Mount Desert Island is northeastern Maine’s largest island, green, mountainous, water, streams, lakes and coves everywhere. The trees on its shores were cut down long ago. The Rockefellers used to come here in the summers, and the Roosevelts. They built homes from the lumber that Samuel Gilpatrick's sawmill cut for them. Sam himself lived on what today is still called Gilpatrick Cove, on land he had cleared with his own hands. Once, way back when, they had come to Maine from Scotland via Ireland, the Gilpatricks. They helped first George Washington chase the English out of the country, and when the redcoats returned in 1812 and refused to leave Maine, there was not a single Gilpatrick who wouldn’t join the militia to kick their British butts.
They now rest at Brookside Cemetery in Northeast Harbor. Without the K. Walter Gilpatrick, a Wall Street lawyer, decided to drop the K and spell his name Gilpatric, and therefore his four children were also named that way. Roswell was the oldest, born in 1906, his summers spent playing in Maine with his childhood friend Nelson Rockefeller who was born around the corner, in Bar Harbor. Now and then I run an unscientific survey, and I ask people if they know who Ros Gilpatric was. Crickets, without exception.
On October 22, 1962, Ros Gilpatric saved the world. Nothing more, nothing less.
When I ask people about Ros's buddy, everyone nods and knows his name. He was Robert McNamara, secretary of defense during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. One day I sat down and had lunch with him: “Hi, I am Bob.” He had brought a table companion, Madelin. Rumor had it that he did so in order to behave better. Bob by himself could be insufferable, always and forever convinced he was right, a problem exacerbated by the reality that he often was.
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