Book Review: The Clinton Tapes - Wrestling History By Taylor Branch

I was a huge supporter of Bill Clinton when he ran for President in 1992. I volunteered for the campaign and even went to the inauguration [albeit about a quarter mile from where he delivered his address]. I continued to support him in 1996, although the drip-drip-drip of scandal over the first four years [Travelgate, Filegate, Whitewater, Vince Foster] gave me pause. Watching Chief of Staff Leon Panetta on election night, prior to Clinton's acceptance speech to the large crowd in Little Rock, I was struck at the time by something Panetta said. He let on that was exhausted and needed a break. I got the definite feeling that he was essentially saying, "Look, somehow I made it through without this guy [Clinton] doing something enormously stupid, probably with a dame. I'm gettin' outta Dodge before Bubba gets caught."

After Lewinsky, I was done with Clinton. Like most Americans, I felt lied to and I'd had enough of his nonsense. It was a grave disappointment. Over the years, my opinion of Clinton has softened a bit - although I still think he should've called his autobiography You Can't Call it Cheating, 'Cause She Reminds Me of You. I was very interested, then, when one of my favorite historians - Taylor Branch - announced that he and Clinton had discreetly conducted taped interviews throughout Clinton's presidency - from 1993-2001. There were 77 sessions in all, and Branch was coming out with a book on the experience.

Branch had met both Clintons - Bill and Hillary - while working Texas for George McGovern's 1972 presidential campaign. After that debacle, Branch lost touch with the Clintons, although he followed his political career, and even traveled to Little Rock on election night to watch the President-elect's acceptance speech. Six days after Election Day 1992, then, Branch was stunned to read an interview with the President-elect in the Baltimore Sun. In the interview, Clinton was saying he was said that thousands of election night celebrants had come to Little Rock and gone without his knowledge. "He [Clinton] said, for instance, that Baltimore novelist Taylor Branch, a long-time friend, had come and gone 'and I never saw him'." Then, shortly after Thanksgiving, Branch was caught off guard when he was contacted by the transition office of President-elect Clinton and told that the President-elect wished to see Branch and his wife, Christy. The meeting took place at a reception on December 7, 1992, held at the home of Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham. When the Clintons arrived, they struck up a conversation with Branch as if they'd just seen him the day before, as opposed to 20 years earlier.

From that encounter came a request in early 1993 from the transition office asking Branch if he would come to Washington to assist with the final preparations on the Inaugural Address. Branch and his wife attended the Inauguration [their seats were a helluva lot better than mine] and even spent some time with the Clintons back at the White House that evening. Now officially an FOB [Friend of Bill], Branch was contacted again in June 1993 by the White House Social Office inviting he and Christy to a large formal dinner at the White House. There, an usher told them that the Clintons wished to see them upstairs. Branch figured there would be a smaller group to which they were being invited, so he was surprised to find the President alone. Clinton wasted no time, telling Branch he needed "an Arthur Schlesinger" to help him. He wanted to put an in-house scholar on staff, as JFK did with Schlesinger.

Branch demurred, as he was still in the middle of writing his Civil Rights Era trilogy/Martin Luther King biography [Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire and At Canaan's Edge]. He agreed, however, to help Clinton work on coming up with a system to keep an accurate historical record. Over the summer, Clinton and Branch finalized the decision to hold taped interview sessions - monthly, if possible. The first was held October 17, 1993, the last on January 8, 2001. The arrangement had to be kept secret, as by that point Whitewater was heating up and anything Clinton touched was liable to be subpoenaed. Clinton would not be able to be candid on the tapes if he thought they would be released while he was still President. The only people who knew of the project where Clinton, Hillary, Taylor, Christy, Chelsea Clinton, Clinton's social secretary and Clinton's lawyer, David Kendall. It was agreed that Clinton would keep possession of the tapes, with Branch taking notes and dictating those notes into a summary, which he then provided to Clinton. It was agreed that any issue that might fall within the realm of a special prosecutor would be recorded on separate tapes in the event that Kendall needed to comply with any court order dealing with Clinton's words/thoughts/notes on Whitewater.

After 77 sessions, Clinton used the tapes in the writing of his autobiography, My Life. There is an arrangement for them to be stored at the Clinton Presidential Library for eventual release. Branch himself is anxious to hear them, as he never has and wants to see how accurate he was in recapturing the sessions in his notes. The Clinton Tapes - Wrestling History, then, is not a transcript of those tapes. Instead, it is the story of how they came about, what it was like during eight years of recordings, and a recreation of the conversations from the notes Branch took.

Ordinarily, I'd be weary of such a book. Without the actual tapes, one could argue, how could an author possibly write a book called The Clinton Tapes? Well, if the author was anyone other than Taylor Branch, I'd agree. Branch, however, is one of the most gifted historians of our era. He bona fides are beyond reproach - as anyone who has read his trilogy can attest. So, I decided to give Clinton another chance.

As you can imagine, the book presents a positive side of Clinton. Branch, after all, is a friend. But there are other sides of Clinton presented as well. The President comes off as....well, human. In a positive way [not in the way of, 'well, if you could get a blow-job from an intern, wouldn't you?!' kind of human]. The result is an engaging, brilliant piece of contemporary history. While certainly historians will treasure the tapes themselves when they are eventually released, in the meantime we have Branch's book to analyze the Clinton years.

Clinton is funny, angry, tired, wired, frantic, and mellow. The goal - to capture the history of his presidency "at the time" - is achieved brilliantly. Branch is particularly gifted in his writing on the Lewinsky scandal. For his part, Branch - prior to Clinton's admission - did not believe the story. He felt that there were probably transgressions in Clinton's marriage in the past, but that none of these had occurred since being elected President. In hindsight - after Clinton's admission - he was able to see small changes in Clinton's behavior at the time, but nothing that would have led him to believe Clinton had had an affair. Reading about that experience alone is worth the price of the book.

Finally, there is a story at the end of the book that - having read the whole book - I think captures Clinton perhaps as close as possible to his "true" self. It is July 6, 2004, and Clinton's My Life has been published. Clinton invited Branch to a party celebrating the event. Getting Branch alone, Clinton turned very solemn and said, "I have something for you." It was an envelope with a check for $50,000, made out to Branch. Clinton continued: "Now, I'm giving out bonuses to everybody who was involved in the book, and there couldn't have been a book without you. I couldn't get you to ghostwrite it for me. You've turned down money, but I want you to have this. I'm the same person I was when you and I were in Texas together and neither one of us had a pot to piss in. And you've spent all this time writing about Martin Luther King, and sometimes I wish I had done that myself. But you still don't have a pot to piss in. I've never had any money, and now I do, and frankly the only reason I want some is to share it with people who are my friends and are doing good."

I still think what Clinton did in the Lewinsky case was a fiasco. I still think he harmed the presidency and his country. But he had a more-than-willing-partner in that: the Republicans and the Right, who were clearly out to get him from Day 1. By bringing the impeachment charges on the Lewinsky issue, Republicans severely hampered Clinton's abilities to govern. The 9/11 Report, in fact, notes that one of the best chances to get Osama bin Laden was scrapped because Clinton feared it would be viewed as a political wag-the-dog move.

All that being said, Branch's book has given me a greater appreciate for all that Clinton did. It reminded me what it was that so attracted me to him as a candidate 18 years ago. It also shed some light on the President's relationship with Hillary. At the time, I believed that Hillary had known all along that Clinton had had an affair with Lewinsky and that she and Bill simply had an 'arrangement'. Branch's writings make it clear that, in fact, Hillary was stunned, deeply hurt and changed by the event. As were we all.

For those who hate Clinton, Branch's book will not change their minds. But for those - like me - who grew ambivalent about the 42nd President of the United States after scandal, after scandal, the book is a great way to get reacquainted with the Comeback Kid from Arkansas.

copyright 2010 by EBBP Redux. If you are reading this on a blog or website other than EBBP Redux or via a feedreader, this content has been stolen and used without permission.

