President's Day

Great Readers James Buchanan was the 15th President of the United States and by nearly universal assessment the worst we've ever had. He dithered while the Union came apart, helped precipitate Bleeding Kansas and did nothing to help Lincoln during the succession crisis in the last days of his administration. Mark Buchanan as a near complete failure...except as it turns out the guy was a great reader. The Daily Beast website has a fun series of short profiles of the presidents who were most in love with books. You would guess, of course, Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson and the two Roosevelts, but Buchanan or Rutherford B. Hayes? Hayes amassed a personal library of 12,000 volumes and Herbert Hoover, a very smart man and not a very effective president, had a library of rare books on obscure science subjects and many were in Latin.

The same website has a Presidential Trivia Quiz today.

Who was the first president to fly in an airplane? Hard to believe, but true, only one president is buried in Washington, D.C. and, believe it or not, Jimmy Carter was the first president born in a hospital.

So...on President's Day, a toast - a rare toast - to James Buchanan, a bad president, but a book lover. With that knowledge, he can be modestly redeemed in my eyes.

Colonel Roosevelt

The Most Famous Man in the World We have become accustom to former presidents writing their memoirs, establishing the presidential library and undertaking a good cause here and there. That's what ex-presidents do. Jimmy Carter has led an exemplary post-presidential life and has, with single-minded determination, come close to eradicating a deadly disease in Africa. Bill Clinton's Foundation has focused on AIDS and third-world development with considerable success. George W. Bush is still settling into the post-White House role and reportedly his recent book has become a best-seller on, of all places, college campuses. As impressive as they have been, none of these recent ex-presidents come anywhere close to matching the life Theodore Roosevelt lived from 1909 to 1919. He packed a near lifetime of activity, scholarship, authorship and politics - including his own and many other campaigns - into the ten years after he left the White House. This amazing Roosevelt history is superbly recounted in Edmund Morris's new biography - The Colonel. The volume is the third in Morris's life of T.R. and it will doubtless stand for a long, long time as the authoritative source on the larger-than-life personality who in his time was called "the most famous man in the world." One things our recent ex-presidents are loath to do is criticize their successors. Clinton and Bush 43 have been particularly careful - we can excuse Clinton's role in stumping for his wife - not to mix their former status with current politics. Teddy had no such reservations. He literally sought every opportunity to bash his own hand-picked successor, William Howard Taft, and the man who wrenched the progressive label from him Woodrow Wilson. Yet even without his deep and prolonged forays into partisan politics post-White House, Roosevelt would have been a world celebrity on the order of, say, Bono or Michael Jackson. The guy was a rock star before we had rock stars. He seemed to know everyone and write about everything. The press of the day covered his African safari, his European tour, complete with marching in the funeral procession of England's Edward VII, his near-death expedition into the Amazon jungle and, of course, his 1912 run for the presidency that included Roosevelt being shot in Milwaukee. Were this life a novel, it simply would not be believable. We have certainly had supremely accomplished presidents since Theodore Roosevelt. Wilson earned a PhD, served as a university president and was a fine writer before the presidency. Herbert Hoover was a world-class engineer who also wrote well. John Kennedy won, with a little help from Ted Sorensen, the Pulitzer Prize. None could touch the breadth and depth of Roosevelt's writing - books, hundreds of magazine pieces, essays, speeches and letters, thousand and thousands of letters. This is a great book about a great man and, a little prediction, Morris will win another Pulitzer for producing what, as the New York Times said, "deserves to stand as the definitive study of its restless, mutable, ever-boyish, erudite and tirelessly energetic subject." In the end, as with much great literature, T.R. story is tragedy. Roosevelt's enless agitating for American involvement in World War I served, in Morris's telling, to glorify the tragic, wasteful, useless war that came to define the 20th Century. The senseless slaughter - only later did Roosevelt come to realize that war is not glory - also cost the life of the youngest Roosevelt, Quentin, who died flying over German lines in 1918. Quentin's father, worn out and dispirited, died the next year. Theodore Roosevelt was only 60; the youngest man to ever serve as president and still and forever one of the greatest.

