1001 People Who Made America - Alan Axelrod [76]
LeMay, Curtis E. (1906–1990) A career military aviator, LeMay was one of the architects of strategic bombing doctrine during World War II and was especially effective as commander of the Twentieth Air Force, which conducted the strategic bombing of Japan, culminating in the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, which brought the war to an end. In the postwar era, LeMay assembled and commanded the Strategic Air Command, a major component of the U.S. “nuclear deterrent,” which simultaneously threatened and prevented World War III. Conservative and irascible, LeMay was uncompromising in his military and political views. He retired from the U.S. Air Force in 1965 and, three years later, was running mate to segregationist candidate George C. Wallace on a third-party presidential ticket.
L’Enfant, Pierre (1754–1825) Born in France, L’Enfant came to the United States with Major General Lafayette as a military engineer in the service of the American Revolution. After the war, he designed in 1791 the street plan of the “Federal City in the United States,” subsequently named Washington, D.C. In addition to laying out the United States capital city—establishing its famous wheel-and-spoke pattern that exists to this day—L’Enfant redesigned New York’s Federal Hall and produced designs for houses, coins, medals, and furniture.
Leopold, Nathan (1904–1971) On May 21, 1924, with college friend Richard A. Loeb, Leopold kidnapped and murdered 14-year-old Robert (“Bobbie”) Franks for no other purpose than to commit the “perfect crime” that demonstrated (as Leopold saw it) intellectual superiority. At trial, the pair was defended by Clarence Darrow, who did not claim the innocence of his clients, but successfully mitigated their sentence from death to life imprisonment, arguing for the first time in American legal history that they were psychopaths—sane, yet constitutionally incapable of moral judgment. Leopold was paroled in 1958 and worked among the poor of Puerto Rico as a hospital technician.
Leslie, Frank (1821–1880) Henry Carter was born in England and learned the engraver’s trade while working for the Illustrated London News. He came to New York City in 1848 and, in 1855, under the pseudonym “Frank Leslie,” began publishing Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, which featured superbly engraved illustrations and became the most popular and influential weekly in the nation. He introduced the technique of dividing drawings into modular blocks that could be given to several engravers, then reassembled for reproduction. This greatly speeded the work and enabled the illustration of fast-breaking news events. He made his fortune providing illustrated coverage of the Civil War.
Lewinsky, Monica (1973– ) Lewinsky began working as an intern in the Clinton White House in 1995, but it was while she was employed as a paid Pentagon staffer that she had a short-term sexual relationship with Clinton. The scandal was detailed in a report written under the direction of Kenneth Starr, an independent counsel appointed to investigate allegations of possibly impeachable offenses committed by the president. The report concluded that Clinton had violated his oath of office by perjuring himself in a sworn deposition he had given in an earlier sex scandal. Motivated in part by the Lewinsky affair and based on the Starr Report, Congress voted, along party lines, to impeach President Clinton, who was nevertheless acquitted on February 12, 1999. After the scandal, Lewinsky used her dubious celebrity to start a designer handbag business (closed in 2004) and to host a short-lived “reality TV” series, Mr. Personality (2003). She then enrolled in graduate school, studying social psychology.
Lewis, John L.