A tattered brown envelope from the War Department Air Corps was intriguingly labeled “Japanese Bombing pictures.” A “SECRET” stamp was crossed out with the notation “Released.”

Inside were dozens of US aerial surveillance photos of Japanese war plant targets, before and after American bombing raids. Here’s one sequence from an attack on June 22, 1945 on a Mitsubishi plant:

The cost to the Japanese of their desperate throw of the dice on Dec. 7, 1941, is starkly captured in other documents in the Gulick files:

But the US had a strategy beyond exacting  reparations from its defeated Axis adversary. It planned to rebuild Japan as a bulwark of postwar world peace.

More on that in coming posts.

Luther Gulick, a Republican who believed deeply in FDR and the New Deal, came to have little sympathy for Richard Nixon and the nonetity he picked for his vice president in 1968, Spiro T. Agnew. Once again, Gulick proved clairvoyant, as this letter he sent to The New York Times just before election day shows.

Alas, the Times rejected the letter. But we know how Agnew ended up.

http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/1010.html

Luther Gulick was not only a  peerless organizer, adviser to Presidents, war and peace strategist, champion of a new science of government administration – and inveterate doodler.  He was also an aspiring poet. In 1953, drawing on a visit to Cartagena, Colombia, he penned some verses and sent them off to the Atlantic Monthly.

Alas, his prominence did him little service.  The mails brought a rebuff familiar to writers through the ages.

Does this sound familiar? Seventy-three years ago, in June 1941, British and Free French forces fought the Battle of Syria and Lebanon, blocking the Nazis from a key foothold in the Middle East. (The top swastika marks almost the exact spot where ISIS is now overrunning a Syrian town on the Turkish border.) We found this large vintage map (38 X 35″) by Time magazine among the papers of Luther Gulick and the Institute of Public Administration.

Here’s some more from the History Channel, with a surprising tidbit: guess who lost an eye fighting for the Allies?

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/allies-invade-syria-and-lebanon

Luther Gulick was a frequent doodler throughout his lifetime. Below are just some of the doodles we found thus far while processing the collection.