The Bookshelf

Substack has become a valuable resource for me.  While already familiar with some authors, I've also discovered many others writing on a wide variety of topics.  Highly recommended are the book reviews at Mr and Mrs Psmith's Bookshelf.  Some of the reviews are jointly authored, others by either Mr or Mrs.  What makes them particularly valuable is that, along with reviewing the book, the reviews often serve as the launchpad for deep, interesting, and provocative discussions.

Some of my favorites:

Xenophon's Anabasis and The Education of Cyrus

An Amish Paradox: Diversity and Change in the World's Largest Amish Community 

Further Arguments Against Jared Diamond (author of Guns, Germs, and Steel)

The Greatest Knight: The Remarkable Life of William Marshal

Leap of Faith (about the Iraq War and a book I've also written about) 

The Wizard and the Prophet

The Verge

Sick Societies 

Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed The Art of War 

 

Reading 2025: Non-Fiction Part 2

King George, Lords North and Germain, Generals Clinton, Cornwallis, Howe, Burgoyne, the Earl of Sandwich, and Admiral Rodney are The Men Who Lost America according to Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy (now that's a catchy moniker!).  The book is both a biography and a chronology of the key British figures in the prosecution of the war against the American rebels.  Lots of interesting information: I had not realized how quickly many of the players discovered the war unwinnable.  However, the structure of the book leads to a lot of repetition and the writing is pedestrian.

I've written a couple of prior posts about my readings on slavery (here's one) and this year read Atlantic Cataclysm: Rethinking the Atlantic Slave Trades by David Eltis, described by Henry Louis Gates Jr of Harvard as "a tour de force by the world's leading scholar of the slave trade".  It is the reflection of a life's work by the author and he reaches some surprising conclusions.  I'd previously read The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas by Eltis, covering the period from the early 1500s to the early 18th century.

Slavery in part of the Old World is the subject of Justin Marozzi's Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World.  Though covering a longer period (1,000 years compared to 350) the number of Africans trafficked in the respective trades are similar.  I will be writing a longer piece reflecting on the Eltis and Marozzi books in 2026.  Both are highly recommended. 

Not surprisingly, I did a lot of Civil War related reading in 2025, particularly as I often purchase books by our Roundtable speakers. 

The Great Partnership: Lee, Jackson, and the Fate of the Confederacy by Christian Keller, professor at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pa. was a very interesting study of the close relationship forged between the two over the eleven months between the Seven Days and Jackson's death at Chancellorsville.  I thought I knew everything already about that relationship but Keller brings out details, particularly about Lee and Jackson's shared religious faith, that explains their unique bond. 

Alex Rossino's investigation of the Calamity at Frederick: Lee, Special Orders No. 191, and Confederate Misfortune on the Road to Antietam was a revelation.  His methodical research process identifies the leading suspect responsible for the loss of Lee's Order 191, which when discovered by Federal soldiers revealed the position of Lee's scattered army to General George McClellan. 

I'd always found the two-week Battle of Spotsylvania Court House in May 1864 to be confusing.  Chris Mackowski's book, A Tempest of Fire and Lead, brought some needed clarity to those events.  Chris has an engaging writing style that is accessible to the non-specialist. 

Everyone has heard of Jesse James. While Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War covers his entire life, author TJ Stiles explains how Jesse's fighting experience during the Civil War shaped the remainder of his life.  There's some myth busting in this book, as Stiles shows how post-war Missouri politics assisted James in his escapades. 

In 1862, slave Robert Smalls was sent by his master to Charleston Harbor to work on a Confederate naval boat.  Smalls managed to steal the boat, smuggle his wife and two children on board and, with the help of fellow slaves, sailed it out to join the Union fleet blockading the harbor.  That story and more is the subject of Be Free or Die by Cate Lineberry.  Smalls went on to become the first black commander of vessel in the history of the U.S. Navy.  After the war, Smalls was elected to the U.S. Congress during reconstruction and purchased his former owner's house.