Great Political Reads

A Top Ten List Legislatures are in session, the president is poised to deliver the State of the Union and we just marked the 50th anniversary of JFK's inaugural. All politics all the time. So...writing recently about Richard Ben Cramer's political classic What It Takes got me thinking about some of my favorite political reads. Here, in no particular order, is a Top Ten List of Political Reads - or a Top Eleven counting Cramer's tome, which has to be on any list of mine. Here goes. 1. Truman by David McCullough. Certainly among the greatest political biographies, McCullough won the Pulitzer for his great writing and research and this booked helped rehabilitate the reputation of the Man from Missouri. 2. They Also Ran by Irving Stone. This is the fascinating story of the men who ran for president and lost. In chapter length profiles, Stone groups these "losers" into categories like "Generals Die in the Army" and "Wall Street Lawyers." This classic was published in 1943, so it ends with the story of that "loser" Wendell Willkie who, with the full benefit of hindsight, seems to have been a remarkable man. In fact, Stone makes a compelling case that many of those who ran for the White House and lost were every bit as able - and often better - than those who won. 3. Shooting Star by Tom Wicker. There are many, many good books about controversial Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy, but if you read just one you will find none better than Wicker's little volume. The great one-time New York Times writer establishes McCarthy in his times with all his well-documented excesses, but also offers a nuanced view - too nuanced for some critics - of McCarthy's troubled personality. This is a critical book, but also fair and full of color sustained by the perspective of a political reporter who knows politics and politicians. 4. Huey Long by T. Harry Williams. Another biography, this one exhaustive, of another demagogue. Long was a brilliant Louisiana communicator/politician who rose from humble beginnings to command a virtual state dictatorship. Williams' book is highly readable and, some would argue, more sympathetic to the Kingfish than it should be, but it is also a classic work of political history. By 1935, Long had become a national figure - his radio speeches were powerful, funny and frightening. He also became a threat from the left to Franklin Roosevelt's re-election. Long's life ended in September 1935 in a hail of gunfire in the hallway of the capitol building he had built in Baton Rouge, but the Long dynasty survived. The Long family produced another governor, a congressman and Huey's senator son Russell who, like his papa, was one of the great political figures in the history of the United States Senate. 5. Advice and Consent by Allen Drury. Drury was a Congressional correspondent when he wrote his classic 1959 novel about a bitter Senate confirmation battle. The book has lasting appeal as a look inside the exclusive club, complete with deals, double crosses, sex, scandal and statesmanship. 6. Senator Mansfield by Don Oberdorfer. Montana's Mike Mansfield was a great Senator and perhaps, with apologies to Lyndon Johnson, the most constructive Senate Majority Leader in history. In former Washington Post reporter Don Oberdorfer's masterful biography, Mansfield emerges as a great thinker and a profoundly decent man; the model of a modern senator. 7. The 103rd Ballot by Robert K. Murray. It is hard to believe these days, with our national political conventions little more than carefully choreographed TV commercials, that years ago the conventions were great political theatre where presidential candidacies were both born and buried. In 1924, Democrats took an unbelievable 103 ballots to nominate a compromise candidate John W. Davis who, not surprisingly, took the horribly divided party to disastrous defeat. That convention - one observer noted that Democrats had taken a week to commit political suicide - is detailed in Murray's colorful history, complete with the KKK, prohibition, religion and, did I mention, large doses of bare knuckle politics. 8. Five Days in Philadelphia by Charles Peters. There have been, I think, two absolutely pivotal presidential elections in American history: 1864 when Lincoln was re-elected and thereby able to prosecute the Civil War to its ultimate end and 1940 when Franklin Roosevelt won an unprecedented third term and a chance to lead the country away from isolationism. Peters' great little book centers on the GOP nominating process in 1940 and the convention in Philadelphia that nominated Wendell Willkie. Willkie was the last true "dark horse" to win a presidential nomination. 9. Mick - The Real Michael Collins by Peter Hart. I'm both fascinated and repelled by the complex and frequently awful history of modern Irish politics. Any effort to understand the complex tale of modern Ireland must include the story of the great Irish Republican leader Michael Collins. Collins was both general and politician, but mostly brilliant political strategist and manager. He was also clever, ambitious, brave and brutal. He lost his life during the Irish Civil War in 1922. Collins had a pivotal role in the negotiations with the British - the British delegation included Winston Churchill - that resulted in the Anglo-Irish Treaty. The treaty helped secure Irish independence, but was so unpopular with some that it also precipitated the civl war. As a practical, pragmatic peacemaker, Collins defended the treaty and knew that in doing so he might well have written his death warrant. Nearly 90 years after his death, Collins' grave in Dublin's Glasnevin Cemetery is still every day festooned with fresh flowers. 10. Master of the Senate by Robert A. Caro. Caro's monumental, multi-volume biography of LBJ is notable for the vast reach of his research, but also for his unrelenting (and at times unfair) critique of Johnson's remarkable career. Still, the third volume on Johnson's years as Senate Majority Leader, is as good a portrait of the Senate as any every crafted. The publication of the final volume of Caro's nearly life-long work on Johnson will be a major milestone, but who knows when he'll be finished with it. Caro took 12 years to write Master of the Senate. It is a huge book and hugely important. There you have it - a Top Ten list for a political junkie.

Richard Ben Cramer

The Best Political Book No One Bought Before Richard Ben Cramer, the campaign political book genre was dominated by the great Theodore White and his remarkable Making of the President series. That changed after the appearance of Cramer's monumental door stop of a book on the 1988 presidential campaign. Now every book about American politics is measured against Cramer's masterpiece - What it Takes: The Way to the White House. Cramer's book, a classic piece of "new journalism," not only provided the inside account of the campaigns of politicians like Richard Gephardt, Joe Biden, Gary Hart, Bob Dole and the eventual nominees, George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis, but also offered fascinating, in depth profiles of the candidates. It was a book about character as much as politics and it has become a classic for political junkies and Cramer and his approach have become a role models for a new generation of writers who see politics as less an insiders game and more a study in character and motivation. [One might argue that the 1988 campaign did a great deal to shape the current presidential campaign environment. Just remember some of the moments: Biden's plagiarism, the Willie Horton ad, Dukakis is a silly helmet in a tank, Bush 41's "read my lips" and Lloyd Bentsen's put down - "you're no Jack Kennedy" - delivered at Dan Quayle expense.] Politico has produced a must read profile of Cramer with insights into his book - the book was panned by reviewers when it came out years after the '88 election and never sold well - that is also a great look into what now passes for political reporting. Most big-time Washington reporters continue to focus their political coverage on the inner workings of the campaign. It's reporting analogous to covering a baseball game - report on the balls and strikes, throw in a little strategy, compose a clever opening graph and you're good to go. Cramer's book - he claims to have done more than 1,000 interviews - concentrated instead on why these remarkable men came to be where they found themselves in 1988. He was interested in who they were as people and what made them tick. This approach - the motivations of people, their background and the details of their lives - is vastly more enlightening to voters than most of what we get in more standard political reporting. I suspect that one of the reasons we don't get more of the kind of reporting Cramer does, in addition to the fact that it is darn hard work, is that candidates generally hate this kind of reporting. As Cramer told Booknotes interviewer Brian Lamb in 1992, most politicians aren't introspective. They never spend 15 minutes thinking about who they really are and what they really hope to accomplish. Cramer's book gets to these questions. The big book of the 2008 campaign was Game Change by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, a book full of gossipy detail and the interesting, but not always insightful, "inside baseball" of politics. Cramer, never one to mince words, is dismissive of Game Change because, as he told Politico, it "almost religiously eschews any understanding of who [the candidates] are." Cramer became disillusioned with reporting on politics after the initial tepid response to What it Takes - he still owes his publisher $200,000 from the advance he received - and hasn't written about politics or candidates since. Instead, Cramer has produced books on baseball, including a book on Ted Williams and a devastating biography of Joe DiMaggio, and is now at work on a book on Alex Rodriquez. It's never too early to get ready for the next presidential election - candidates are already planning trips to New Hampshire and Iowa - so, if you haven't read What it Takes, haunt a used book store and lose yourself in one of the best political books ever written. What it Takes is a classic. And thanks for checking in here during 2010...a Happy New Year to you and yours.

