guns in our house. She had never expressed an interest in shooting. She did not like Westerns, nor in any way had she taken on the styling of a Texan or Annie Oakley. But there she was, rifle in hand, shorter by a foot than all the men, and one of only a handful of women entered. Cool as a cucumber, she approached the firing line.
I was eleven. My younger brother was nine. My eldest brother was not with us on that trip, but the second eldest was; he was sixteen. There were several elimination rounds, and she came through them all. She finished second place. No turkey, but a story that we will never forget.
***
In one of my mother’s bookshelves, which is now in my bedroom, are four Barbara Tuchman books. The Guns of August is about the first month of World War I. A Distant Mirror is 14th century France. The March of Folly covers the Reformation to the Vietnam War. The First Salute was about the American Revolution. I have only read A Distant Mirror, many years ago because my mother said it was a wonderful book and I must read it. I have only the vaguest recollection, but I retain the sense that I was engaged while reading.
In this Redux from January 2006, Alan Watt and Vyzygoth discussed Barbara Tuchman. Alan said, “…it’s so obvious to me that she is a chosen author to get into these archives, because she’s been authorized to come out with the information that she has. Now, many authors have got in before and omitted this relevant information about the past, but she is allowed to bring it to the public. So, they are definitely authorized on what to disclose and how much to disclose and what aspects never to mention, you see.”
All I knew about Tuchman was that my mother thought she was a wonderfully vivid writer, an excellent historian, and I remembered she had won the Pulitzer Prize for literature a time or two. Today, I have learned a lot about Barbara W. Tuchman. She was the daughter of Maurice Wertheim, a wealthy banker who owned The Nation magazine. He was the president of the American Jewish Committee, and he founded the Theatre Guild in New York. Her mother was the daughter of Henry Morgenthau, who served as Woodrow Wilson’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. It is noteworthy that the Ottoman Empire was defeated in World War I.
Barbara’s uncle was Henry Morgenthau, Jr., U.S. Secretary of the Treasury under Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was instrumental in designing the New Deal, and shaping foreign policy, including Lend-Lease, support for China, helping Jewish refugees, and proposing how to deindustrialize Germany as outlined in the Morgenthau Plan.
In 1940, Barbara Wertheim married Lester Tuchman, an internist and professor of clinical medicine. They had three daughters, one of whom is Jessica Tuchman Mathews, who has been employed by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace since 1997, and from 1997 to 2015, she served as its president. She has had employment across the Executive and Legislative branches of government and has worked as a researcher in biochemistry and biophysics, and as a journalist. Jessica Mathews is considered an international affairs expert whose focus is climate and energy, defense and security, nuclear weapons, and conflict and governance. She has worked for the National Security Council and was a fellow at the Council on Foreign Affairs. She is on the steering committee of the Bilderberg Group.
Barbara Tuchman’s father bought the Windygoul estate in Cos Cob, Connecticut in 1900 from the naturalist and author Ernest Thompson Seton for what would have been in today’s money the whopping figure of $250,000 in 1900 dollars. Windygoul is Scottish for ‘windy glen.’ In 1962, Tuchman used her Pulitzer Prize money for The Guns of August to construct a secluded wooden writing cabin on the hill above the main house. She maintained a schedule of twelve-hour days, and solitude from everyone including family. When Tuchman died in 1989, the property (originally nearly 150 acres) of 43.4 acres and the old private residence became part of a protracted legal battle between the three daughters. Alma Tuchman had moved to the estate in the late 1980s to care for her parents. Attached is a link to the court case, Eisenberg v. Tuchman for those of you who might be curious. Alma wished to follow her mother’s intention that the estate be kept intact for a public space. The other sisters were successful in dividing the land, selling off sections so they could collect proceeds from the sale. The sisters ceased speaking to one another. The house was vandalized and eventually fell into disrepair and was demolished by the town which could not afford its upkeep.
Tuchman began her first book in 1948 to document events in the Middle East. The book was entitled Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour (1956). Her second book The Zimmerman Telegram (1958) analyzed the cable which helped turn American public opinion against the Germans in World War I. Included below is a link to a 2015 article by Asa Winstanley entitled “Britain and Palestine in history: the racism of Barbara Tuchman.”
This is a long quote from that article. “You see Tuchman was a most fanatical Zionist ideologue and apologist for Empire. Her thesis was apparently titled “The Moral Justification for the British Empire” – but one does not need to know that to detect her love for European Empires practically glowing off every page of this book.
The book is recommended, though with reservations, by Israeli historian Shlomo Sand, in his book The Invention of the Land of Israel (which I thoroughly enjoyed), a fascinating account of how the “Land of Israel” was transformed by Zionism from an metaphysical religious concept in Judaism (which in fact largely prohibited Jews from living in Palestine) to a concrete political justification for a project of colonization.
Sand says that while the book is “one of the most fascinating and comprehensive studies ever undertaken on Britain’s role in the birth of Zionism” it suffers from the fatal flaw of “crude Orientalism, manifested in its complete blindness and indifference to the original inhabitants of Palestine” (page 145n).
Sand is certainly correct. The Palestinians themselves are almost totally ignored in the book’s narrative. Their stories, wants, needs and desires are of no relevance to Tuchman. The only people who count are the agents and rulers of Empire. Foremost among these as far as she is concerned are the leaders and founders of Zionism, such as Herzl, Weizmann and their ideological forerunners.
Zionism for Tuchman was clearly a deeply metaphysical thing. Her faith in the political project of Zionism was clearly so strong that it came with an almost religious fervour. She writes in a preface to the 1980s edition that the entire concept of the book was “inspired by the re-creation [sic] of the state of Israel” – and that the research was even begun in 1948, the year of the Nakba (when Zionist militias expelled by force some 750,000 Palestinians in order to carve out their new state in that ancient land).”