Was President Franklin Roosevelt effective in ending the Great Depression?  That's the topic of False Dawn: The New Deal and the Promise of Recovery 1933-47 by George Selgin. I grew up thinking that the answer was "of course he was!" but over the years there has been a growing controversy about the right answer.  Selgin approaches the question analytically, making a distinction between FDR's policies intended to provide relief, or to institute longer-term reforms, versus those designed in whole, or in part, to end the economic downturn.  Too much of the literature on FDR has been polemical, both pro and con, and it was helpful to have a more analytical approach. Selgin's verdict is mixed but the topic is important and complex enough that I plan on a post devoted to the book. 

I've read a good deal on the Spanish Civil War, both histories and personal accounts.  The latter have all been from the Republican perspective (including Alan Furst's outstanding historical novels).  Mine Were of Trouble by Peter Kemp is the first from someone who fought on the Nationalist side.  Kemp was a British law student who volunteered to fight in the conflict because he was an anti-communist and heard about the atrocities committed at the start of the war.  His account is very well written and while explaining why he fought and the details of battles, it does not shy away from sordid acts committed by some of Franco's units, and provides insight into the factional disputes among groups forming the Nationalist coalition.  Kemp was badly wounded and returned to Britain; with the advent of World War II, he joined the Special Operations Executive and was infiltrated into Albania to help the partisans fight the Germans, and later into Poland, events he recounted in No Colours or Crest: The Secret Struggle for Europe, which I have also read. No Colours or Crest is quite good but Mine Were of Trouble is definitely the one to read if you have a choice.

James Holland and his partner Al Murray run one of my favorite podcasts, We Have Ways Of Making You Talk, all about World War Two.  He is also a prolific author (see here for an example) and his latest is Cassino '44, covering the Italian campaign from January 1944 through the liberation of Rome in early June of the same year.  Something I particularly appreciate about Holland's books is that he uses documents written at the time, not accounts from years later, which gives his books an immediacy.  He also nicely balances strategic discussions with the personal intimate accounts by soldiers on the ground in that grinding campaign.  Northwest Europe with Normandy and the Bulge gets more attention and celebration but we owe a lot to the Allied soldiers in the Italian campaign.

I'm currently reading Vietnam's American War by Pierre Asselin.  In Dereliction of Duty (HR McMaster's indictment of the process by which American ground forces became engaged in Vietnam)  I referenced a previous book by Asselin, Hanoi's Road to the Vietnam War: 1954-65.  Asselin speaks and reads Vietnamese and has access to the archives of the Vietnam government, which have become available to researchers over the past thirty years.  His work focuses on the perspective of the Vietnam communists, and often upsets the neat story told by Western academics.  His new book takes us back into the ancient history of Vietnam, along with its colonization by France before America's involvement begins in 1954.  That background is essential because Asselin's thesis is that Vietnam was engaged in a civil war between communists/nationalists and anticommunists/nationalists into which America got dragged, rather than a conflict between patriotic Vietnamese (who happened to be commies) and the Americans and their Vietnamese puppets.  Another book I will be writing more on.

Reading 2025: Non-Fiction, Part 1

Ancient History 

What happens if you are a Greek mercenary, deep in Mesopotamia, and the guy you hired you gets killed in battle and his cause collapses?  Read Anabasis by Xenophon to find out.  Also called The March of The Ten Thousand, Anabasis is the story of those mercenaries, hired by Cyrus the Younger in 401 BC to help seize the Persian throne from his brother Artaxerxes II.  This is one of those books I'd read about countless times but had never read until this year.  Xenophon, one of the mercenary commanders, wrote Anabasis about thirty years after the events.  Before reading I'd been under the impression that the core of the book covered the fighting retreat of the Greeks after the battle of Cunaxa until they reached the Black Sea but that's only half the story.  Quite an adventure and a reminder of how different and violent the Classical world was.  

Cato the Younger was Caesar's great enemy at the end of the Roman Republic.  Fred Drogula's study attempts to reconstruct Cato's life and motives and provides a convincing explanation for his ultimate ineffectiveness and inability to help forge a compromise that might have saved the Republic.