My Reading Life

A Window Into All Worlds It has taken me half a century to figure it out, but I now know how to start a conversation with anyone. It worked again on Saturday. I was in a room with total strangers; people I had just met and knew nothing about. I eventually got an opening to ask the question that never fails to make a friend: What are you reading? The 60'ish woman across the table instantly became animated. "Unbroken," she said, referring to Laura Hillenbrand's new and widely praised book about a World War II hero. I had an immediate connection and just as fast an insight into my new reading friend. You can't long be a stranger to a person who is opening up about the books they love and why. The burly guy in the photo is a big time reader, too. Pat Conroy's new little book My Reading Life tells the story of how the best selling author of Prince of Tides and The Great Santini became a great writer by becoming a great reader. For anyone who loves books, its a good page turner. Conroy's survey of reading and the bookish life ranges over the enduring importance of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind, touches Dickens, praises Thomas Wolfe and James Dickey, proclaims War and Peace history's greatest novel, explores the wonders of a really good used book store and, most of all, praises his book consuming mother for her lasting influence on his reading and writing. "Reading great books," Conroy says, "gave me unlimited access to people I never would have met, cities I couldn't visit, mountain ranges I would never lay eyes on, or rivers I would never swim. Through books I fought bravely in wars of both attrition and conquest. Before I ever asked a girl out, I had fallen in love with Anna Karenina, taken Isabel Archer to high tea at the Grand Hotel in Rome, delivered passionate speeches to Juliet beneath her balcony, abandoned Dido in Carthage, made love to Lara in Zhivago's Russia, walked beside Lady Brett Ashley in Paris, danced with Madame Bovary - I could form a sweet-smelling corps de ballet composed of the women I have loved in books." Good stuff. I've also discovered that my simple question works to not start a conversation with someone I may be well advised to avoid. When you ask, "what are you reading," and get the standard brush off response of "I just don't have time to read" or "I read so much in my work," it may be time to move on. I still have the first book I can remember my father reading to me. He had written his name in the front cover when Warren Harding was in the White House. I read the book to my sons and it is just one of thousands of books I love. The Story of the Bold Tin Soldier, that first book, certainly isn't Faulkner, but it started me on a reading life and that has made all the difference.

Books, Books and Books

Good Reads for Winter The Lonely Planet guidebook recent published a Top 10 list of the world's greatest bookstores. (I'm happy to say I've browsed in three of the Top 10, including the stores that LP lists as No. 1 and No. 2.) That list of great bookstores got me thinking about the best books I've come across in the last few weeks. So in no particular order, here are a four good reads for winter. Two new presidential bios are out. Ron Chernow's Washington: A Life is a big, sprawling book about the president we all know, but really don't. As the Christian Science Monitor noted in its review: "From Washington’s churning emotions beneath a cool exterior to his love of ladies and dance, the hero of the Revolutionary War and America’s first president emerges as an admirable, flawed, and human figure." In other words, a more interesting and approachable man and politician than the stone figure of statues and myth.

The long awaited final volume of Edmund Morris' three-volume life of Theodore Roosevelt - Colonel Roosevelt - is also in the bookstores. I haven't read it yet, but the NPR interview with Morris about the post-presidential life of the great TR was absolutely fascinating. The first two volumes of this trio were simply superb history and biography and, I'm betting, the final volume will be just as good.

The New York Times said of Morris' opus that it "deserves to stand as the definitive study of its restless, mutable, ever-boyish, erudite and tirelessly energetic subject. Mr. Morris has addressed the toughest and most frustrating part of Roosevelt’s life with the same care and precision that he brought to the two earlier installments. And if this story of a lifetime is his own life’s work, he has reason to be immensely proud."

Two new books on United States foreign policy in the post-war world deserve praise. Presidential historian Robert Dallek has produced an assessment of the post-World War II blunders of most of the world's major leaders - Truman, Stalin, de Gaulle, Churchill, among others. The book - The Lost Peace - argues that the Cold War wasn't inevitable and might well have been avoided.

Dallek reminds us, for example, that Vietnamese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh spent significant time during his younger days in the United States, Britain and France. Ho's guerrilla activities, aimed at the Japanese and Vichy France during the war, were all about Vietnamese nationalism. Dallek makes a compelling case that a lack of imagination on the part of American policy makers coupled with de Gaulle's desire to maintain French colonies after the war pushed Ho toward open confrontation with the West. Ho repeatedly petitioned President Truman for acknowledgement of Vietnamese aspirations for independence. Truman never responded.

Another book of note examines the Cold War from the perspective of two giants of American foreign policy from the 1940's to the end of the century. The Hawk and The Dove by Nicholas Thompson tells the story of the friendship and rivalry between "the hawk" Paul Nitze, a career Washington policy insider, and "the dove" George Kennan, a Soviet expert who spent most of his life trying to influence policy from the outside. Thompson is a deft storyteller and great researcher who is also Nitze's grandson, but he never plays favorites.

As the Washington Post said, "In this important and astute new study, Nitze emerges as a driven patriot and Kennan as a darkly conflicted and prophetic one."

