HISTORY

The MIP (Most Interesting President)

In Friday’s column, I recounted the time USC President John Hubbard went and ate dinner at a dorm with the students.

So I thought this is a good time to mention how colorful a life he lived, according to his memoir.

  • On a graduation trip (from UT, 1938) to Europe, he and his friend stumbled onto one of the Nuremberg Rallies and heard Hitler speak.
  • He witnessed the Hiroshima atomic explosion from the air while flying a reconnissiance mission that they thought was just a routine bombing raid.
  • He attended the 1952 Helsinki Olympics as a reporter for Harper’s magazine. But that was a cover. He working as a CIA agent and directly assisted in the defection of a Romanian shooter.
  • A few days after the Nuremburg rally,  he was later he was carousing with Luftwaffe pilots (returning from the Spanish Civil War) in a beer hall along the Rhine (this was particularly interesting to me because I visited the same little village, Bacharach, in 2008).
  • His first job out of college was an assistant at a government agency for one of Franklin Roosevelt’s close advisors. He rented a room in Virginia from the personal secretary to House Speaker Sam Rayburn.
  • He was commissioned as a WWII Naval pilot with ill-fated eldest Kennedy brother Joe, in a private ceremony attended by the whole Kennedy clan.
  •  His air squadron was among the first to rotate into Iwo Jima after the U.S. Invasion.

 

15 thoughts on “The MIP (Most Interesting President)”

  1. John Hubbard was a man….M-A-N. Not perfect —but always rose to the occasion.

    Thanks for the memories, Scott. Nice to recall a time when “interesting” people served as our University Presidents — unlike the parade of jackasses we’ve seen lately.

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  3. DONNY JUST SAID IF YOU’RE COMPLAINING ABOUT THE PRICE OF GAS YOU NEED TO DRIVE LESS OR WALK……WOW!!!!!!!!!

    MILLIONS REGRET VOTING FOR HIM…..

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      1. Jill Saint John was one of the most beautiful Bond girls. I also liked the Spectre girl in Thunderbolt and the lead female in From Russia with Love. Scott should post these on the Friday Notes column.

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      2. Yes!

        ..But…isn’t it “Thunderballs”…or am I thinking of a blu-ray disc Sybil sent me as a birthday present?

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  9. I wonder if some professor in the Black Studies department is trying to get Hubbard censored posthumously for attending a Nazi rally in 1938. Today he would be considered a Fascist or worst for that act alone. And watching the Hiroshima explosion from above would not go over well either. Very few in the press or academia are interested in the context of these events.

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