Peter Brown is considered the leading historian of late antiquity and Through The Eye of A Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD, is a masterwork.  I had some hesitation before starting the book, worried it might be dry and too scholarly.  It is certainly scholarly but not dry and extremely well-written and engaging.  The title is from the words of Jesus as recounted in the New Testament, "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God."  Avoiding cynicism, Brown provides a sympathetic study of how a struggling church, embraced by a minority of the population in 350, becomes the dominant and wealthiest player in the formerly Roman west two centuries later as it tries to reconcile the words of Jesus with the conditions of the disintegrating empire.  Making the reader rethink some of the common assumptions about that era, Brown focuses on individuals like Augustine, Ambrose, Pelagius, Jerome, Ausonius and others to help the reader understand the arguments over the appropriate role of wealth and the wealthy within the Church.  In other books and articles I've found it difficult to understand the nuances of early Christian theological arguments, but Brown provides admirable clarity in this work. A very rewarding read.

A decade ago THC wrote about the history of Rome after the 4th century (Belisarius Enters Rome)  relying greatly upon Richard Krautheimer's classic work from 1980, Rome: Profile of a City, 312-1308.  The last few decades have seen an upsurge in archaeological activity in Rome focused on the post-Empire history of the city and this year I read two books by Hendrik Dey incorporating the new information; The Aurelian Wall and the Refashioning of Imperial Rome, AD 271-855 and his most recent work, published in 2025, The Making of Medieval Rome: A New Profile of the City, 400-1420.  Building upon the work of Krautheimer and the recent archaeology, Dey's books provide an update portrait and way of thinking about the city during its "dark ages".  I will be writing more about both books in 2026.

Israel

The Old City of Jerusalem is, as the name states, "Old" and contains the Temple Mount.  However, it is only in the past three decades that close to, but not within, the Old City is the City of David, dating back to King David around 1000 BC.  When The Stones Speak by Doron Spielman tells the story of its discovery and excavation and the political storms ignited by the archeological work.  Spielman has worked on the project and the discovery part is quite exciting, particularly finding the passageway between the City of David and the Temple Mount.  Because the area of the City of David is adjacent to an Arab settlement and given the Palestinian strategy to deny any historical Jewish connection with Jerusalem, each step of the excavation process has triggered controversy.

In The War Of Return, Einat Wilf argues the hypothesis that the highest aspiration of the Palestinian people is to have their own state has been proven to be incorrect as they have repeatedly demonstrated that the destruction of the Jewish state is a higher priority.  She writes that the actions of the United Nations, and of Western Nations, and the peculiar nature of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) has contributed to the inability to resolve the conflict.  UNRWA created a unique category of refugee for Palestinians, unlike that of the tens of millions of other refugees around the world created in the wake of WW2.  UNRWA has become a facilitator of Palestinian rejectionism and the only hope to resolve the conflict is the dissolution of UNRWA.  I previously wrote about Wilf and her hypothesis in An Irreconcilable Conflict of Principles.

Music

I read the first two volumes of Ricky Riccardi's trilogy on the life of Louis Armstrong, Stomp Off, Let's Go: The Early Years of Louis Armstrong and Heart Full of Rhythm: The Big Band Years of Louis Armstrong.  Riccardi is director of research collections at the Louis Armstrong House Museum in the borough of Queens, NYC (worth a visit!) and himself a musician.  This is an incredibly well researched and almost day by day account of Armstrong's life and brings a lot of previously unknown information to light.  Riccardi is a great admirer of the man but does not shy away from giving us a portrait of the man in full.  If you like Armstrong's music you'll find some new cuts to enjoy and be overwhelmed by the man's drive and talent.  It remains a miracle to me that a young man could come from such a trying and terrible background and grow to display not just enormous talent but such a positive disposition and view of life. It's why I've written many times about Armstrong.

Inspired after watching A Complete Unknown, I read Elijah Wald's, Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night that Split the Sixties.   Dylan Goes Electric gave me a much better understanding of the folk music revival of the 50s, Pete Seeger's key role, and why Dylan's rejection to being annointed the savior the folkies had been searching for was so significant.  The movie and the book also inspired my recent visit to the Dylan museum in Tulsa.