Late in life the two brilliant men reconciled their political differences and Nitze, while never admitting it, came to embrace Kennan's view that nuclear weapons must be reduced and eventually eliminated. This is a great book if you want to better understand American foreign policy from Roosevelt to Reagan.

If you're not quite ready to tackle Sarah Palin's latest, any one of these four very good books will provide real insight into American politics and history and provide a great way to spend a winter evening or weekend.

The Red Corner

Communists in Montana? You Must Be Joking... See if you can transport yourself to 1920 in extreme northeastern Montana. It must have been a heck of a place; booming settlement, bootlegging, truly radical politics and real support for a guy named Lenin. Sheridan County, Montana borders on North Dakota to the east and the Canadian prairie province of Saskatchewan to the north. It is about as far removed from Soviet Russia as you can imagine, yet Sheridan County from about 1920 to 1930 was at the very center of the tiny American Communist movement. Led mostly by radical farmers and a bombastic newspaper editor, Sheridan County voters sent an openly Communist state senator and a state representative to the state legislature in Helena. The sheriff and most other county elected officials operated, as they say, under the Red Flag. The local newspaper - The Producers News - published in the county seat of Plentywood, eventually became an official mouthpiece of the Communist Party USA. The editor, Charles "Red Flag" Taylor, was a brilliant propagandist who, after serving in the Montana State Senate also ran for the U.S. Senate and actively participated in Communist Party activities nationally. Taylor was on friendly terms with William Z. Foster, the perennial Communist Party candidate for president, and brought Foster to Sheridan County in 1932. This fascinating, and mostly forgotten story, has been well chronicled in a fine new book by Verlaine Stoner McDonald. The book - The Red Corner: The Rise and Fall of Communism in Northeastern Montana - was published earlier this year by the Montana Historical Society Press in Helena. Professor McDonald grew up in Sheridan County and her great-great uncle, Clair Stoner, was elected to the state legislature in the 1920's. He was a Communist.

One of the most interesting aspects of McDonald's book is that for decades, as she writes, "during the McCarthy years in the 1950's and the Cold War, the people of northeastern Montana tried to forget their brush with notoriety."

McDonald, who graduated from Plentywood High School, "without having heard of the Sheridan County Communists" and knowing that her relative had been a leader of the radicals.

In his review of The Red Corner, Montana historian Donald Spritzer notes that once the New Deal relief efforts of Franklin Roosevelt brought benefits to Sheridan County - the WPA built a courthouse in Plentywood, for example - the county's Communists faded from significance and the locals seemed more than happy to have the history disappear, as well.

"Today residents are not particularly proud of what occurred in that bygone era," Spritzer said. "But they are no longer so ashamed that they seek to hide it from their schoolchildren."

Montana native Ivan Doig, whose splendid book Bucking the Sun, is set in northeastern Montana in the 1930's gets the last word on the radicals of Sheridan County.

"When there was enough rain," Doig wrote in his story about the Montanans who built Fort Peck Dam, "the soil of the northeastern corner of Montana grew hard red wheat. When drought came, politics of that same colorization sprouted instead."

Harry Truman said,“The only thing new in this world is the history that you don't know” How true.

McDonald's book tells a great story that has been long forgetten; a rich history of the rural American west and one area's flirtation with - truth stranger than fiction -Communism.

The Nazis Burned Books, Too

No Good Comes From This Unfortunately there is a long history of humans believing they can destroy ideas by burning the books that contain those ideas. The practice hardly began with a crackpot preacher in Florida, but dates back to the Inquisition, the Spanish conquest of the "New World" and even ancient China. In May of 1933, in the town where Martin Luther nailed his famous Theses to the church door, pro-Nazi students burned 25,000 books deemed "un-German." Included were works by the German Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann, a guy named Hemingway and, of course, works by Karl Marx, Socialists and Jews. The pictures and what they foretold are haunting and should tell us something. Two things about the story out of Florida are worth noting it seems to me. The first is the enormous media attention lavished on Rev. Terry Jones. Not bad for a guy, as Gail Collins pointed out, who has built a thriving congregation of "about 50 people." In a matter of hours, Jones' plan to burn the Quran went viral sparking protests in Afghanistan, worry about the impact on our soldiers in the field, comments from every politician in the nation, etc. More important, perhaps, the Aljazerra website has been all over the story. Additionally, I'm struck by the fact - as we approach the ninth anniversary of the September 11 attacks - how far we have come, in the wrong direction, in building a worldwide consensus to oppose the radical forces that operate in the shadow of Islam. I remember George W. Bush - megaphone in hand, standing on the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center - and the profound sense that the United States, at that huge moment in time, had the moral force to lead a worldwide effort to confront extremism. For a brief moment, the world was with us, but...well, apparently we blew it and here we are nine years later. Now I fear the message sent by Rev, Jones, and folks like Newt Gingrich fulminating against a Muslim Cultural Center in lower Manhattan, paints America as unfaithful to our own professed and cherished traditions of religious freedom and tolerance. A perception of hypocrisy doesn't play well in any culture. Books - even books we would never read or whose content we abhor - are important things. They are symbols, as well as repositories of history, culture and, at a very important level, tolerance. I'm not a big fan of Sidney Shelton or Barbara Cartland. In fact, I've never cracked a cover of either of those best selling authors, but they have huge followings and you have to respect that. I don't read the Quran, either, but 22% of the people on the planet do and their numbers are growing at a rate faster than the world's population. Sending a billion and a half people regular telegrams from America with a message that we hate them doesn't seem like a winning strategy. It also doesn't seem like America.