Book Review: Franklin & Lucy

Joseph Persico's Franklin and Lucy is simply a fabulous book. I can't put it more simply than that. As someone who thought he had read everything there was to read about Franklin Roosevelt, I can say that I went into the book with very low expectations. When I realized that I had read the first 100 pages at nearly one sitting, however, I realized I was - as Herman's Hermits once put it - into something good.

I won't go into the history between FDR and Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd. Think John Edwards and his tramp minus the kid and the sleaze–factor. Like most other FDR-philes, I knew the story well – or thought I did. The conventional wisdom was that FDR had the affair with Lucy during World War I; once it was discovered by Eleanor, FDR was told by his mother, Sara, that if he left Eleanor she would disown him; FDR ended the relationship and never saw Lucy again until after World War II began.

Until recently, that was the standard scholarship on the FDR-Lucy relationship. Then a descendant of Rutherfurd stumbled upon a treasure trove of long-thought-destroyed letters between FDR and Lucy that spelled out that FDR and Lucy actually reconnected in the 1920s. Indeed, there is even some suggestion that he never actually ended the relationship at all. By the time he became President, they remained close enough that he sent a personal driver to take her to his first inauguration. She would be standing there, not terribly far from Eleanor, for that first - and subsequent second, third and fourth - inauguration.

In the short time between FDR's death and her own [of leukemia in 1948], Lucy told those few who knew of her relationship with FDR that she had burned all of their correspondence. Why she kept these newly discovered letters is unknown, as is how they remained unknown until nearly 60 years after her death.

The letters - and follow-up interviews by Persico of the descendants of the key players in their relationship - is truly an amazing tale. Twenty years before White House staffers would be trained to time President Kennedy’s trysts to make sure that Jackie had “left the building” before ushering in some nubile talent, people in the FDR White House knew Rutherfurd as Mrs. Paul Johnson. Her calls were to be immediately put through to FDR, her visits were to be carefully choreographed to occur either when Eleanor was completely out of town or – as time went on and FDR became less careful – at least when she was out of the White House.

Most of this was done in the open. FDR would often be put into a car and driven to Rutherfurd’s home. While FDR remained in the idling car in the street, the driver and a team of Secret Service agents would collect Rutherfurd, put her in the car, and drive the two of them up and down the streets of Washington.

Persico also looks at FDR’s relationships with Missy LeHand, Princess Martha of Norway, Daisy Suckley and Dorothy Schiff. The question of whether FDR could physically consummate sexual relations after being struck with polio is one that will never be known with 100% certainty. It does seem likely, however, that FDR was in fact sexually active with other women after being struck with polio [and equally likely that he and Eleanor never had physical relations after the 1918 discovery of his affair]. Based on some of the newly discovered Rutherfurd letters and interviews with descendants of the various women it does seem that FDR was not rendered impotent by the disease.

Persico’s book is a compelling story. It is not the book to read if you are looking for any kind of in-depth analysis of FDR’s presidency. His subtitle – President Roosevelt, Mrs. Rutherfurd and the other Remarkable Women in his Life – says it all. The book is about FDR and his relationship with women - Lucy being the primary focus of the story. Persico certainly places the stories and events in the proper historical context – for example, one conversation with Lucy occurs with FDR railing against the hornets’ nest his “Supreme Court packing” plan has caused. But this is a story about an extraordinary man without delving too deeply into the events and his subsequent actions that demonstrated that greatness.

These newly discovered letters and subsequent interviews also answer the question: 'Did FDR know how sick he was?' Indeed, he did. While many tried to keep FDR shielded from the diagnosis - based on a 1944 physical exam - that FDR was suffering from a worsening heart condition that made it unlikely he would live to the end of a fourth term. Indeed, FDR not only knew it but - according to Lucy - seemed to realize that his condition was almost certainly terminal. During their last week together at Warm Springs before his death, according to Lucy, FDR told her that he planned to open the United Nations in San Francisco, finish off Germany and Japan, and then resign, hopefully by mid-1946. If true, this makes his decision to keep Vice President Harry Truman out of the loop on the Manhattan Project even more inexcusable [although Lucy also believed that the reason FDR replaced his third-term Vice President Henry Wallace - whom FDR regarded as insane - was so that he could essentially choose his successor].

FDR - like most great people - was a complicated individual. Persico's book shines a light on one of the most complicated - but long-standing - relationships of his life. While the man was complicated, this book is not. Do yourself a favor and read it.

copyright 2009 by EBBP Redux. If you are reading this on a blog or website other than EBBP Redux or via a feedreader, this content has been stolen and used without permission.

Book Review: Bottom of the Ninth

Michael Shapiro's Bottom of the Ninth is fascinating reading for anyone who loves baseball -or football, for that matter. Although it is told as a parallel story - with a distracting and incongruous outlining of Casey Stengel's final years as manager of the New York Yankees - the real story is about Branch Rickey and his proposed Continental League, which he tried to create between 1958-1960. The CL would be a third Major League that would do for baseball what - it turned out - the American Football League would do for football. Rickey's CL idea is a little-remembered phenomenon that very nearly worked, and Shapiro's recounting of it is excellent.

At heart, Rickey envisioned a fundamental change in the nature of baseball: no longer would the Yankees and a few other teams so totally dominate the American and National Leagues that competitive races for the pennant were nearly non-existent in 80% of the cities that fielded Major League teams. Instead, Rickey envisioned a more balanced setting, with revenue-sharing, a Major League draft and competition. Rickey believed he could build the CL in a few years into a viable league that would merge with Major League Baseball. Like Ban Johnson - whose start-up American League had broken the will of the National League at the turn of the 20th century - Rickey envisioned his Continental League forcing the other Major League owners to expand.

But Rickey's was not to be expansion for the sake of novelty. Rickey was adamant that his Continental League was not a ruse simply to get the American and National League owners to finally open up Major League Baseball to other cities through expansion franchises in the existing leagues. As Shapiro deftly outlines, however, Rickey was duped. Many of the potential Continental League owners that Rickey had assembled - Craig Cullinan (Houston), Joan Whitney Payson (New York), Jack Kent Cooke (Toronto), and Edwin Johnson (Denver) among others - secretly viewed Rickey's vision to be exactly that: a sham that was merely a way to break the will of the existing Major Leagues and finally get franchises for their respective cities. While Rickey argued that such expansion was a novelty-act - creating new teams that would be unable to be competitive with existing teams - Rickey's potential CL owners wanted to get into that novelty act badly.

Like Ban Johnson - who he viewed as an icon - Branch Rickey believed in competition as the best way to generate and sustain a fan base. For Johnson and Rickey, competition was relative: it didn't matter who a team played so long as the outcome was in doubt. A new league pairing franchises of equal talent against one another - the Continental League or the American League in 1901 - would generate far more excitement and potential for revenue growth for all of the owners than would four new expansion teams in the existing Major Leagues.

Of course, there was another example besides Ban Johnson that Rickey also knew about: Charlie Weeghman. A Chicago businessman, Weeghman desperately wanted to buy either the Cubs or White Sox. When he could not do that, he simply created a third league, with a franchise in Chicago, to being play in 1912. With his Federal League launched, Weeghman even built a new stadium in Chicago - what would become Wrigley Field. But Weeghman never really intended for the Federal League to succeed. His goal was to put enough pressure on the existing owners that they would force the owners of either the Cubs or White Sox to sell to Weeghman in return for his agreement to disband the league. Which is exactly what happened: the Cubs were sold to Weeghman and the other owners Weeghman had suckered into joining him were left to bankruptcy.

The irony is that at the very same time Rickey was looking to launch the Continental League, Lamar Hunt was launching a league that would do exactly that for football. The National Football League had sworn that it would never accept franchises in - let alone merge with - any city that fielded a team in Hunt's new American Football League. Yet, the idea of revenue-sharing and broad competitive sport - which the AFL brought with balanced teams playing competitive games every Sunday - is exactly what contributed to the explosion in popularity of the AFL. It was a success that the NFL could not ignore. Indeed, despite Commissioner Pete Rozelle's claim that the two leagues would never merge, they indeed joined hands in 1970 and today the NFL is the single-biggest competitive professional sports league in the world.

