Busy as he was in the late 60s and 70s, Luther Gulick found time to assist a young reporter named Robert A. Caro tackle the toughest biographical subject any writer could imagine — master builder Robert Moses.

Caro and his publisher were deeply grateful, as these letters in the collection attest:

(The “F” on the letters is Gulick’s code for “file”.)

What’s the most successful transportation system in the world? Luther Gulick could speak with some authority. Born in 1892, he witnessed the coming of the automobile, the airplane and the New York City subway. Let others praise these, or even the lowly peddler’s pushcart. No, Gulick opined in 1956, the greatest people-mover of all time was…the elevator.

Just think of it, he marveled: it was always there when you needed it, perfectly engineered into the environment with the perfect carrying capacity and perfectly free.

The folder was easy to overlook — tucked away unobtrusively in the Gulick alphabetical files N-O. Even the title was a snooze: Nubian Monuments (Egypt) 1962-1963. But therein lay a tale worthy of Indiana Jones.

Camelot was still young, with the Kennedy Administration still reeling from the debacle of the Bay of Pigs and soon to be embroiled in the Cuban missile crisis. In the volatile middle east, the United Arab Republic — Egypt and Syria under Gamal Abdel Nasser, until Syria seceded in 1961 — was building a dam on the Nile at Aswan that would flood two massive rock temples dating from the 13th century B.C.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aswan_Dam

The cry went up: save the doomed temples of Abu Simbel! Not surprisingly for a world authority in public administration who had recently consulted with the Shah of Persia on a sweeping Iranian development project, Luther Gulick was soon on a plane to the U.A.R. to advise on the practicalities and financing of a rescue plan.

http://www.sis.gov.eg/En/Templates/Articles/tmpArticles.aspx?ArtID=1200#.VPYFsKOwX9w

Upon his return he reached out to the First Lady, Jackie Kennedy, who had just opened the traveling King Tut exhibit in Washington.

Alas, Mrs. Kennedy had no time to meet, her social secretary wrote Gulick, but would be glad to hear more by letter.

Gulick followed up a few weeks later, expressing the hope “I might persuade you and your Lady to take a quick ‘unofficial’ trip to the Upper Nile to see the Nubian monuments before they are drowned, and that such a trip would help the President decide how America can take a more direct interest in the exploratory work and in the salvage efforts which are now needed.” (JFK had already vowed to help and later went to Congress for $10 million, equivalent to about $77 million today).

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=8043

Gulick kept in touch with the Egyptians and American officials. Of course, 1962 being a Congressional election year, politics was a factor. Would American taxpayers stand for shelling out millions for an Arab regime hostile to the U.S. and Israel?

How hostile? Well take a look at this map in the Sinai brochure Gulick picked up.

Notice anything? No Israel. Only “Palestine.”

But Gulick kept up his efforts to save the temples.

The Peabody Museum at Harvard also saluted Gulick’s efforts.

By the way, take note of that name Edmundo Lassalle in the first paragraph. He’s worthy of a whole book of his own — in fact there is a biography of the dashing cultural diplomat who had fought in the Spanish Civil War, worked for Nelson Rockefeller and Walt Disney, married a German princess linked to Hitler, and later two heiresses, and ended up taking his own life.

http://www.amazon.com/Edmundo-Robert-Huddleston/dp/1602640009

Here’s Lassalle’s confidential 1961 memo to the director of the Peabody on the machinations behind Congressional efforts to round up money to save Abu Simbel.

Note that Leontyne Price was offering to donate 1,000 albums of her Aida to raise money to move the temples.

And Jackie? Because of Gulick’s pleas or not, she ended up a key ally in the campaign to save Abu Simbel, which was ultimately raised above the waters. In recognition, Nasser presented her a memorable gift for the people of the U.S. — the Temple of Dendur, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

http://travelinstyle.smytheandson.com/egypt-tours/story-jacqueline-kennedy-abu-simbel-temples-nile/

Thanks to the collection’s files on fluoridation (which generated an article Feb. 24 for The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/24/health/new-yorks-fluoridation-fuss-50-years-later.html?ref=science) we know how Gulick prodded his good friend Mayor Robert F. Wagner to stop dithering and take a stand for fluoridating New York’s water. (Wagner had always taken his Senator-father’s advice to heart: When in doubt, don’t.) It took eight years but fluoridation finally came to New York in 1965, 50 years ago this October. https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/ipaprocessing/wp-admin/post.php?post=1591&action=edit Half a century later, it remains a hot button issue around the globe.