The Richest Hill on Earth

Doig's Historic Fiction...Butte in 1919 By 1919, Butte, Montana had fully made the transition from mining camp to industrial city. It is no exaggeration to say that the copper mining city, a mile high in the Rockies, was the most important mining center in the country. What a place it must have been - ethnically diverse, a cauldron of labor unrest; a place where culture, politics and big business collided. Ivan Doig's latest book - Work Song - deals with all this history in a compelling, engaging way that liberally mixes a novel's plot with historical background. Doig understands what makes Butte such a fascinating and enduringly important place. In a recent interview with the Seattle Times the author of novels, non-fiction and a great memoir This House of Sky said that he encounters people from Butte at his book reading/signing sessions and "they're still proud of Butte and still taken with it." Julia Keller, the cultural critic for the Chicago Tribune, like me, really enjoyed the new Doig, saying it captures the American spirit. Keller wrote, "Doig, grand storyteller that he is, understands this (spirit). His books — with "Work Song," the tally hits 13 — explore the American West with humor and pathos. His men and women are drifters, gamblers, barkeeps, landladies, cowboys, thugs, poets and librarians, and that's just the smallest peek at his census." The New York Times featured Work Song in the Sunday Book Review and also did an interview with Doig about his own work and reading habits. Big surprise for a guy writing about Butte, he loves Roddy Doyle's book The Commitments about a band of young Irish musicians in Dublin. Doig has long objected, in his gentle and gentlemanly way, to being characterized as a "western writer." Tim Rutten, writing in the Los Angeles Times gives him his due. "Ivan Doig is an exemplary regional voice in American letters," Rutten says, "which simply means he is a very fine writer who has chosen to site his work in the West, particularly in Montana, where he was born and grew up." Among the reviews of Work Song that I reviewed, only the Washington Post's Jonathan Yardley took shots at the tight, little historical novel calling it "uninviting" and "a world-class dud" among other pejoratives. I can't agree. I wonder if the typically provocative Yardley has ever been to Butte. In 1919, the Anaconda Company, the powerful economic and political force in Montana, secretly owned virtually all the newspapers in the state and, of course, in his book Doig pokes many sticks at "the company." I'm not suggesting that the eminent critic of the Washington Post is some how secretly carrying water for the long-dead Anaconda Company, but his review is every bit as much of a polemic as you might have found on the front page of the company's Butte newspaper in 1919. Which is to say, read Work Song for yourself and see if its not a pretty decent summer read with a realistic dose of the truth-stranger-than-fiction history of the "richest hill on earth."

Last Call

The Rule of Unintended Consequences Most students of 20th Century American history know that the 18th Amendment to the Constitution - Prohibition - helped spawn the rise of organized crime. Al Capone, Mayer Lansky and Lucky Luciano, not to mention a host of lesser crooks and thugs, owed their spectacular rise to the misguided reformers of the 1920's who thought they could put the Constitution between a thirsty citizen and a bottle of rye. But until I popped open Daniel Okrent's fascinating new book - Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition - did I realize that so much else has resulted from the great experiment to do away with booze in America. Take, for example, the rise of the now ubiquitous Walgreen's Drugstore. You can find a Walgreen's on every other corner in many U.S. cities today and we can thank Prohibition for that. Okrent notes that Chicago-based Charles Walgreen had built his "chain from nine locations in 1916 to twenty just four years later." Family history says it was the introduction of the Walgreen's milkshake that drove the chain's remarkable growth spurt in the 1920's, but it wasn't milkshakes alone that allowed Walgreen to operate 525 stores by the end of the decade. Physicians prescribing "medicinal" alcohol had a lot to do with the rise of the drugstore chain. Doctors typically charged two bucks for a script for a pint of whiskey and the local pharmacist filled the order. That must have been almost as good as a modern day Viagra concession. Prohibition also sped the evolution of the speedboat, something like the kind George H.W. Bush ran aground yesterday on the Maine Coast. Rum runners needed the extra horsepower to outrun the Coast Guard along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Many of the big names in today's California wine industry - Mondavi, Beaulieu, Wente - thrived during the 1920's thanks to the dramatic increase in the consumption of "sacramental" wine. Jewish "wine congregations" suddenly appeared around the country. Okrent also makes an effective case that modern coalition politics can trace its dry roots to Prohibition. A motley and unlikely crew of anti-booze zealots, women's suffrage advocates, progressive reformers in favor of an income tax and even the Ku Klux Klan, came together to convince the Congress, and then most state legislatures, to end the liquor trade. We know how this story ends. It didn't work. Yet both political parties and politicians as diverse as William Jennings Bryan, Woodrow Wilson and Warren G. Harding went along with a national wave that, while politically expedient was also really stupid. Okrent - he is the former Public Editor of the New York Times - writes with genuine insight based on exhaustive research. He quotes the Mayor of Boise and bar owners in Butte; the Governor of Utah and the sheriff of King County, Washington and paints wonderful portraits of the cast of characters that drove the politics and the policy. George Will recently called Okrent's book "darkly hilarious" and it is downright laugh out loud funny at times. One big-time bootlegger in New York was so impressed with the closing arguments of the prosecutor who was trying to put him in jail that he told the lawyer, "I almost think I should be convicted." Will also said, and its true, that Prohibition was doomed from the start. "After 13 years, Prohibition, by then reduced to an alliance between evangelical Christians and criminals, was washed away by "social nullification" - a tide of alcohol - and by the exertions of wealthy people like Pierre du Pont who hoped that the return of liquor taxes would be accompanied by lower income taxes. (They were.) Ex-bootleggers found new business opportunities in the southern Nevada desert. And in the Second World War, draft boards exempted brewery workers as essential to the war effort." By 1932, the fizz had gone completely out of Prohibition and Franklin Roosevelt, in the political parlance of the time a "dry-wet" - he supported Prohibition, but also enjoyed a martini (with entirely too much vermouth, according to contemporaries) - could openly call for repeal. The photo at the top of this post is of the caustic columnist H.L. Mencken drinking to the end of Prohibition in his hometown of Baltimore, a place that never, even remotely, took to the notion of no booze. Mencken pronounced his first drink - make that legal drink - "pretty good - not bad at all." Prohibition, like so much of our history, is a cautionary tale. Excess in almost everything is a bad idea. It is hard - impossible maybe - to redirect basic human instinct; harder yet to ban a substance that many enjoy responsibily and fundamentally think should be no one's business save their own. Prohibition proves that there are limits to what governments can do. Last Call, a good summer read, full of insight into American politics and culture, is - pardon the pun - spirited. It might even go a bit better with a drink of something. You choose.