On a side note, one of Shapiro's other noteworthy stories involves Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley and his revolutionary idea of pay-per-view television for broadcasting baseball. O'Malley was so convinced in the idea of what we now call cable television, that when he moved the Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, he blacked out all of their games - home and away (with the exception of games against the rival Giants, now in San Francisco) because he refused to let the concept of free baseball on television take root in Los Angeles the way it had in New York.

O'Malley's decision paid off when - on July 17, 1964 - the Dodgers hosted the Cubs with the game being broadcast to 2,500 homes wired to receive it in a four-square mile section of west Los Angeles. Viewers paid $1.50 to view the game. And thus was born the idea of pay-per-view television. Ironically, cable television would have been launched twelve years earlier than it was [in 1976] if not for the Hollywood motion picture industry. So frightened by O'Malley's experiment in 1964, the film industry successfully lobbied politicos to put a referendum on the November 1964 California ballot banning pay television. The referendum passed. Although it only effected California, it so scared off other entrepreneurs that it took a billionaire who didn't care - Ted Turner - to finally launch the concept in 1976.

Shapiro's book is really a testimony to the brilliance of Branch Rickey. In addition to a new league to foster competition, another Rickey innovation that Lamar Hunt's AFL [and very soon thereafter Pete Rozelle's NFL] adapted was the concept of national television contracts versus local television contracts. In addition to revenue-sharing, a pooled television contract would benefit all of the owners in the Continental League. That's exactly what happened in football and it lead to the sport becoming the most watched professional sports entertainment on television.

While baseball did see changes: the abolishment - necessitated by federal court - of the hated reserve clause in 1974 and - finally - revenue sharing in 2005, the sport in 2007 was tied with basketball - well behind football - in popularity. And the financial value of NFL franchises are far, far greater than baseball. On average, NFL teams are valued at $957,000,000 -far greater than baseball, which is roughly $450,000,000.

More important, though, is the discrepancy between teams' values: in football, the richest team, the Dallas Cowboys, is worth $1,200,000,000 while the poorest team, the Minnesota Vikings, is worth $782,000,000. The richest is thus twice as valuable as the poorest. In baseball, however, the richest team, my beloved Yankees, are worth $1,200,000,000 while the poorest team, the Florida Marlins, aer worth $256,000,000. The richest team is thus five times as valuable as the poorest in baseball.

Rickey's plan for a league fell apart when the owners of Major League Baseball were able to peel away some of Rickey's owners by agreeing to expansion. The American League expanded in 1961, and the National League in 1962. Shapiro's book is a fascinating look at the divergent paths that baseball and football took, and the billions of dollars that were earned as a result.

copyright 2009 by EBBP Redux. If you are reading this on a blog or website other than EBBP Redux or via a feedreader, this content has been stolen and used without permission.

Book Review: 1789

By all rights, I should not have enjoyed this book. I've never been in love with European history - probably because it's too damned long. U.S. history is great: concise, 200+ years, simple. Boom, that's it. With Europe though, you're talking about at least 1,000 years - and that's if you write off whatever happened before 1066 as utter misery.

Andress' book, however, blends American with European history through the spectrum of 1789 in America, France and England. The events of that year - and the years immediately preceding and succeeding it - led to what Andress calls "the threshold of the modern age."

We know that in the United States 1789 saw the installation of the form of government approved in the newly-ratified Constitution. The irony is that in England at the same time, a centenary celebration of the "glorious" revolution of 1689 led many to question whether England's unwritten constitution - or an actual written document like the United States now had - was the preferable form. As President Washington settled into his new digs in New York City, Congress began debate on a 'bill of rights' - which had been demanded by many states in return for their agreement to ratify the Constitution at all. Andress covers most of the basics in the Federalist/Anti-Federalist debate, although his portraits of Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison are a bit thin. He does accurately bring to life, however, Benjamin Franklin and the role his ideas played in the new government.

In England, a battle between political forces led by Charles James Fox against those led by William Pitt coincided with the centenary celebration. At the same time, Thomas Paine was preparing his epic, The Rights of Man, which would turn much of the world on its proverbial ear with such truly revolutionary concepts as the fallacy of monarchy and the inherent rights of the common man [hence, the title, folks] that exist - written or unwritten - now and for all time.



Meanwhile, in France, we know that a whole lot of guillotine makers are about to get rich. Which is ironic, since it is the rich who will end up at the losing end of the guillotine over the next five years. Andress' description of Louis XVI - and Marie Antoinette - make the book worth reading in and of themselves. The duplicity of Louis - according to Andress - is what truly was his ruin in the end. His half-measures in dealing with the Estates General were simultaneous with his plans to crush the 'parlement'.



Andress' work is well-researched and a relatively easy-read. It gets a bit mundane in the inner-workings of each country's system of government - but such a background is necessary in order to make his larger point that the events in and around 1789 laid the foundation for the modern age.



In addition to revolutionary ideas [and, in the U.S. and France, revolutionary actions], all three powers shared another common bond: slavery. Andress goes into great detail about how slavery and slave trade came to be in each of the three nations, and what effects slavery had on the shaping of the revolutionary ideas that were taking shape in the world of 1789.



While not necessarily a work for those looking for a quick-read of light fare, Andress' 1789 is a good starting point for anyone seeking to get a primer on the age, with the idea of then delving deeper into any of the many issues he touches on in his work.

copyright 2009 by EBBP Redux. If you are reading this on a blog or website other than EBBP Redux or via a feedreader, this content has been stolen and used without permission.

Book Review: Too Fat to Fish

I have loved Artie Lange since before most Americans had ever heard of him. Back in 1995, MadTV was launched on FOX as a funny alternative to Saturday Night Live - which in the post-Phil Hartman years had actually become a drama. There was one member of the ensemble MadTV cast that caught my attention immediately: Lange. His impressions were funny, not because they were accurate but because - much like Chevy Chase's famous impersonations of Gerald Ford during the early SNL days - they bore absolutely zero resemblance to the character he was impersonating [he did Newt Gingrich with a Jersey accent]. And - for my money - nothing has ever been funnier on American television than Lange's portrayal of a black woman who was hit by a bus, had her soul jump into a big fat white guy from New Jersey, and became That's My White Mamma. Lange's catch phrase in the sketch - 'Don't make me break my foot off in your ass!" - still makes me laugh 15 years later.

Lange disappeared from television only to reappear seemingly attached to SNL alum Norm MacDonald. It was that relationship that led to Lange's eventual role-of-a-lifetime on The Howard Stern Show. A self-described rabid Stern fan, Lange's 'I could've been a longshoreman' persona made him connect with Stern's listeners in a way that Jackie Martling never could. Lange on Stern's show on "terrestrial radio" [or, 'testicle radio' as Lange coined it] was great. Lange on Stern's Sirius satellite radio show has been utter brilliance. Lange is a foul-mouthed comic and one now can hardly believe he was able to survive on commercial television and radio so many years without saying the word "fuck".

So, I say all of this as a prelude to demonstrate my Lange-loving credentials. I loved Artie. I still do. But after you read Too Fat To Fish, you're not going to like him that much. Lange's self-destructive behavior - told in uproariously painful detail on the air over the last eight years - are funny when he tells them on the radio because Lange is always the butt of the stories. In TFTF, however, you get to see the collateral damage: what Lange's behavior did to his family and friends as they tried to steer him off the course of destruction.

In short, if you're thinking about reading TFTF for laughs, keep walking. You're not going to get them here. Sure, there are funny tid bits and tales. But mostly it's a sad, disgusting, ugly tale. Maybe Lange did himself a disservice by telling all of those funny stories over the years on Stern's show. Anything funny in the book, you've already heard on the Stern show. It's the other stuff that you find out in the book: the friends he nearly beat up in fits of drug rage; the countless number of chances he was given only to always fuck it up with an overdose or violent behavior; the pain he inflicted on his mother and sister through his too-numerous-to-mention binges is truly disturbing.

