On Green Spring Farm: The Life and Times of One Family in Fairfax County, Virginia, 1942-1966

by Michael Whitney Straight

One family — but not just any one of America’s first families, whose lives were intimately and indelibly intertwined with the basic fabric of this country. Powerful but altruisic, artistic yet activist, a family whose story is the history of mid-twentieth-century America. "On Green Spring Farm" is a memoir — a series of short anecdotal vignettes, based on journal entries — chronicling two decades of our American history. Unifying the tales is the ever-present backdrop of what is now known as Green Spring Gardens Park, a public garden and Manor House in Virginia. The stories range from the back-room politics of Democratic campaigns for Harry Truman and Adlai Stevenson and the founding of the American Veterans Committee, to Jackie Kennedy’s "appropriation" of a family portrait of James Monroe to beautify her White House — all interspersed with colloquial family tales of pets, vacations, illnesses, theatricals and hair-raising misadventures in small aircraft. "On Green Spring Farm" provides a window onto another time and place, through which we witness history as experienced by one unusual family. Evocative, charming, funny, rousing and a Samuel Pepys for our time.

253 pages, Hardcover

First published July 12, 2004