A Reputation in Tatters

Ambrose Accused of Faking It I've always had a soft spot for Stephen Ambrose the author of Undaunted Courage, the book that did more than anything, I think, to bring Lewis and Clark back from the dusty corners of American and Western history. I have a vivid memory of visiting Ambrose at his summer place in Helena, Montana some years ago. It was a treat to be invited into his "office" - if I remember correctly a converted garage - where he wrote and where a photo of Dwight D. Eisenhower hung prominently on the wall. Ambrose was a little on the gruff side, outspoken, but still gracious. He signed a couple of his books for me that day. At least, that's how I remember it going. Then again, maybe I embellished the memory a little in the interest of making the experience a bit more, well, interesting. I've been questioning my own memory about that meeting since I read, with more than a touch of sorrow, Richard Rayner's piece in The New Yorker making a very solid case that Ambrose fabricated (embellished, made up, lied about) the level of interaction he had with Eisenhower during the time he was writing the general-president's biography. Until now, the Ambrose works on Eisenhower have been considered the definitive story of Ike's military and political career. No more. Rayner documents, with the help of the meticulous records Ike's assistants kept, of the very limited amount of time the historian spent with the former president in the 1960's. Ambrose claimed hundreds of hours. The records show maybe five hours. The documentary evidence even calls into question Ambrose's oft told story about how he came to write about Eisenhower. As a result, as James Palmer notes, "everything Ambrose claimed Eisenhower said, including quotes that have often been used by other historians, must now be taken as false." Those who occasionally check in at this spot know that I am passionate about history. I have come to really disdain what some have called the American propensity for "historical amnesia." It is a big part - and I don't believe I overstate the case - of the reason our politics, our political discourse and our understanding of why things are as they are seems so limited so much of the time. A lack of historical perspective failed to inform the country about the dangers of going into Iraq, it recently led a governor of Virginia to proclaim Confederate History Month and forget to mention slavery, it permits a clown like Glenn Beck to get away with equating the Catholic (and other religions) tradition of social justice with "socialism." For the most part, Americans don't know their history. So when popular historians like Stephen Ambrose find a wide following - he sold over 5 million books - a history buff can only rejoice that more people are paying attention. Except, what happens when the work of a popular historian is cast into serious doubt? And, not for the first time, regrettably. In his OregonLive.com blog, Steve Duin recalls other of Ambrose's misdeeds and the latest episode calls up his run-in with plagiarism related to his book about bomber crews in Europe during World War II. It is not a pretty record and his reputation as an historian, as they say, lays in tatters. I have most of the books Ambrose wrote about Eisenhower. Until a couple of days ago, I thought of them as little temples to the times of a very important American. Now I'll never think of those books the same way again. I'll remember the kindness of their author, to be sure, but I'll wonder what compelled him to mix fiction with history, particularly when the true story is so very interesting. Winston Churchill famously quipped that history would be "kind" to him because he "intended to write it." And, so he did producing one of the first and most voluminous histories of World War II. Still, I can read Churchill knowing that what is on the page has been written by a participant in the great events; a participant colored by all his bias and desire to create a legacy and defend his actions. That doesn't make Churchill's version of history "bad" history, or less interesting, or without merit. You just know what you're reading. I used to read Stephen Ambrose's words, naively it turns out, as the work of a keen, uninvolved, but still passionate, academically trained searcher for the "truth" in history. No more and that is a real shame.