While Lange's stories on the air about his binges are filled with self-deprecating humor, in the written word they come off as self-destructive and - worst - destructive to the lives of anyone around him. Lange comes off as a toxic nightmare - not just the chemical toxins he put in his body but the toxic effect he had on anyone involved in his life: friends, co-workers, producers, directors, even the poor maids who had to clean up after him. In fact, a not-so-insignificant part of the book is Lange apologizing - literally, apologizing - in the text to those he's hurt over the years. More than a dozen times you'll read something to the effect of, "I haven't seen [insert name here] since that happened. I love [insert name here]. If [he/she] is reading this, I want to apologize and say I love you."

Really, Artie, it would've been simpler to just write them a goddamned note. You didn't need to co-write a book to get it off your chest. Perhaps the fact that I read the book after it became known that Lange had relapsed and was back on heroin when he wrote it colored my thoughts about the book. Reading about his antics knowing that he was still addicted makes it less funny.

About halfway through the book I realized I was getting angrier and angrier at Lange. About three-quarters through I realized I didn't like him all that much, either. By the end of the book, I thought he was the biggest asshole I'd ever read about.

Fortunately, once Monday came around, I was able to go back to just listening to Lange on the radio and by Tuesday I loved him again. Like I said, if you're looking for laughs you'll be looking a long time. Anything funny in the book you've already heard on the Stern show. It's the aftermath of what he wrought that you'll read about. And you'll most definitely want to break your foot off in his enormous ass.

copyright 2009 by EBBP Redux. If you are reading this on a blog or website other than EBBP Redux or via a feedreader, this content has been stolen and used without permission.

Book Review: Hello Darlin'

Larry Hagman is one of my all-time favorite actors. J.R. Ewing has been as much an integral part of my life as has Archie Bunker - portrayed, ironically enough, by Hagman's lifelong close friend Carroll O'Connor. Hagman's portrayal of J.R. and the phenomenon that was Dallas defined the late 1970s/early 1980s for many Americans.

But, if you are looking for tall tales about the Dallas years in Hagman's autobiography, you'll have to wait until page 181 [of a 272-page book]. The 13 years of Dallas zip by in Hagman's story with a few stories, opinions and recaps. Surprisingly, however, despite this you'll not be disappointed in this book. In actuality, the seemingly short-shrift given to Dallas is simply the way Hagman views his life: Dallas was but one of a string of unbelievably lucky breaks received by a man who has lived an extraordinarily lucky life and who is smart enough to know how lucky he has been.

Hagman doesn't hate Dallas - far from it. He may be the only actor so tied to a role who doesn't hate the association [O'Connor bristled at being constantly labeled as "Archie"; James Gandolfini won't even allow questions about The Sopranos from any journalist; then there's poor Fred Gwynne who - when he died - had Herman Munster's photo reprinted in newspapers across the country]. Hagman embraces J.R. and the series that created him. He loved nearly all of his castmates [the only one he speaks poorly of is the late Dack Rambo, whom Hagman said he actually liked during the series but hated after Rambo publicly called Hagman a "homophobe" who got Rambo fired from Dallas because of his openly bisexual lifestyle and his HIV diagnosis; charges Hagman angrily dismisses].





Hagman writes of trying to get Jim Davis to kick his five-pack-a-day cigarette habit [Hagman quit smoking in the 1960s and became one of the biggest anti-smoking advocates in Hollywood]; and of losing a similar battle with Barbara Bel Geddes until a near-fatal heart attack got her to stop in the mid-1980s. Hagman's fondness for Patrick Duffy is clear, as the close relationship he has maintained with Linda Gray. Unlike many Hollywood tales, the cast of Dallas was actually a tight-knit group - all of whom couldn't believe their great fortune to be a part of something like Dallas.





Indeed, Hagman is fully aware and grateful for the tens of millions of dollars Dallas has earned him. He can still remember being so low on money that he had to rent out his home to Peter Sellers for a month [while he and his wife, Maj, slept on a mattress in Peter Fonda's office]. But Hagman's life was noteworthy before Dallas and if his post-Dallas career has been quieter, his successful recovery from a liver transplant brought him continued renown.

And one of the most enjoyable things about the book is Hagman's seemingly endless encounters with other celebrities. Granted, with a mother as famous as Mary Martin was in her day, it's not unusual that Hagman met famous people long before he himself would reach the stage or screen. Still, Hagman's eclectic list of friends over the years - in addition to Fonda, Sellers and O'Connor - include: Ray Bradbury, Marlon Brando, Art Buchwald, David Crosby, Cary Grant, Joel Grey, Dennis Hopper, Margot Kidder, Richard Lewis, Steve McQueen, Peter Marshall, Lee Marvin, Burgess Meredith, Jack Nicholson, Charlotte Rae, George C. Scott, and last but certainly not least: The Who's Keith Moon. Reading of his adventures in drinking with Moon is worth the cost of the book itself.

The book is a quick - and funny - read. Typical is a story Hagman tells of the shitty amenities the cast of Dallas dealt with - even long after it had become a hit. One of the shittier places [pun intended] was the restrooms on set. When they put in a handicapped stall, it narrowed the other stalls to the point where no one could use them. So, everyone used the handicapped stall, as no one on the cast, crew or staff were disabled. One day, however, while Hagman was in the stall doing his business, there was a sharp bang on the stall door. "Who's in there!" the voice belonging to the 'bang' queried. "I am," said Hagman. "Who are you?!" said the voice incredulously. Hagman told him it was none of his business. This really pissed the guy off. The voice said that he was disabled and needed to use the stall NOW. Hagman apologized and said he'd be happy to vacate it as soon he was finished. This led the man to threaten to call security. When Hagman got out he saw a clearly pissed off man in a wheelchair. At this point, Hagman was recognizable the world over but this man didn't recognize him. "Hey asshole," the guy said as Hagman walked out. "What's your name?" Hagman replied, "Patrick Duffy. And go fuck yourself."

copyright 2009 by EBBP Redux. If you are reading this on a blog or website other than EBBP Redux or via a feedreader, this content has been stolen and used without permission.

Book Review: Lincoln's Virtues

This book is not for the faint of heart; or for anyone who falls asleep easily. Don't get me wrong: the book is worth reading. It looks at Abraham Lincoln from a different prospective. Rather than just Lincoln the politician, or just Lincoln the war president, William Lee Miller goes deeper, delving into the moral, philosophical and spiritual [not religious] underpinnings of Abraham Lincoln. Miller then makes a strong argument that those moral and philosophical foundations go a long way toward explaining why the man is on Mount Rushmore.

A central tenet of Miller's work is this: Lincoln abhorred slavery. He viewed slavery as inherently wrong, and he held this belief by the age of 30. To those who have argued - using some of Lincoln's own words - that Lincoln was not truly against slavery, or did not truly believe that bondage was wrong, Miller painstakingly [with the emphasis on pain] refutes these critics throughout the work. Any ambiguity as to Lincoln's feelings about slavery, according to Miller, fall to the floor once you understand his 'virtues'.

Yet, if that is a central tenet, Miller also insists that those who deify Lincoln are equally misguided. That Lincoln was a fantastic politician is generally agreed to, even by his critics. But many who worship Lincoln believe that his political activity was nothing more than an end to a means: that he didn't really like politics and didn't do the things that politicians do. Miller argues that this is simply not true. Lincoln not only was good at politics: he loved it. Miller's message to Lincoln-worshipers who try to forget that Lincoln was a politician is simple: the man not only liked politics but he practically founded the Illinois Republican party. Certainly not something that one who abhors politics would do, no?

Lincoln was a true Whig at the start of his political career, which began before he turned 30 when he served in the Illinois House of Representatives. He was a firm supporter of Henry Clay and his idea of an 'American System' of national improvements. Unlike Clay, however, he believed that slavery was morally wrong. Unlike abolitionists of the next two decades, however, Lincoln did not believe that slavery where it existed should be touched. Where Lincoln was adamant, however, was that slavery should not spread to new territories. Lincoln often made the analogy of dealing with slavery the way you deal with walking in to find deadly snakes in a bed with your children: the snakes are an evil, but you dare not disturb them for fear of your children being harmed. You do not, however, put more snakes in the remaining beds, either.

Miller looks at the 1860 election in an interesting way, too. Basically, working backwards, Miller says the question isn't how Lincoln got elected President. The question is: how did he secure the Republican nomination. The distinction is important because, according to Miller, it was largely a foregone conclusion that whomever the Republicans nominated stood a better than even chance of winning the presidency.