Recent Reading: Non Fiction

Another in a series of occasional posts on my reading.

We'll start with two books by recent speakers at the Scottsdale Civil War Roundtable.

When Hell Came to Sharpsburg: The Battle of Antietam and Its Impact on the Civilians Who Called It Home by Steven Cowie

There are plenty of books about the military aspects of Civil War battles but few about what happened to civilians caught in those violent clashes.  Steven Cowie spent, when he wasn't working his day job, 18 years researching and writing about the people in and around Sharpsburg, Maryland, the site, in September 1862, of Antietam, the bloodiest day in American history.  For the civilians it was not just about the day of battle, terrible as it was, but about the six weeks following when the Army of the Potomac was based in, and around, the town.  Most homes that weren't destroyed were converted into hospitals to care for more than 10,000 wounded soldiers and home and farms were looted, crops and stock confiscated, even the fence posts that separated pastures and properties were taken.  Disease outbreaks took dozens of lives and then it took decades to get any compensation for the destruction (the last case wasn't resolved until 1915 and many received nothing).  Incredibly well-researched and documented, it also provides much insight into mid-19th century farming.

A Worse Place Than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation by John Matteson 

If you come to this book expecting a detailed study of Fredericksburg and how it changed the nation you won't find it.  Instead, despite a title probably insisted upon by the publisher to boost sales, A Worse Place Than Hell is a finely written, engaging, and touching study of five Civil War figures (only two of them soldiers) and how their lives intersected at Fredericksburg in December 1862.  Four of the subjects are from the North - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, Louisa May Alcott, Walt Whitman, Arthur Fuller, and one Southerner, John Pelham.  Alcott and Whitman both started their nursing duties in the wake of the battle and Matteson writes of how that experience shaped their lives and writing.  Holmes was a soldier, wounded annually; shot in the chest at Ball's Bluff in 1861, in the neck at Antietam the following year, and in the foot at Chancellorsville in '63.  He was at Fredericksburg but saw no action because of debilitating illness.  Fuller is the figure readers are most likely to be unfamiliar with.  A Massachusetts clergyman, chaplain to a regiment from the state, and meeting a tragic end in the streets of Fredericksburg. Pelham was the young and charismatic commander of Jeb Stuart's mobile artillery unit.  A courageous, gallant, and innovative leader he played a key role at Bull Run, Antietam, and Fredericksburg before dying in a skirmish in March 1863.  Despite some errors on the military history side, this book is highly recommended. 

I Can't Tell a Lie by James Bish.

"Father, I can't tell a lie.  I chopped down the cherry tree".  Supposedly said by young George Washington to his father as related by Parson Weems in his early 19th century book.  Since Weems was an itinerant preacher and huckster who just made stuff up, the story is obviously nonsense and has been regarded as such by historians since the late 19th century.  But is it really nonsense?

Jim Bish is a historian, an expert genealogical researcher, and has lived in Virginia for many years (he's also a friend).  I Can't Tell a Lie makes the argument that it is very possible that the tale related by Weems is true.  The story is in two parts.  The first is a careful examination of what Weems wrote versus what we all think he wrote, because what he really wrote is key to the case that what he wrote might be true.  The second is the genealogical and historical research about the linkages between the families living on the narrow neck of land between the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers in the 18th century.  While Parson Weems may have been itinerant, he was also connected to the Washington family.  I came away convinced that it is very possibly a true story.  For a detailed analysis of the historiography on the Weems story you can also read this article by Bish and a co-author.

De Gaulle by Julian Jackson

One of the great figures of 20th century Europe.  He drove Churchill and FDR crazy during WW2 but he ended up getting his way.  A remarkable man and Jackson shows us how great, how frustrating, how inspired, and how wrong he could be at times.  His political resurrection in 1958 in the midst of the Algerian crisis was something I knew little about and Jackson tells it well.  De Gaulle was a very undemonstrative and private man but I learned that when he and his wife had a daughter with severe down's syndrome (she never learned to speak) they insisted upon raising her with the rest of the family when the common practice at that time was to institutionalize.  De Gaulle doted on her, often singing songs and spending hours with her at his home, expressing his emotions in a way that the public never saw.