Why History Matters

Knowing the Past... For much of the 1950's and 1960's, this photo - Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin together at Yalta in February 1945 - served as the iconic evidence that hard headed, authoritarian Russian Communism rolled over idealistic western democracy at the end of World War II. In the most popular narrative, largely unchanged for more than half a century, the Cold War started at Yalta and the U.S. and Britain were easily rolled by that cagey Commie Uncle Joe Stalin. The truth, of course, is much more complicated, more nuanced, and much more important. A new book - Yalta - The Price of Peace - by Harvard historian S.M. Plokhy tells the nuanced story of Yalta and the account helps explain why the famous gathering in the Crimea was neither a victory nor a defeat for the west, but rather one step in the long march of history that helped shape the post-war world. Sen. Joseph McCarthy and others exploited many of the myths about Yalta, including the notion that FDR was naive about dealing with the Russians and that somehow Churchill and Roosevelt should have been able to get a better outcome for Poland. Plokhy's research makes clear that FDR was far from naive. He went to Yalta to make a deal in the interest of getting Russian approval of his outline for the creation of the United Nations and, under intense pressure from his military advisers, to get Stalin to commit to joining the war in the Pacific against the Japanese. He accomplished both objectives. He also got agreement on post-war occupation of Germany and secured for the French, who Stalin wanted out of the picture, a major role in both the U.N. and western Europe. By contrast, neither Churchill nor FDR had much leverage over Stalin when it came to Poland, since, by early 1945, Red Army troops were occupying much of the country and would win the race to Berlin. That is the history and the nuance, yet as recently as 2005, George W. Bush, choosing to read (or remember) history with an ideological bias, was declaring that Yalta led to some of "the greatest wrongs of history." No word on what the former president thinks of Karl Rove's new book that acknowledges no Bush-era culpability for American military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, but that's another history lesson. Still, both cases - Yalta and the post-war and Iraq today - prove a fundamental truth: where there is no nuance, history gets distorted; where history is abused in the pursuit of ideological ends there can be no truth. "History can help us be wise," Margaret MacMillan, the Canadian historian, writes in her new book - Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuse of History. "It can also suggest to us what the likely outcome of our actions might be." MacMillan is the best kind of historian; a skilled researcher and a lively writer on the search for truth. Her last book - Paris 1919 - tells the story of the Versailles Treaty that ended World War I and helped set the stage for the next war. The book should be required reading for every American politician, since all seem to need to understand the rule of unintended consequences. Ultimately, history is about trying to arrive at truth, which is why MacMillan tweaks Bush and Tony Blair for invoking Munich of the 1930's to justify an invasion of Iraq in the 21st Century. But she is no ideologue, also pointing out that a "liberalizing" China is unwilling to deal with the legacy of Mao and that even normally circumspect, mild mannered Canada experienced a full-throated controversy in the 1990's when a documentary suggested that there might be questions of morality associated with Canadian aircrews and their wartime strategic bombing of Germany. I think Margaret MacMillan might agree that one of the profound challenges facing the American Republic is a deepening and profoundly troubling lack of understanding of our history coupled with the fact that history is ever more regularly twisted to suit some need to score immediate partisan politic points. Frank Rich, writing in the New York Times over the weekend, made this fundamental point in a starkly effective way. Rich quotes a former Bush White House press secretary and the ever present Rudy Giuliani, as saying "we did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush's term." Say what? Obviously, this ultra selective "abuse" of history was rolled out in an effort to portray the current occupant of the White House as "soft or terrorism." Barack Obama may or may not be soft on terrorism, but abusing the reality of recent history to make that case is beyond comprehension and should be labeled for what it is - a distortion or, if you prefer, a lie. As the old saying goes, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts, or their own history. The recent race to raise America's educational standing in math and science has generally meant a diminishment of teaching of what we normally call the humanities, most importantly history. I'm all for better math and science education, but I also know that too many Americans, as surveys and Jay Leno's sidewalk interviews have shown us, don't know much about their history. No less an historian than two-time Pulitzer Prize winner David McCullough said a while back that the lack of knowledge about our history is jeopardizing our way of life. We don't all need to ponder the real impacts of Yalta in 1945 or know in detail the terms of the Paris peace conference in 1919, but we do need to know enough about our own history to call foul on those who would distort it. We can't rely exclusively on historians to hold the ideologues of the right and the left to account for "abusing" history. Democracy doesn't - or can't - work that way. If we fail to know enough of our history, or, as David McCullough has said, to "know who we are" or we misunderstand "how we became what we are, we're going to start suffering from all the obvious detrimental effects of amnesia." That truly is a threat to our way of life.

Two Outliers With Big Followings

Salinger and Zinn: American Originals...And More J.D. Salinger (left) might have become the greatest American writer of the post-war period, but opted out of fame and as the New York Times notes became "the Garbo of letters." Salinger died yesterday, a mystery man to the end, with his masterpiece The Catcher in the Rye rolling on and on, discovered by each new generation; immensely popular and controversial. The leftist historian, teacher and activist Howard Zinn also died this week, content to the end to tell the American story through the eyes of "little people" he long contended had been left out of most history books. Zinn's million-selling A People's History was a surprise and runaway best seller; immensely popular and controversial. Zinn shrugged off criticism that his approach to history was more polemic than fact, once telling an interviewer: "If you look at history from the perspective of the slaughtered and mutilated, it’s a different story." Salinger, the famous recluse, pursued his craft in just as individual a manner. His reputation established, he moved to New Hampshire to live the life his great character Holden Caulfield hoped for, building: "a little cabin somewhere with the dough I made and live there for the rest of my life,” away from “any goddam stupid conversation with anybody.” A People's History and The Catcher in the Rye...true American classics from two American originals.

Good Reads

A Good Half Dozen

It is the time of year for lists of the "best of" of 2009, a year that may go down in memory as not leaving all that much to recommend it. Nonetheless, some new and not-so-new reads during the year are truly worthy of mention. None of these made the New York Times list or won the Booker Prize, but did make The Johnson Post half dozen.

Non-Fiction:

The best political biography I have read in a long time in John Milton Cooper's life of the endlessly fascinating, endlessly flawed 28th president of the United States Woodrow Wilson. Woodrow Wilson - A Biography will likely remain the definitive treatment of Wilson for years to come. Cooper, a University of Wisconsin historian, is the Wilson scholar and he writes with a lively, engaging style that leaves none of Wilson's many accomplishments - academic visionary, legislative maestro - or numerous shortcomings - stubborn, partisan - unconsidered. Still, Cooper likes his subject and we should, too. Reading this marvelous book made it clear once again that the modern world began in the Wilson Age. The world that emerged from "the war to end all wars" - not Wilson's phrase, by the way - is the world of today: a violent Middle East, the fractured Balkans, a phony country called Iraq, etc.

For sheer delight in reading about a major figure of the 20th Century, few tomes can compare with Paul Johnson's new, short biography of Winston Churchill. Johnson, a great writer and generally revisionist historian, captures Churchill in just 166 pages; no mean feat considering the great man's life spanned the 20th Century from The Boer War to the Cold War. Johnson is particularly good at illustrating Churchill's humanity. He was a damn tough taskmaster, but remarkably gentle with political foes once he had bested them. He taught himself to be a great speaker through - listen up would be politicos - endless practice and polish. He loved good Champagne and Johnson estimates that he may have consumed 20,000 bottles in his long lifetime. This is a great little book.

I approached Ted Kennedy's memoir, published after his death, with some trepidation. Would Teddy offer up the typical book by a politician - interesting perhaps, but not really revealing? Kennedy's book - True Compass - may, as his Senate career did, set a standard for such efforts. Kennedy candidly discusses his shortcomings and offers real insight into the "Kennedy Way". His portrait of his father, Joe Kennedy, is particularly good and will cause a rethinking of the old man and his influence on American politics.

