Books in Brief: I’ve Seen It Happen Twice: First Hand Reports on a World in Crisis

I’ve Seen It Happen Twice: First Hand Reports on a World in Crisis, by Lillian T. Mowrer (Devin-Adair, 263 pp., $5.95). Lots of this ground has been covered before: the retreat through France ahead of Hitler’s Panzers in 1940; the struggle to get the United States into the War; the founding of the United Nations; and the twenty years of broken hopes and promises that followed. It’s not Mrs. Mowrer’s fault the story is so well-known. She tells it briskly and with certain added jollities such as the advice that it is best, if retreating, to retreat in the company of a Rothschild, or the information that Lady Astor’s butler regarded Hitler as “quite a common person, no manners at all!” and that FDR never stopped talking. But what is new and different and absolutely entrancing in Mrs. Mowrer’s book is the final section in which she sets out, three centuries later, on a piece of historical detection. It is about John Scott of Long Island, sent to the colonies at the age of ten as an indentured servant because of his involvement in a Stuart plot; a young man who prospered in the new land, got into trouble with colonial authorities, surfaced in England where he was involved in the Pepys scandal. A thoroughly bad lot so history tells us. But Mrs. Mowrer got interested. She spent literally years in national archives, libraries, county seats, parsonages, old attics and, in the end, she succeeded in clearing John Scott’s name. The things Pepys and his attorneys said about that man—lies all.