Now we find Gulick also behind the scenes counseling Wagner on his political ambitions, namely trading City Hall for a seat in the United States Senate — the seat his late father, Robert F. Wagner Sr., held from 1926 to 1949 — and who knew what beyond?

Here’s the background: In 1956, Wagner was in the third year of his first term as Mayor. (He would serve three terms, along with Fiorello LaGuardia, Edward Koch, and Michael Bloomberg, but that’s getting ahead of ourselves.) In 1956, a prize Senate seat from New York opened up with the retirement of Herbert H. Lehman, Franklin Roosevelt’s successor as Governor of New York who had taken Wagner senior’s place after he resigned for ill health. Lehman and Gulick had a long connection, having worked closely together on refugee relief issues during World War II.

For the ’56 campaign, headed nationally by President Eisenhower and VP Nixon seeking reelection, the Republicans, eager to pick up a second Senate seat from the Empire State, put up New York State Attorney General and former Congressman Jacob Javits. But although Wagner would not be risking his city job to run — he would not be up for reelection as mayor until 1957 — he characteristically hesitated.

According to a revealing letter from Gulick, the Democratic National Committee and Presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson (making his second run for the White House after losing to Eisenhower in 1952) were pressuring Wagner to become their Senate standard-bearer in New York. To win, they needed New York, and Wagner was a charmed Democratic name.

But was a Senate race good for Wagner? Gulick shrewdly weighed the pros and cons.

Once Wagner agreed to run, Gulick urged him to take off the gloves. This would be a bitterly-fought campaign and Gulick confidentially urged Wagner to target the Eisenhower Administration for “perpetrating a political fraud on the people of the State of New York” in housing policy, immigration, urban affairs and much besides. Ike himself, “whom we all respect as a fine old man” was not spared in Gulick’s harsh rough draft for Wagner. Though once an ardent Republican, Gulick was devoted to FDR and the New Deal and despised Richard Nixon. https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/ipaprocessing/?s=nixon

When he calmed down, Gulick produced a cleaner copy for Wagner.

We know how the story ends: Javits swamped Wagner by almost 460,000 votes. Wagner went on to run and win again for Mayor in 1957, and a third time in 1961. Meanwhile, however, he flirted with another run for the U.S. Senate in 1958, to challenge the GOP neophyte, Kenneth Keating.

Once again Gulick weighed in with advice: “…this will require a much better planned effort than last time.”

But this time Wagner took his father’s advice. He was in doubt — and didn’t. (Manhattan District Attorney Frank Hogan ran as the Democrat, losing to Keating by nearly 400,000 votes).

Gee, you never know what you’re going to find in the archives. Alex opened a box and found this — a US Army tag for captured World War II prisoners, dated 1942.

Here’s the flip side (in English, German, Italian and Japanese). Get this: “NO TAG –NO FOOD!” Uncle Sam wasn’t fooling around.

We didn’t have many prisoners yet — months after Pearl Harbor, the war was going very badly for the Allies indeed. But we were ready with the tags, just in case.

So how did one end up in the Gulick/IPA Collection? It’s not clear but we know that Luther Gulick traveled to conquered Germany in 1945 with President Truman for the Potsdam Conference to plan the peace with Stalin and Churchill.

https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/ipaprocessing/2014/09/the-berling-corridor/

There were some other interesting artifacts in the box. Laundry lists — printed on the backs of French maps (to save paper). Hey, everyone needs clean underwear.

And here’s the most intriguing thing: a mailing label from 1944, with Hitler stamps of course, addressed to a German diplomat and officer, First Lieutenant Goetz von Flotow. (The back was blank.) The return address looks serious, beginning with Reichsverband, or Imperial Association…for…The Care and Testing of German Warmbloods, Division of the Imperial Food Production Authority. So the von Flotows were keeping or breeding racehorses.

Diligent readers of the blog (you know who you are) will remember the strange episode of “Looter” Gulick’s Max Liebermann painting that he was safekeeping for the family of von Flotow and, after he died in 1947, his widow, Hildegard. That didn’t sit too well later with an Assistant Attorney General in the US Office of Alien Property. There were strict rules about private acquisition of enemy assets. Gulick had an innocent explanation but ended up surrendering it for auction by US authorities.

https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/ipaprocessing/2014/11/looter-gulick/

But how did Gulick come into a possession of a document from von Flotow from 1944, when the war was raging and well before he had the disputed painting? That we don’t know.

One guess: Gulick liked to collect souvenirs. Perhaps when he was there in 1945, he found, or was given, the label and, with the painting already in hand, held on to the label as well.

Another WWII mystery.