Commanches: The History of a People by TR Fehrenbach

Learn about the origins of the tribe in Wyoming, their move to the Plains, the century and a half domination of the Southern Plains, subduing other tribes, and holding off the Spanish, Mexicans, and Americans until the 1870s.  The greatest Indian horsemen, Fehrenbach's book describes in detail the culture and lifestyle of the Commanche with a sense of both understanding and sympathy and of the inevitability of their ultimate fall.  I was a bit puzzled that Fehrenbach spends so much time in the last part of the book on the history of the Texas Rangers and the frontier strategies that finally conquered the tribe and also saw some commentary and reviews mentioning the same thing.  It was only when I realized that the original title was Commanches: The Destruction of a People, that I understood why that material was included.

The Year That Broke Politics by Luke Nichter

This book was a revelation.  It's about the 1968 presidential election.  Well-documented, it overturns several myths about that campaign.  Most startling to me was the extent of communication, including meetings, between Richard Nixon and LBJ, and the president's preference that Nixon win the election. LBJ was concerned about his legacy, both on civil rights and Vietnam, and did not trust Hubert Humphrey on the latter.  Nixon reassured LBJ about his support for civil rights and led LBJ to believe he was more in touch with his views on Vietnam than Humphrey.  Lots of other interesting material make this book worth reading.

The Savage Storm by James Holland 

I've already written about this book about the war in Italy from September through December 1943 in Incident at Bari.  Looking forward to the next installment on the Anzio and Cassino campaigns due this fall. 

To Hell And Back by Audie Murphy

As a kid I only knew about Audie Murphy because I saw him in some cheesy Western movies.  Though I later learned he was the most decorated American soldier in WW2 and had written an autobiography, I ignored it thinking it probably wasn't very good.  I changed my mind after listening to James Holland describe, on his We Have Ways Of Making You Talk podcast, how he initially thought Murphy's recounting of an incident in the Italian campaign was probably inaccurate, but upon walking the terrain realized it was 100% correct and went on to describe his book as one of the best of WW2 memoirs.  Murphy used a ghostwriter so there are some literary touches, some dialogue invented, and the names of his fellow soldiers changed, but in preparation for the writing Murphy and the writer traveled to Sicily, Italy, France and Germany to revisit the battle sites and, from what I've been able to find out, is accurate. The book is written in the present tense.  Murphy does not describe himself in heroic terms.  Almost every one of his fellow soldiers is killed or wounded as he relates in detail what combat was like.  When Audie describes his state of mind at the end of the war, you realize he had what today would be called PTSD.  Reading up on his life after the war we learn that indeed he had difficulties, taking sedatives to help him sleep and sleeping with a gun under his pillow.

Charlie Hustle by Keith O'Brien

Just published biography of Pete Rose.  The author interviewed many of those, including family members, who knew Rose.  O'Brien even spent several days with Pete in 2021 until Rose cut him off.  The book is about the rise and fall of the all-time baseball hit leader and the choices he made that led to his current pariah status.  Well done.

Malintzin's Choices by Camilla Townsend

I became aware of this book while listening to the Rest Is History 8-part podcast on Cortez's conquest of Mexico.  The podcast, with Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook is the best of all the history podcasts.  Malintzin.  It is about the young Indian woman, probably in her late teens, who had been taken from her tribe and given to the Aztecs, whom she hated.  Upon encountering her and realizing she knew the Aztec language and was very quick to pick up Spanish, she became Cortez's trusted translator upon whom he relied in his negotiations with the Aztec (or Mexica, if you prefer).  She also became Cortez's mistress and bore him a son, whom he recognized and made an heir.  Townsend's book tells the story of the conquest and its aftermath from Malintzin's perspective, which makes for compelling reading about a world-changing event.

Alamo In The Ardennes

Today's marks the 79th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge, the German surprise attack on American forces in Belgium and Luxembourg.  It was Hitler's last offensive, a desperate plan to split the Allied front and shatter the British/American alliance with the Soviets.  The battle, including the American counteroffensive lasted until January 28, 1945.  Though Hitler's gamble failed, it was the costliest American battle of the Second World War, with 81,000 soldiers killed, wounded, or captured.