So, how did Lincoln secure the nomination? A commonly-held misconception is that a great deal of luck was involved. Miller argues that, while luck played a small role, it was no more than the fact that Lincoln was "lucky" to be from Illinois; "lucky" that Illinois had been home to Stephen Douglas; and "lucky" that Lincoln had used his six-year verbal jousting with Douglas to create a litany of speeches and written documents outlining his views far beyond Illinois itself, making him something of a national figure even before the 1860 convention. The location of that convention is often viewed as "lucky". It was not. Lincoln was instrumental in getting Chicago chosen as the site of the convention.

Throughout the book, Miller does a thorough job of tracing the trajectory of Lincoln's journey from self-taught lawyer to the White House. While dry and somewhat existential at times, Miller includes enough politics and history to make the book worth reading. He gives more depth to Lincoln than many authors. His is a balanced look at the life of the "real" Lincoln, not the icon with a monument on the Mall in Washington.

The book stops at Lincoln's inauguration. There are numerous examples, however, of the 1861-1865 Lincoln and his decision-making. But the purpose of the book is not to report on Lincoln the President. It is to explain how Lincoln the President came to be. What his values were, what his philosophies were, what made him what he was. After reading this, you'll get a greater appreciation of Lincoln the Icon, too.

copyright 2009 by EBBP Redux. If you are reading this on a blog or website other than EBBP Redux or via a feedreader, this content has been stolen and used without permission.

Book Review: The Last Campaign

Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?

Can you tell me where he's gone?

I thought I saw him walkin' up over the hill,
With Abraham, Martin and John.

Dion’s “Abraham, Martin and John” is one of at least two songs whose lyrics were altered in-studio due to the assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy [D, NY] on June 5, 1968 at 3:16 am Eastern time. As the title suggests, the song was written [by Richard Holler] as a result of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and was a poetic triumvirate tying Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy and King together as men who, “freed a lot of people, but it seems the good they die young…” As Dion was laying down vocals, Bobby Kennedy’s assassination led Holler to add the final paragraph [above] to the song. The other song similarly adjusted was the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy with the Devil”. Keith Richards’ and Mick Jagger’s lyric was originally, “I shouted out, ‘Who killed John Kennedy?’, when after all, it was you and me”. As they were laying down the track, RFK was killed, leading Richards to slightly alter the line to have Jagger sing, “I shouted out, ‘Who killed the Kennedys?’, when after all…”

If I was truly conceived exactly nine months prior to my actual birth, then I was conceived the night that Robert Kennedy was murdered. Other than that – and my nephew’s being born exactly 40 years after the event – I have never thought much about Bobby Kennedy’s 82-day campaign for the Presidency in 1968. I knew the basic facts about the assassination in California, and had seen an extended rebroadcast of the event as it aired in the middle of the night on the east coast on June 5, 1968 – including Lyndon Johnson’s simply surreal address of mourning to the Nation. After listening to LBJ, anyone dropping in from Mars would have been clueless as to the visceral hatred both men shared for one another. That LBJ didn’t win an Oscar for that performance was criminal.

Until reading Thurston Clarke’s The Last Campaign, however, the actual campaign that preceded the assassination never captured my interest. I had generally believed that RFK – in 1968 at least – had been an opportunist. That he ran only after Sen. Eugene McCarthy [D, Minn] showed how vulnerable LBJ was by capturing 42% of the vote in the New Hampshire primary, and that Kennedy probably would not have been able to wrest the nomination away from Vice President Hubert Humphrey had he not been killed.

While Clarke often slips beyond the impartial into that world of Kennedy-worship that often makes books about them unreadable, his work does make a very strong argument that Robert Kennedy’s run for the Presidency in 1968 was nothing less than a political revolution that held the promise of a universally new way of politics. Clarke’s portrayal of the campaign, of RFK’s own inner-psyche and transformation at the hands of those who nearly tore him to pieces in trying to touch him, really does lead me to question my previous assumptions of the viability of Kennedy’s candidacy.

Those in the love-Kennedy camp often rhapsodize about ‘what might have been’ had President Kennedy lived; had Bobby Kennedy lived, etc. It is romantic and dramatic to draw up ‘might have beens’ and ‘what ifs’ when writing about either Kennedy. Bobby, though in particular, lends himself to this phenomenon because we know how it ends. We know what President Richard Nixon is going to do – not just in Vietnam and Laos but at home – and we know that what followed were some of the darkest political days in our nation’s history. Because we know all of this, it is tempting to think that – had Bobby lived – it all would have been different.

It is very, very hard to stop yourself from doing that kind of dreaming when reading Clarke’s work. For one thing – Clarke never shuts up about it, constantly hammering home his conviction that RFK would have been the greatest president since Lincoln. If you begin this work, though, aware of this tendency, and keep focused on the facts and stories alone, Clarke’s book is truly fascinating.

Because Bobby Kennedy’s campaign was fascinating. Clarke interviewed extensively all of the surviving members of the [very large] press pool that followed Kennedy from Day 1 to Day 82 of his campaign. These recollections are often being told here for the first time by men and women who – as journalists – fell in love with Kennedy and later felt guilty about losing their impartiality. That – combined with the horrific end of the campaign – led many to remain silent for nearly 40 years about what went on behind the scenes of that campaign.

For Clarke, however, they open up and tell an amazing story. For one thing [and this a major theme of the book], there was the almost universal belief among all of the media that Bobby Kennedy was going to be shot. From the first night of the campaign, when a bunch of reporters having drinks after hours took up a pool to see who could guess the exact date on which Kennedy would be shot [and this was in March; even before King had been killed] there was an inevitability among the press that this man was going to die before he could possibly succeed his brother. That he would die at the hand of an assassin and that it would happen while he was campaigning.

Indeed, that sense of inevitability was felt by many Kennedy aides. The candidate himself thought a great deal about it, according to some of the sources for Clarke’s book. These sources – mostly journalists who Kennedy often sought out after-hours to pour out his soul off the record – say Kennedy once said, “There are guns between me and the White House.” When asked what that meant, Kennedy reportedly smiled and said, “These people [the voters] say I’m a hero; well, heroes get shot.” On many occasions during the campaign, a car would backfire, or someone would set off firecrackers, and Kennedy would jolt upright, cover his head with his hands, or otherwise recoil as if it was Dallas 1963 all over again.

In addition to having that sense of inevitability about him, Clarke’s Bobby Kennedy is a man who – by March 1968 – was eager to leave his brother behind. “I’m interested in what can help this country in 1969,” Kennedy said, “not what we did in 1963.” Indeed, Bobby Kennedy by 1968 was far more ‘in-touch’ with the downtrodden, minorities, poor, and disenfranchised than his brother ever was [or would have been had he lived]. Bobby’s sense of empathy and his deep compassion were not characteristics, in fact, that his brother would have even recognized in his Attorney General. Indeed, the Bobby Kennedy of 1968 would have been unrecognizable to John Kennedy – both physically, with his long hair, and philosophically with his deep and passionate concern for African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and poor whites.

And these constituencies loved Bobby Kennedy. One of the great senses of tragedy around Kennedy’s 1968 assassination was the feeling held by many minorities that RFK had been their last best hope. With his death, no politician for the next 25 years would ever hold their esteem the way Bobby Kennedy had. And Kennedy loved these people. Despite his abhorrence of being so much as touched let alone having his shoes, cuff links, ties and other apparel torn violently from his body by adoring mobs, Kennedy insisted on allowing it to happen. Whenever his [private] security detail would object or try to keep crowds away, Kennedy would reprimand them on the spot and insist that he be allowed to freely greet and mingle. In fact, one of the many ironies of RFK’s actual assassination is that almost to a person those who believed he would be killed thought it would happen during these meet-and-greets. No known attempt on his life, however, was ever made during these literally hundreds of gatherings.