A final non-fiction pick for 2009 would be Antony Beevor's D-Day, a superb re-telling of the Allied landings on the Normandy coast in June 1944 and the first major new book on the subject in 20 years. All the major players are here: Eisenhower, the brilliant organizer and politician, de Gaulle, Omar Bradley, Rommel, Teddy Roosevelt, Jr., but also the common soldier, sailor and airmen who accomplished the single greatest invasion ever undertaken. The invasion was brutal, brilliant, chaotic, callous and history changing. Beevor captures all of the story and suggests, as others have, that the invasion could well have ended in disaster. He also makes the case that atrocities - Allied bombing of French civilians and summary execution of prisoners on both sides, for example - have long been ignored in the myth making surrounding what Rommel called "the longest day."

Fiction:

One of the best fiction reads this year was Jim Harrison's The English Major. Harrison takes readers on a cross country romp from Michigan to Montana with funny and telling stops along the way. His hero is a 60ish English major turned backwoods farmer who finds himself without a wife and without much purpose in life. If you know Harrison, you'll not be surprised that the book is full of quirky characters, massive amounts of food and drink and, of course, sex. The guy can write.

I have seen the movie with Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet a dozen times and it is always enjoyable, but had never read The Maltese Falcon until recently. Dashiell Hammett's classic was published nearly 80 years ago and it remains a great read. The John Huston movie is very faithful to the book, even using word-for-word dialogue, but there is no substitute for Hammett's lean, clean prose coming off the page. This is the essential detective story.

Happy reading in 2010.

Saving The Forest By Burning It

Restoring Fire to the Landscape A fine series of articles focused on a smarter approach to wild land fire management is rolling out this week in the Arizona Daily Star.

Reporter Tom Beal has three stories and a series of sidebars about some of the latest thinking on fire management and the challenge of altering the long-cherished notion that all fire is bad and must be banished from the ecosystem.

The series is reminiscent of work done over the last several years by the Andrus Center for Public Policy, including the Center's report - The Fires Next Time. Following a major conference in 2003, the Andrus Center report made the case that changes in public policy must be accelerated in the direction of managing forest ecosystems more aggressively, including restoring fire to it rightful place in the management mix.

A good deal of the Center's fire work has been informed by Stephen Pyne, perhaps the nation's foremost historian of fire. Pyne keynoted that 2003 Andrus conference and he continues to call for more rapid change in fire policy.

Pyne wrote recently in the context of major southern California fires: "Like economic transactions, fire is not a substance but a reaction – an exchange. It takes its character from its context. It synthesizes its surroundings. Its power derives from the power to propagate. To control fire, you control its setting, and you control wild fire by substituting tame fire."

Most of the smartest people who think and plan for handling wild land fire know that we "control wild fire by substituting tame fire," but the process of changing a hundred years of policy does not move, unfortunately, as quickly as a western wild fire.

By the way, while Steve Pyne is a celebrated author of much excellent material on fire, he has also authored a marvelous little book on the majestic Grand Canyon in northern Arizona where he spent time as a firefighter. How the Canyon Became Grand is a great read for anyone who loves that awesome ditch.

The Big Burn

Positive Notices Roll in for Egan's Latest As I noted in this space a while back, Tim Egan's new book - The Big Burn - is a winner both as western (especially Idaho) history and as a cautionary tale about natural resource policy. Publisher's Weekly gave the book a starred review and Kirkus said it is a must for any "green bookshelf." Egan's work deserves a wide audience and appears to be getting one based upon accolades so far. The Seattle Times said: "The Big Burn shows off Egan's writerly skills and will bring attention to both how the Northwest was won — with big timber at the front — as well as the current debate over fire prevention in the wilderness." The Washington Times, a newspaper not likely to embrace much of what Egan writes in his New York Times column, nonetheless loved his book: "Not since David McCullough's 1968 The Johnstown Flood grabbed readers and hurled them down the narrow Conemaugh Valley to certain doom can I remember a natural-disaster yarn that yanks one by the back of the neck face to face with horror the way Timothy Egan's The Big Burn brings the great Western fire of 1910 over the mountain to destroy the town of Wallace, Idaho." The Oregonian's review focused on the heroes of Egan's story: "Timothy Egan loves the story of Ed Pulaski and tells it with relish, gesturing with his arms and lowering his voice to imitate Pulaski. He also loves the story of Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, the future president and the first chief of the Forest Service, stripping to their underwear and wrestling to seal their friendship in 1899." The Idaho Statesman's Rocky Barker has a good piece on the book and, like me, loves the story of forester Pulaski who left his family during the worst of the great fire to march back into the woods to help his trapped firefighters. In a long essay on the first chief of the Forest Service, Pennsylvanian Gifford Pinchot, who plays a center role in The Big Burn, the Philadelphia Inquirer said: "Central to Egan's story are the nation's forests themselves. And Pinchot's efforts to conserve them." And, the Christian Science Monitor says: "What makes The Big Burn particularly impressive is Egan’s skill as an equal-opportunity storyteller. By this I mean that he recounts the stories of men and women completely unknown to most of us with the same fervor he uses to report the stories of historic figures." For Idaho history buffs, Egan's book also resurrects one of the state's true political characters, Senator Weldon Heyburn, who has mostly been forgotten. The Twin Falls Times-News notes that the mean-spirited Heyburn was a "hard man to like" and that, "In his hometown of Wallace, the U.S. senator from Idaho once stopped a visiting band in mid-performance and ran it out of town because he didn't like a tune it was playing." Heyburn State Park near Plummer, Idaho - the oldest park in the Northwest - is named after the Senator. After you read Tim Egan's book, you may well conclude that renaming the park to honor Ed Pulaski would make some sense. The Big Burn is as good a piece of northwest political, cultural and public policy history - all in the wrappings of an adventure story - as we've seen in a long time.

Go read it.