For those interested, I'm recommending a book I read earlier this year on an overlooked aspect of the battle.  In most accounts, what gets our attention is the heroic defense of Bastogne by the 101st Airborne Division, rushed into combat (and the subject of several episodes of Band of Brothers) and General Patton's incredible feat of completely and quickly reorienting his Third Army and relieving the siege of Bastogne (featured in the movie Patton).

What is often ignored is the desperate stand of the 28th Infantry Division in the opening days of the German offensive and its impact on disrupting the Nazi attack plan.  It's the subject of John McManus' book, Alamo in the Ardennes.

Twenty years ago, while historian McManus was interviewing veterans of the 101st, some mentioned that the unsung heroes of the Bulge were the soldiers of the 28th, prompting McManus to do the research and tell their previously untold story.

The German plan for their winter offensive was to capture the key road hub of Bastogne by mid-day on December 17 and then pivot northwest and cross the Meuse River.  The entire offensive was a desperate gamble with very little chance of success, but failing to seize Bastogne would doom even that small chance.

The 28th Division had just been through a brutal struggle in the Hurtgen Forest, suffering almost 6,000 casualties in November, and was sent to a quiet section of the front in north Luxembourg to recuperate.  Instead they found themselves taking the main blow of the surprise German offensive.  What followed were a series of small scale engagements; company and squad size, in which the American infantry, usually outnumbered 5 or 10 to 1 and facing German Panzer divisions, were able to slow down the planned advance while sacrificing themselves in the process.  The hardest-hit regiment of the 28th lost all but 400 of its 3,250 soldiers.  Not to be forgotten was the assistance from Combat Commands of the 9th and 10th Armored Divisions which were rushed to the scene with directions to slow down the Germans and suffered terribly in accomplishing that task.

The result was that German forces only began their approach to Bastogne late on December 19, which gave time for the 101st to reach the town and hold it.  By the next day, when the Germans reached the area in force, it was too late to launch a direct assault on the town.  Though they began the siege, the German strategic gamble had failed.

McManus does a great job in the book balancing the big picture with the details on these small-scale engagements.  He tells the stories of individual soldiers, at times providing almost a shell by shell narrative.  A compelling book providing well-deserved recognition for these brave Americans.

The 28th saw 196 days of combat between July 22, 1944 and mid-March 1945.  Its total organizational strength was about 14,000 men.  During combat deployment the division incurred 15,904 battle casualties and 8,936 non-battle casualties.  The odds were heavily against a soldier present on July 22, 1944 not being killed, wounded, captured, missing, or otherwise incapacitated by March 1945.

Waiting For Caro

For many years I resisted reading Robert Caro's multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson.  I finally gave in about a decade ago and, only then did I realize what I'd missed.  It is a masterpiece of biographical art and essential reading for anyone interested in how political power is obtained and held. Caro has completed four volumes and is working on the fifth, and final, book.  It's a race against time; Caro is 87 and his editor for the past half-century, Robert Gottlieb, at 91. 

Caro is a mid-20th century liberal Democrat and that is the perspective he brings to his books from a policy view but, unlike many 21st century authors, he does not fit everything into a narrative to match those views.  In fact, one of the themes he explores is how do we judge Lyndon Johnson, who Caro clearly supported on domestic policy, but also has distaste for the man and his methods?  It also means he explores his subject from every angle so that his work his brimming with insight.  He also brings to life other characters like Sam Rayburn and Richard Russell so we can understand them in the context of their times.

Later this month, a documentary on Caro and Gottlieb, and their sometimes testy relationship, is being released, Turn Every Page.  The trailer is below.

In conjunction with the film, New York Magazine published this article on Gottlieb.

I've written several posts about, or with reference, to Caro's work.

The Passage of Power

The Need for Gratitude 

The Art of the Biographer

Reasonable Creatures

So convenient a thing to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.