His end would come in a hotel kitchen instead. Here, too, Clarke points to another irony: Kennedy always insisted on leaving a speaking engagement by walking through the crowd and out the back to the exit. On the few occasions during the campaign that aides led him through a back way – such as the kitchen entrance of a hotel – he would furiously chastise them, “Never do that again!” It is possible that – after 82 days of tireless and endless campaigning – by June 5th Robert Kennedy was just too tired to go through the crowd one more time. That is the only reason anyone associated with the campaign can explain - 40 years later - why Bobby Kennedy allowed himself to be led through the kitchen where Sirhan Sirhan was waiting to kill him. In fact, some of Kennedy’s security detail that night had started to clear a path in front of the speakers podium, so that he could exit through the crowd, only to have to double back quickly [and, ultimately, futilely] when they realized their candidate had instead ducked back to the hotel kitchen.

For me personally, another of the great revelations in this book is the fact that Robert Kennedy knew he’d been shot. Because he’d been hit in the head, I had always assumed he lost consciousness instantly. He did not. Because there were so many people in the room at the time – one journalist estimated that there were 80 human beings within a 20-foot radius of the candidate with all of their attention focused on him when Sirhan pulled the trigger, Kennedy’s assassination was the most-witnessed political killing ever. While the Zapruder film captures in vivid and gory detail the assassination of John Kennedy, that film came to light only five years after the event. Until that time, very few had witnessed the actual shots and grim results.

Not so with Bobby Kennedy. The proximity between Kennedy and Sirhan was less than a few feet. Five others were wounded. As Kennedy had been led back through the kitchen, he clasped hands with cooks, dishwashers and other well-wishers. As he was leaning across one of the kitchen worktables to shake hands with yet another member of the kitchen staff, Sirhan reached out from the crowd, pointed a revolver at Kennedy’s head and fired. Sirhan used a .22-caliber pistol, not an ‘ideal’ weapon for an assassin. Later, the surgeon who operated on Bobby Kennedy would say that if the fatal bullet had hit Bobby Kennedy just a centimeter further back on his head than it did, Kennedy would have survived and eventually recovered with no brain damage.

Clarke recounts word-for-word the actual moment of the assassination as recorded live by Mutual Radio Network reporter Andrew West. West happened to be lucky enough to get Kennedy’s attention just as he entered the kitchen. The candidate agreed to talk with him, while he greeted the kitchen staff. On the tape, West asks, “Senator, how are you going to counter Mr. Humphrey and his backgrounding [sic] you as far as the delegate votes go?” Kennedy – still shaking hands – responds, “It just goes back to the struggle for it….” The gunshots. At that point, West frantically screams, “Senator Kennedy has been shot – Senator Kennedy has been shot. Is that possible? Is that possible? It is possible, ladies and gentlemen. Is it possible? He has. Not only Senator Kennedy – Oh my God – Senator Kennedy and another man – a Kennedy campaign manager – and possibly shot in the head. I am right here and [Kennedy aide] Rafer Johnson has hold of the man who apparently has fired the shot….HE STILL HAS THE GUN!! The gun is pointed at me this very moment. I hope they can get the gun out of his hand. Be very careful. GET THE GUN! GET THE GUN! Stay away from the gun. Stay away from the gun. His hand is frozen….get his thumb, get his thumb take a hold of his thumb [here West momentarily forgets he is on the air] fucking BREAK it if you have to. Get away from the barrel. Look out for the gun. OK – all right. That’s it, Rafer, get it. Get the gun, Rafer. Ok, no hold on to the gun. Ladies and gentlemen they have the gun away from the man. I can’t see the man. I can’t see who it is. Senator Kennedy right now is on the ground. He has been shot. This is a – this is – wait a minute. Hold him! We don’t’ want another [Lee Harvey] Oswald, Rafer! Hold him. Keep people away from him. This is a – make room, make room, make room, make room. The Senator is on the ground. He’s bleeding profusely…apparently the Senator has been shot from the frontal area, we don’t see exactly where the Senator has been shot.”

At this point, Kennedy was still conscious. His eyes would focus and then go blank and then refocus again. A busboy kneeled at his side with a towel, uncertain where to put it as there was so much blood he couldn’t be sure where Kennedy had been hit. Kennedy looked up at the busboy and said, “Is everybody else all right? Is [aide] Paul [Schrade] okay? Is everybody all right?” As Kennedy’s wife, Ethel – who had been held up at the podium by well-wishers and only entered the kitchen after hearing the shots – reached him, he said to her, “My head!” Another witness said he then said, “Jack, Jack…” and lost consciousness. He regained it, however, when the ambulance attendants were finally able to reach him through the throng. “Don’t!” Kennedy screamed, “Don’t lift me. No, no, no, no!”

As Clarke says, perhaps the most surprising thing about Kennedy’s assassination is that almost literally no one was shocked, not even the victim. Journalist Hays Gorey recounts, “Gazing up from the floor, Robert Kennedy, still lucid, wore a haunting expression that no one who knew him will ever forget. He was fully aware of what had happened.” Another reporter, Peter Hamill – speaking for the first time in 40 years about the event – told Clarke that Kennedy had “a sort of sweet kind of acceptance” on his face as he lay on the floor. Hamill looked in Kennedy’s eyes and “instead of asking ‘What happened?’ they seemed to be saying, ‘So this is it.’”

The depth of the grief expressed by the underprivileged of all colors at Kennedy’s death is telling. Clarke’s account is well-done and thought-provoking. Of course, the answer will never be known – would Kennedy have won? Would he have even been a good president? What Clarke’s work does answer, however, is the question, ‘Why did this man want to be president?’ Whatever ambitions he may have had immediately after his brother’s death, by 1968 he was running for president because he’d found himself. He had found ‘his people’ and he was going to show them that in this country they could have faith in the government because he was going to make sure they were never forgotten.

It is tempting to chalk this up to rhetoric and in-the-heat-of-campaign bullshit. The fact that so many in the press fell in love with Bobby Kennedy during those 82 days, and that they fell in love with him because of what he was saying and doing, however, does tend to give credence to the idea that he really believed what he was saying. That these really were ‘his people’ and that he intended to do things his brother would never have dreamed of doing. We’ll never know, of course, but Clarke’s book brings those 82 days to life and is well worth the read for it.

copyright 2009 by EBBP Redux. If you are reading this on a blog or website other than EBBP Redux or via a feedreader, this content has been stolen and used without permission.

Book Review: Waking Giant

David Reynolds' Waking Giant aptly demonstrates the innumerable revolutions that transformed America between 1815-1848.

A quick read, David Reynolds' Waking Giant is an excellent primer in early-to-mid-19th century American political, cultural and social history. First, from an "interesting things to say at a cocktail party" aspect, the book is filled with numerous "a-ha" moments. For example, ever wonder where the expression "O.K." came from? Well, wonder no more: it came from Martin Van Buren's 1840 reelection campaign against Whig William Henry Harrison. Known as Old Kinderhook, the Democratic convention campaign used those initials and included them in the slogan "Down with the Whigs, boys, O.K."

Another example - ironically also from that 1840 campaign - is "keep the ball rolling". Harrison supporters would push large leather balls from town to town for each campaign rally - an activity that became an American expression shortly thereafter. I know, I know, 'who the hell pushes a ball from town-to-town'? This is what you did when there was no TV or porn to occupy your time, folks.

Yet another example is "the peanut gallery". During this era, the rise of theaters in America led to a democratization of "the play". There were three separate seating arrangements in theaters. Upper class patrons were in the box seats, middle class folk were in the wooden benches in front of the stage, while the working class (not to mention the prostitutes) were in the cheaper seats known as the "gallery". Those seated in the gallery smoked, drank booze, and chewed peanuts, disposing of the shells on the floor, leading to the phrase "the peanut gallery".

Reynolds argues - persuasively - that the Age of Jackson gave rise not only to democracy in politics, but to a wide range of cultural, social and religious revolutions from 1815-1848. The era of "isms" included abolitionism, transcendentalism, spiritualism, among others and they all made the era one of dizzying changes. Every aspect of American life underwent fundamental change. Sex, religion, politics, even cultural activities all expanded and changed so that a person awaking from a 30-year sleep in 1848 would find American unrecognizable from the world he left in 1818. Few eras in American history - our own perhaps being one of them - can claim to have had that much transpire in such a short period of time.

