Volume 10, Number 3 · February 15, 1968
Wings of the Hawk
By Elinor Langer
The Billy Mitchell Affair
by Burke Davis
Random House, 373 pp., $7.95
Who remembers Billy Mitchell? If he is remembered at all, he may be confused with Gary Cooper who played the screen version of his screen-version life: the brilliant officer who correctly understood that airplanes would change warfare and ruined his career trying to advance military aviation against the designs of army men who were either too obtuse or too self-protective to read the handwriting on the wall. The story has a benign shape, like the story of Robert Fulton or of other visionaries who were later proven right; Mitchell's just happened to be a vision of destruction, honored today only by the most obviously destructive institution in our society, the United States Air Force.
Review, 2525 words
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