Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll find out about a recent promotion for Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, who died 139 years ago. We’ll also get details on the 45-year sentence for a man whose fentanyl stash at his wife’s day care center killed a 22-month-old boy.
Who is buried in Grant’s tomb? A general with the Army’s highest rank.
Ulysses S. Grant, who has been dead for 139 years, has finally received the promotion long sought by his admirers.
“This is the step we were really waiting for,” said one of them, Frank Scaturro, the president of the Grant Monument Association. “It’s a wonderful recognition of the monumental importance of the singular life and singular public career of one of the supreme commanders of American armies during one of the two wars of existential magnitude.”
“He and George Washington in the Civil War and the Revolutionary War — those are the two conflicts that the United States had to win,” Scaturro said.
Yes, Scaturro put Grant up there with Washington. The Army did not go quite that far.
In approving Grant’s promotion to general of the armies of the United States, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin III noted that Grant would be elevated “with the same rank and precedence” as the World War I hero John J. Pershing. He was named a general of the armies in 1919, a year after the Allies and Germany signed an armistice, and the war came to an end.
Washington is also a general of the armies, although the Army did not give him the title until 1978, 179 years after his death. Washington’s promotion came with a provision that he would always be the Army’s highest-ranking officer, no matter how many generals of the armies were eventually named.
Grant’s promotion was authorized in the defense appropriation bill that President Biden signed into law in December 2022.
Grant became the nation’s first four-star general in 1866, a year after Robert E. Lee surrendered to him at Appomattox Court House in Virginia, ending the Civil War. The Army elevated four generals to five-star status during World War II but has not named any since the death of Gen. Omar Bradley in 1981.
Scaturro, the author of “President Grant Reconsidered” (1998), called Grant “in many respects the first modern general.”
“You’d get as close as you can to a consensus” among historians that “America produced no greater general than Grant,” he said. Grant became a model for other military leaders — including his own son Frederick, who was the second-highest ranking officer in the Army when he died in 1912. Frederick’s son, Ulysses S. Grant III, also joined the Army and became a general.
Another plus for Ulysses S. Grant: “He never suffered a Waterloo, as Napoleon did,” Scaturro said.
Not on the battlefield, anyway. Grant’s reputation was tarnished by scandal during his presidency. David Petraeus, the highest-profile general from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and later the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (and who had his own brush with scandal), has argued that Grant placed “too much trust in some members of his cabinet.”
Grant appears to have repeated that mistake after his presidency, when he joined a Wall Street firm started by one of his sons. Something was fishy about the firm’s bookkeeping. When the firm ran into trouble, Grant turned to William H. Vanderbilt of the New York Central Railroad, who gave him $150,000. It was not enough: A bank failure took down the firm.
But Grant’s reputation has improved in the last 25 years or so. Scaturro mentioned the 15th Amendment, which was ratified during Grant’s presidency and gave Black men the right to vote. “Grant and many others thought that was the height of achievement for America as a democracy, that it was America living up to its ideals,” Scaturro said.
When people ask him who is buried in Grant’s tomb, Scaturro said, “I always say General Grant,” even though Grant and his wife, Julia, are actually above ground in sarcophagi.
“My view,” Scaturro said, “is the dictionary definition of ‘burial’ is broad enough to encompass interment that’s not literally underground.”
Weather
Today will be sunny, with a high near 60. Tonight, expect a mostly clear sky, with temperatures in the mid 40s.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect today (for Sukkot).
The latest New York news
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Fighting a development proposal: A proposal for a high-rise building with hundreds of new apartments hit a sticking point: the shadows that would be cast over the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s rare and exotic plants.
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One hat, many unhappy fans: The Mets and the Yankees are in the playoffs, and Mayor Eric Adams wore a hat with the logos of both teams in the Columbus Day parade on Monday. Few fans were pleased.
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Rockefeller aide dies: Megan Marshack, who was at the center of rumors about Nelson Rockefeller’s last moments, remained silent about their association until she wrote her own obituary. She was 70.
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Recreating the Anne Frank House in Manhattan: The Anne Frank House will replicate the cramped rooms where Frank, her family and four other Jews hid to avoid the Nazis. An installation, to open at the Center for Jewish History on West 16th Street in January, will be the first full-scale replica of the hiding place on foreign soil.
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Visibility for Black composers: The New York Philharmonic is devoting a series of concerts and events to the African diaspora. The Afromodernism festival shines a light on Black artists, who are vastly underrepresented in classical music.
For man who stashed fentanyl in a day care center, a 45-year sentence
Felix Herrera Garcia ran to the basement of the Divino Niño day care center one afternoon last September after his wife, Grei Mendez, called him and said that three children would not wake up.
He did not stay long — he was gone before an ambulance arrived. Prosecutors, who said that the basement had long been used to store and package opioids, said that Herrera Garcia would have stepped over a 22-month-old boy lying on a kindergarten mat. The boy, Nicholas Dominici, had been poisoned by fentanyl and soon died.
“I have nightmares about what happened that day,” Herrera Garcia said on Wednesday before he was sentenced to 45 years in prison. Judge Jed Rakoff said that Herrera Garcia had created the conditions for “the pitiful innocent babes that were poisoned and, in one case, killed.”
Herrera Garcia pleaded guilty to two narcotics charges in June. My colleague Colin Moynihan writes that court documents provided the most detailed description yet of the lethal episode and the events surrounding it. The documents included new information about how Divino Niño functioned as a secret stash house, with kitchen implements, used to prepare children’s meals, doubling as drug-packaging tools.
Prosecutors wrote that a six-hour drug packaging session had taken place two nights before the children were poisoned. In court on Wednesday, a prosecutor, Maggie Lynaugh, said that Nicholas had ingested a “very substantial” amount of fentanyl, adding: “The likely source of the ingestion was the children’s lunch.”
The poisonings at Divino Niño, located in a building a mile from the New York Botanical Garden, prompted an outpouring of anger and grief, in large part because children had been harmed in a place trusted to protect them. Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, said after Nicholas’s death that it was “simply staggering” that traffickers had kept heroin and fentanyl in “the very space in which the children ate, slept and played.”
In addition to Herrera Garcia, four people, including Mendez, were charged in an indictment filed by Williams’s office, which has jurisdiction over the Bronx. Two of the defendants, Renny Antonio Parra Paredes and Jean Carlo Amparo Herrera, have pleaded guilty to conspiring to distribute narcotics and are awaiting sentencing.
METROPOLITAN diary
City Island summer
Dear Diary:
City Island glistened as a friend and I met for lunch on a summer Saturday before the evening crowd flooded in. I ordered shrimp, she ordered fish, and we got some of the same soul food sides we enjoyed last summer.
Three hours later, after we had caught up on a year’s worth of living, the sun was still shining brightly, and the sail boats on Eastchester Bay were still bobbing to their own beat.
“Look,” my friend said, pointing toward the line of dinnertime drivers navigating their way onto the island, as we crossed the bridge and headed home.
“We have to do this more often,” I said, wishing we had stopped for a piña colada to go.
Next time.
— Pamela Horitani
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Makaelah Walters and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com.
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