Reynolds looks at literature, the arts, music, dance and other aspects of social history with the same crisp and concise analysis he gives to politics. Children from the "Summer of Love" in 1967 would be shocked to learn that such sexual liberation had transpired 130 years earlier in Jacksonian America. A "free love" movement during the era challenged Puritan sexual mores. Women's rights and abolition began to expand upon who, exactly, "We, the people" really were.
The sexual revolution of the era - granted on a smaller scale than the "fuckfest" that was the 1960s and 1970s - led to other revolutions in the culture. For one thing, the number of abortions performed in the United States increased dramatically. The number of abortions went from 1-in-25 live births in 1830 to 1-in-5 live births a short 20 years later in 1850. Indeed, it was only after the Civil War that what we would recognize as a true antiabortion movement first took hold in the country.

I think my favorite aspect of the book, though, are those "a-ha" moments I mentioned earlier. Whether it's "O.K", "keep the ball rolling", "the peanut gallery", or the even fact that the word "homosexual" did not even appear in the English language until 1892, Reynolds laces his narrative with interesting facts that link the bygone era of mid-19th-century America to our world today. Now, the next time someone says, "we don't need any comments from the peanut gallery," you'll know where the expression came from. Chicks dig that, guys.

copyright 2009 by EBBP Redux. If you are reading this on a blog or website other than EBBP Redux or via a feedreader, this content has been stolen and used without permission.

Book Review: Tried By War

Of all the amazing accomplishments of Abraham Lincoln's career, perhaps the greatest was his ability to overcome the urge to travel to General George McClellan's headquarters and blow his head off.

James McPherson - whose Pulitzer Prize-winning Battle Cry of Freedom has become one of the great studies of the Civil War era - focuses on Abraham Lincoln as commander-in-chief. Citing a dearth of such studies in the Lincoln historiography, McPherson concentrates on the day-to-day military leadership Lincoln provided to what seemed to be a never-ending line of big-talking do-nothing generals.

One of the main premises of the book is that Lincoln was forced into taking a far more active role in military affairs than he had ever intended, largely because of the ineptitude of his commanders. He spent countless hours studying military histories late at night at the White House, talked with generals and military advisers, asking probing questions that helped to shape his military strategy.

It was not until Ulysses S. Grant's rise through the ranks that Lincoln found a general who shared that strategy: defeat of the Confederate army. More important than capturing Richmond, Vicksburg, Atlanta or even defending Gettysburg was the pursuit and defeat of that army. Lincoln - and Grant - realized that until that army was defeated, the war would continue even if the Union successfully captured every major city in the South.

Throughout McPherson's work, we see an agonized Lincoln waiting at the War Department telegraph office for his generals to attack. He wrings his hands at their lack of movement, at their over-caution, and at their short-sighted aims of capturing pieces of land at the expense of pursuing the enemy. There is the possibly apocryphal story of Lincoln saying, "If General McClellan isn't going to use his Army, perhaps he won't mind if I borrow it." That, in a nutshell, was Lincoln's first two-plus years as commander-in-chief. You only need substitute the names of Joe Hooker, George Meade, Ambrose Burnside and a half-dozen others in place of McClellan to get the full impression of what Lincoln faced.

McPherson confronts head on the natural question that might arise: if these generals were so incompetent, isn't Lincoln at fault himself for appointing them in the first place? As McPherson points out, in each and every case where Lincoln appointed these men, they were universally recognized as the most qualified for the position....on paper. There were some exceptions, military appointments Lincoln made with politics in mind [the appointment of Democrat-turned-Republican Benjamin Butler being one of the more famous].

Incorporating his thesis from Battle Cry of Freedom, McPherson points out the evolution of Lincoln's thinking as to the main goal of the war. What started out in 1861 as an effort to reunite the Union as it was, evolves into creating a new Union free of slavery. The abolition of slavery gave the War a greater meaning than simple reunion: there had to be a greater purpose for all of this carnage than simply restoring the Union as it was in 1860. That purpose was abolition.

By 1862, it was abolition and the complete destruction of the Confederate army that served as Lincoln's two main war aims. Many times, however, Lincoln would be frustrated by his generals' inability or unwillingness to comply with his commands. In September 1862 he has to actually spell out for McClellan, "Destroy the rebel army." In June 1863 he says in frustration to Hooker, "Lee's Army, and not Richmond, is your true objective point." In anguish, he chastises George Meade after the latter's inability or refusal to pursue Lee's army out of Gettysburg. If Meade had only accomplished, "the literal or substantial destruction of Lee's army, the rebellion [would] be over."

As McPherson points out, many generals won battles capturing territory. But the war was won by those generals carrying out Lincoln's edict to destroy the enemy army: Grant at Vicksburg, Philip Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley, George Thomas at Nashville and - ultimately - Grant at Appomattox.

Indeed, it was not until the team of Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, Thomas and Sheridan came to the fore by 1864 that Lincoln had "his man". That is, a general (or, in this case, generals) who would fight the war the way Lincoln wanted it fought.

Destroying an army is not easy, however. It is bloody, lengthy and hard. The sheer number of Americans who died in these battles staggers the mind today. Grant was known as "The Butcher" - and that was what Northerners called him, so appalled were they at the casualties he [and, ultimately, Lincoln] was willing to endure in the pursuit of his war aim.

Tried By War is a quick read, and not too heavy on the detailed military analyses that sometimes makes reading military history a little like watching paint dry. As with most works that analyze Lincoln, the reader comes away from Tried By War with an even greater appreciation of the man and in amazement at all that this brilliant "backwoods lawyer" accomplished in saving the Union.

copyright 2009 by EBBP Redux. If you are reading this on a blog or website other than EBBP Redux or via a feedreader, this content has been stolen and used without permission.

Book Review: Dutch

When Edmund Morris' Dutch was published ten years ago, it created a firestorm within the historical and political community. Morris - a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Theodore Roosevelt - had created a fictional character to accompany Ronald Reagan and to help tell his story. At the time, I remember being shocked that a writer of Morris' credibility would 'stoop' to such a tactic. I refused to read the book at the time. Over the years, though, I've been intrigued by it and often thought of finally picking it up. I'm glad I finally did.

For one thing, Morris' publisher does a far better job than the author ever did during that tumultuous book tour ten years ago in explaining why he used this tactic. Morris was announced as Reagan's 'official biographer' by the White House in 1985. Morris was given unprecedented access to Reagan throughout his second term - with the notable exception of when the Iran-Contra scandal exploded. Even then, though, Morris was privy to far more than most biographers. A few years into the project, however, Morris came to a startling revelation: he no more knew Reagan the man after spending nearly three years with him than he did when he started the project. Reagan was impenetrable to biography. There was so little intellectual curiosity in Reagan's mind, and so much 'acting' that knowing the real Reagan - indeed, if there was one - was impossible.

It was while trying to figure out how to write the biography with this major roadblock that Morris stumbled upon the idea of creating a fictional character. This character would be able to color in the blank spots on the pages of Reagan's life. Granted, it would no longer be biography in the strict sense of the word. Undoubtedly, the author's own hypotheses and opinions about aspects of Reagan's life - and why he did what he did - would make total objectivity impossible.

I'm not sure if Morris was right to do it this way, but he was right about one thing: it works. Dutch is an amazing book. The fictionalized character really does add tremendously to the book as a whole. But where it really helps is in the pre-presidential years. All of the quotes in the book from characters other than Morris' fictional one are true: they were obtained by Morris through years of research and interviews. Nothing in the story is 'fiction' in so far as everything everybody says in the book is something they really said to Morris, or that he really overheard during his three-plus years shadowing Reagan around the White House.

There were three 'wow' moments in the book for me: facts that I never knew, and that by themselves make the book a worthwhile read. First, the assassination attempt. By now, we all know that Reagan was far closer to death than we had ever been led to believe. In conversations with the lead emergency room surgeon that saved Reagan's life, and with Reagan's lead Secret Service agent that day, Morris reveals that a single right turn in the motorcade was the difference between Reagan living and a Bush Administration in 1981.