***
Today as I was reading about Tuchman and the author who follows, I was reminded of a recent conversation with Dom Waterson and Nick Heys about Dom’s book entitled Traitors: The Plandemic Politicians, and the quote he shared from Mark Devlin that “No one’s dad is a plumber.” Whenever we investigate the genealogies of our politicians, media presenters, writers, musicians, and actors, this becomes glaringly apparent. A self-made woman who is the daughter of a rum running stonemason and an unsmiling mistress of skillet cornbread may achieve the pleasures that come to a curious mind, but she will not breed offspring who are asked to join the Council on Foreign Relations or the steering committee of the Bilderberg Group.
***
A quote from Alan’s conversation with Vyzygoth which was recorded in 2005 and published in January 2006. “And if we go back to the beginnings, again, of this system - I like to jump back and forth, because this is a continuum, and people get stuck or hung up on certain aspects of history, which is sort of hung out for us to see on the washing line, and I think it’s deliberately too. Because really this system has been unbroken for thousands of years. It’s a system where a few people can get everyone else to work for them, take their labor from them through the money they introduce and they take it back in the form of taxation, and with that money that everyone accepts they can hire and maintain in the field armies and pay them, you see. And then they can go and conquer other countries; so this has been a continuum for thousands of years; and if we look at even the definition of a “citizen” - well, a citizen basically means “someone who was born into an organized society with pre-existing duties to that society.”
***
A wee glance at Walter Isaacson who was born in 1952 to Irwin Isaacson. There are no overt Masonic connections, unless we read between the lines, which I like to do. The stories there in the blank spaces are lively and provocative. Irwin Isaacson Jr. was born in 1925 in New Orleans, where he gained prominence for his engineering work on major local landmarks (enter the Builder), including the Louisiana Superdome, the International Trade Mart (World Trade Center), and the Rivergate. He served as President and Chairman of Weil and Moses Inc. and later as Chairman of IMC Consulting Engineers and was a graduate of Tulane University with a degree in mechanical engineering.
This is where I make a logical leap, because the Isaacson genealogy is not publicized with neat connections. Irwin Isaacson (presumably Sr.) was born in 1901, and died in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1969. He was a medical doctor. His wife was Irma Moses Isaacson who outlived him by four years. Their gravestone is viewable online. This is how the Masonic breeding system works. The generations improve in a tidy, architectural fashion. The doctor fathers an engineer. The engineer fathers a Rhodes Scholar. Walter Isaacson was born in New Orleans and had the opportunity to study at a summer program called Telluride Association. More engineering/building connections to that organization. Check out some of the alumni if you are curious. Steven Weinberg, Barber Conable, Eve Sedgwick, Francis Fukuyama, Paul Wolfowitz, Jan Švejnar, Dominick LaCapra, William vanden Heuvel, William T. Vollman, Stacy Abrams, Daniel Alarcón, and Gayatri Spivak.
Walter Isaacson studied history and literature at Harvard University and from there he went to Pembroke College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He embarked on an illustrious career in journalism, becoming CEO of CNN in 2001. In 2003, he stepped down from that position to become president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a position he held until 2018. In past years, I have extensively covered the Aspen Institute, and all the overlap and interlock, the Aspen Security Group, thick with members of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. Naturally, Isaacson is a member of both.
He co-authored The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (1986), Kissinger: A Biography (1992), Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2003), Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007), Steve Jobs (2011), The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (2014), Leonardo da Vinci (2017), The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race (2021), Elon Musk (2023), and The Greatest Sentence Ever Written (2025).
Isaacson is a star-maker, an historian and popularizer, but he is much more than that. He helps to shape policy. He co-chaired the Louisiana Recovery Authority after Hurricane Katrina. He co-chaired the U.S.-Vietnamese dialogue on Agent Orange. He was appointed to the advisory committee of the National Institutes of Health. Obama made him Chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors which runs Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and other international broadcasts of the U.S. government.
In 2022, Walter Isaacson and his attorney wife, Cathy moved to a new 4,000 square foot apartment in New Orleans. They still maintain an Upper West Side apartment near Central Park in Manhattan but have always kept a residence in the city they call their “spiritual” home. With 12-foot-high ceilings and a “New York loft culture” feel, the kitchen has plenty of room, but does Cathy make Walter skillet cornbread slathered in butter?
© Not Sure
Historian Barbara Tuchman on Why Modern Politicians Should Be More Like George Washington
https://billmoyers.com/content/barbara-tuchman/
Barbara Tuchman’s Comments on Israel
https://jcfa.org/article/barbara-tuchmans-comments-on-israel/
Britain and Palestine in history: The racism of Barbara Tuchman
EISENBERG v. TUCHMAN (2006)
https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/ct-court-of-appeals/1264412.html
The Gardens of August: Wyndygoul
https://www.asla.org/news-insights/the-field/the-gardens-of-august-wyndygoul
Barbara Tuchman - historian, journalist, author (Alan said she was given access to archives, authorized to write about certain things. Her maternal grandfather was Henry Morgenthau Sr., her uncle, Henry Morgenthau Jr.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_W._Tuchman
Tuchman's father - Maurice Wertheim, investment banker, environmentalist
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Wertheim
Barbara Tuchman's daughter - international affairs expert
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica_Mathews
Walter Isaacson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Isaacson
With 12-Foot Ceilings and a Dash of Southern Charm, This House Is a Love Letter to New Orleans
https://www.elledecor.com/design-decorate/house-interiors/a41093998/walter-isaacson-new-orleans/