Looking for My Country : Finding Myself in America

by MacNeil, Robert

• ISBN13: 9780156029100
• ISBN10: 0156029103
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-04-01
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

Respected journalist Robert MacNeil did not receive a personal response from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt when he wrote to him in 1942 as an eleven-year-old boy living in Nova Scotia. He did, however, receive a personal letter and a large gift from the American consul. This gesture of generosity is the departure point for MacNeil's exploration of nationality, loyalty, and one of the reasons he eventually became an American citizen in 1997. Born in Canada and witness to many pivotal moments in history as a journalist in England and America, MacNeil's memoir integrates historical events from the past seventy years with his own personal story to provide an intimate glance at one man who became inseparably connected with America and her people. With a reporter's sharp analysis and an autobiographer's introspection, Looking for My Country delivers a story that is both touching and thought-provoking.

Author Biography

ROBERT MacNEIL was the coanchor of PBS’s MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour until his retirement in 1995. He has written two volumes of memoirs and three novels. MacNeil grew up in Nova Scotia, the setting for his bestselling memoir Wordstruck. He now divides his time between Halifax and New York City.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
1 The Letter to FDR	1	(8)
2 The Robin in the Snow	9	(12)
3 There'll Always Be an England	21	(18)
4 The Land of Indulgence	39	(12)
5 Venerating Stones	51	(32)
6 A Fresh Start	83	(10)
7 A Crash Course in America	93	(28)
8 Seeing America from Britain	121	(14)
9 The North American	135	(16)
10 The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour	151	(26)
11 The Anglo-Canadian-American	177	(20)
12 September 11, 2001	197

Excerpts

THE LETTER TO FDRIn the winter of 1942, a couple of months after Pearl Harbor, I wrote to President Roosevelt.I was eleven, living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. It was the third year of war for Canada, and our strategic port was a vital assembly point for convoys crossing the Atlantic to keep Britain's war effort alive. My father, a lieutenant-commander in the Royal Canadian Naval Reserve, commanded one of the corvettes protecting those merchant ships from Hitler's submarine wolf packs.Even a boy my age could feel the high adrenaline of wartime Halifax. Men in the uniforms of many countries filled our streets; there were blackouts and air-raid drills, collections for scrap paper and metal, and the excitements of my dad's brief times ashore. Chocolate was scarce, my mother fretted over ration books for food and clothes; they built an antiaircraft gun tower beside my school, and we played war games in Point Pleasant Park. I could catch glimpses of the harbor from many places and watch gray warships of different navies slipping by-destroyers and corvettes, sometimes cruisers, even full battleships-inspiring awe and pride. Occasionally I could visit one and be taken over every inch by sailors fresh from the real war at sea.For the rest, life was filled with school, helping with a baby brother born the day after Pearl Harbor, sledding, skating, snow forts and snowball fights, radio programs like The Green Hornet, movies like They Died with Their Boots On, comic books, real books, and my stamp collection.My friend Harold Stevens and I were stamp collectors, but with limited pocket money we almost never bought stamps. We hoped to be given them.We must have read about FDR's collection because it suddenly occurred to us to approach him, and I wrote something like this:Dear President Roosevelt,We have heard that you have a very big stamp collection and people send you stamps from all over the world. But you must be very busy with the war right now and may not have time to play with your collection, or use all the stamps people send you. We were wondering whether you had any extra stamps you didn't want. If so we would be very happy to have them.Yours sincerely,How two painfully well-mannered boys found the effrontery to concoct this brazen missive, I don't know. But I stuck on the red four-cent stamp of King George VI in his wartime uniform, addressed it to the White House, Washington, D.C., U.S.A., and forgot about it.We did not write to our king, who we knew had a stamp collection at least as fabulous as the president's. The king seemed utterly unapproachable and FDR did not.Six weeks or more later, a letter arrived from the American consul in Halifax. Indeed, he wrote, President Roosevelt was too busy with the war to reply personally, but if we cared to come down to the consulate, he was sure they could find us some stamps. We went and were overwhelmed. They gave us a shoe box with hundreds of stamps, including exotic specimens from t

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Excerpted from Looking for My Country: Finding Myself in America by Robert MacNeil
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