At the moment that John Hinkley fired his shots at Reagan, one bullet hit the presidential limousine's armored right-rear panel. In doing so, it changed shape and became a tiny high-speed circular "saw blade-like" object that spun into Reagan's chest with such surgical precision that there was no apparent entry wound. Indeed, as Jerry Parr - Reagan's lead security agent - threw Reagan onto the floor of the car and screamed at the driver, "Haul ass! Let's get out of here!", Reagan felt tremendous pain in his chest and said, "Jerry, get off, I think you've broken one of my ribs." Parr took one look at Reagan's mouth and saw that he was coughing up blood. Parr, too, believed that Reagan had punctured something internally. Not sure whether he was looking at a world-wide conspiracy, Parr's training took hold. He grabbed the car radio and lied to the agent in the car behind, telling him "Rawhide not hurt" using Reagan's code name. This was to throw off anyone in the area eavesdropping on the Secret Service frequency. With that done, Parr made the key move that would save Reagan's life: he made a split second decision to redirect the motorcade [which was heading back to the White House] to George Washington University Hospital instead. Had he not done so, Reagan's physicians told Morris, the President would most certainly have died.

As it was, getting him to the emergency room as quickly as Parr did almost wasn't enough. The treating physicians assumed the President was suffering from a punctured lung, caused by a broken rib. It was only when a nurse lifted Reagan's left arm to insert an IV line that she saw a neat slit on the side of Reagan's chest open up. "Oh-oh, he's been shot!" she screamed. Reagan - still conscious - looked stunned when he heard this. Reagan would tell Morris that it was only then that he realized he was dying.

In the end, Reagan's incredible physical health prior to the assassination attempt saved his life. Because he was in such good shape, and his chest muscles were like those of a 40-year old, his body was able to withstand the trauma.

The second 'wow' moment in the book concerns the controversial visit by Reagan to a Nazi burial ground in Bitburg in 1985. I could never understand how a White House as incredibly detailed in planning as the Reagan administration was could have allowed him to accept an invitation by Helmut Kohl to tour a site that held the remains of Hitler's SS troops. Well, there is a very simple explanation. When Mike Deaver went to Bitburg to advance-scout the cemetery, snow blanketed the graves and their stone markers. Deaver could not see the markers. Had he been able to, he would have clearly seen "SS" on the many graves.

While you might think he should have brushed the snow off a few of them, that is hindsight talking. Deaver joked to Kohl, "Will any of these graves embarrass my President?" Kohl's protocol chief reacted defensively saying, "You think maybe Mengele is buried there?" With that, Deaver left. Had he visited a few weeks earlier or a few weeks later - when there was no snow - the whole embarrassing episode could have been avoided.

The final 'wow' moment concerns the weeks after the Iran-Contra scandal broke. Aides became quite alarmed at how disoriented Reagan appeared. New Chief of Staff Howard Baker was stunned by the deterioration in Reagan's mental acuity. So alarmed was Baker that on March 2, 1987, before lunch in the Cabinet room, Baker and his aides purposely positioned their chairs so that they would be able to observe Reagan literally from all angles. Prior to that lunch, Baker's assistant, James Cannon, wrote an emergency transition paper to set in motion the invocation of the 25th Amendment [Presidential Disability] if Baker and his aides found Reagan to be "disoriented" at that lunch. As it happened, Regan was lucid and "on his game" throughout the lunch. Baker shelved the position paper and the 25th Amendment.

In conclusion, if you haven't read Dutch, do so. While Morris became a little too close to Reagan to truly be objective, the narrative is wonderful and the details extraordinary.”

copyright 2009 by EBBP Redux. If you are reading this on a blog or website other than EBBP Redux or via a feedreader, this content has been stolen and used without permission.

Book Review: John Lennon By Philip Norman

For most of my life - at least the last 28 years of it - I've been fascinated by the life of John Lennon. His words, music, ups, downs, genius as well as destructive behavior make him one of the most fascinating figures of the 20th century.

Norman's book is fabulous, so I'll get that out quick and up front. Norman criticizes earlier Lennon biographer Ray Coleman for not bringing Lennon 'to life' in his early 1980s work, Lennon.

Well, Norman certainly does bring Lennon to life. Here we see all aspects - good and bad - of John Lennon, from small child to that warm December evening in 1980 when it all ended

Yoko Ono agreed to interviews over a three-year period. While she did not want this to be an official biography, she did want to see the finished manuscript before publication. Unfortunately, she was not pleased, telling Norman that he was "mean to John". I agree with Norman's response that he certainly didn't feel he'd been mean to John and join with his hope that Ono will eventually come to understand what Norman was trying to achieve.

Even more than Ono - and a fascinating interview with Sean Lennon that appears in the Afterward - are the dozens of interviews Norman did with the Lennon cousins, aunts, his step-mother Pauline and countless other 'little people' in Lennon's life that have never before been interviewed. Through one cousin, Norman was given access to all of John's Aunt Mimi's correspondence, which shed a fascinating light on the woman who played such a strong role in his life that right up until the end - the day he died - he religiously called her twice a week and wrote her countless letters about his life in America, even though he never did manage to get back to England to see her after his departure in 1971

There are countless examples in this book of funny stories that have never before been revealed about Lennon. For example, during a jaunt down Cold Spring Harbor in 1979, as his boat passed the home of Billy Joel, Lennon called out to him, "I've got all of your records!" [John loved "Just the Way You Are"]. In his conversations with Mimi, he'd always begin with, "It's 'Himself'," as a greeting. In the late '70s a promoter offered The Beatles $50 million to reunite for three concerts; while Lennon had been an obstacle to such a reunion in the past, when Neil Aspinall called John at the Dakota to tell him about the offer, he was shocked that John agreed, "Neil, I'd stand in the corner on my head for a year for $50 million!"

There is also a tinge of sadness throughout the book, as we all know how it's going to turn out. Despite that knowledge, however, I still found myself becoming incredibly sad as I read the final pages - hoping for what, I don't know. Hoping he wouldn't die? That's how vivid a portrait of Lennon Norman has drawn that you're actually rooting for him until the very end. The last months of his life were a whirlwind after nearly five years out of the spotlight. The circle of life is here as well: on the day he died, in preparation for a second photo shoot with Annie Leibovitz, John had his hair shorn into a 'teddy-boy' 1950s style: at death, he looked not unlike the young tough Beatle from Hamburg.

Norman also asks Ono the question that has puzzled me all of these years: with all of their faith in numerology, astrology, tarot, etc, didn't Yoko receive some signs that John was in danger? For the first time, here, she reveals that - indeed - their on-staff astrologer [that's right, they had an astrologer on retainer, right along with their lawyer and their accountant] did tell Ono shortly before John's death that, "I see a woman with long black hair - she must be your sister. She is crying and she is holding a child. It must be your sister." Ono remembers telling the woman, "I have a sister - but she doesn't have a child." For some reason, Ono never once thought the vision might be her - even though as early as 1968 she had a premonition that if she stayed with Lennon she would be victim of some great tragedy

Finally, here Ono for the first time says that she and John actually had a run-in with Mark David Chapman on December 7th - the day before he murdered John. Chapman approached the two of them quite aggressively, and began taking photos of them. Angry, Lennon began to chase after Chapman to grab the camera. "Don't, John, leave it," Ono remembers saying. "If they get me," Lennon prophetically told her that day, "it'll be a fan."

The famous photo of Lennon signing an autograph for Chapman hours before the murder might have been quite a different photo: Chapman had intended on killing Lennon then and there. Unlike the day before, however, John was so nice to Chapman that the would-be killer lost his nerve and kept his gun inside his jacket. Ono has no recollection of that encounter on the 8th, nor does she have any reason to believe that Lennon knew that the man he was granting an autograph was the same man he'd chased the day before.

In conclusion - and I know this is a long review, but the book is 800+ pages! - this is a must-read, regardless of how much you think you know about John Lennon. It will make you miss him even more.

copyright 2008 by EBBP Redux. If you are reading this on a blog or website other than EBBP Redux or via a feedreader, this content has been stolen and used without permission.