From the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin which I'm in the midst of reading.  A marvelous piece of work.  This passage is from when, as a young man, Franklin, who had adopted a vegetarian diet, was persuaded to join a fish fry, first explaining to the reader his reasoning for doing so. 

Franklin's autobiography follows his life until 1757, though he died, at age 84, in 1790, and was not published until after his death.

I was inspired to read the autobiography after recently finishing Author-In-Chief: The Untold Story of Our Presidents and the Books They Wrote by Craig Fehrman, the first work on the subject.  Though Franklin never served as president, Fehrman starts with his autobiography as the first memoir of a prominent American.  Author-In-Chief does not just concern itself with memoirs, covering all books by our presidents, several of whom were also prominent authors and/or scholars.  It is also more than just a book about presidential books, weaving in the story of the development of the publishing industry and the growth of readership across time.

Though I only read Fehrman's book recently, it was a reference in either a review or interview with him that led me to read The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge (see my post Not A Great Man), which he considers the best work of its kind.  I've now added several more presidential works to my reading list while finding, to my surprise, that Ronald Reagan's pre-presidential autobiography, Where's The Rest of Me?, praised by Fehrman, is now out of print.

A Fondness For Books

 "I most sincerely commiserate with such a person but I do not know how to help him."

Theodore Roosevelt

From Author In-Chief: The Untold Story of Our Presidents and the Books They Wrote by Craig Fehrman, quoting from an essay written by TR, regarding those, who unlike Teddy, did not read books.

Fehrman later writes of a visit by author Edith Wharton, a friend of Roosevelt, to the White House:

"That day Roosevelt complained that no one in his administration knew Alice's Adventures in Wonderland . . .  He had tried to joke with his secretary of the Navy, telling him, "Mr Secretary, what I say three times is true."  All he got in response was groveling. "Mr President", the secretary replied, "it would never for a moment have occurred to me to impugn your veracity."

Tying back to yesterday's post, as I read the sections in the book on Woodrow Wilson, I realized WW had at least a passing resemblance to Gustavo Fring, owner of the Los Pollos Hermanos fast food chain and successful meth distributor on the side, from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.  This is the content you come to THC for!

 

Based On A True Story

Read Norm MacDonald's 2016 book, Based On A True Story: Not A Memoir.  Funny, outrageous, bizarre - just like Norm.  Some is true, some not, and some you just can't tell.  If you like Norm's comedy you'll like this, as I did.  If not, you won't get it.  Definitely written by him.  The style and rhythms are pure Norm and you can hear his voice in your head as you read (and he does the audio book version).

Not knowing much about his early career I was interested to see how much credit he gave to Adam Sandler, "Without Adam, no career".

As we now know (but didn't then), Norm had already been diagnosed with the leukemia that would kill him in 2021.  Amid the wild tales, there are a couple of moments, when it seems, in retrospect, he's reflecting on his diagnosis:

"The only thing an old man can tell a young man is that it goes fast, real fast, and if you're not careful it's too late.  Of course, the young man will never understand this truth."

In the context of a hospital visit to a child who's been diagnosed with a fatal illness, most of which is very, very funny, he writes:

"Death is a funny thing.  Not funny haha, like a Woody Allen movie, but funny strange, like a Woody Allen marriage.  When it's unexpected, death comes fast like a ravenous wolf and tears open your throat with a merciful fury.  But when it's expected, it comes slow and patient like a snake, and the doctor tells you how far away it is and when, exactly, it will be at your door.  And when it will be at the foot of your bed.  And when it will be on your flesh."

. . . and Rereading

As I've grown older the ratio of my rereading to reading books for the first time has increased, partially due to the fact I've already read a lot of books, and partially from the realization I usually get great joy (and only occasional disappointments) from rereading.  Because I've usually read other related materials since my original read, rereading tends to give me more insight and see more connections, and sometimes reveals flaws I had not recognized the first time around.  The passage of time can also result in the rereading having a different impact.  I first read the Lords Of The Rings trilogy as a teenager and then reread it at the age of 50 when the movies were released.  Both times I recognized it as a monumental achievement, but the sections that emotionally resonated with me the most at 50 were often different from those when I was much younger.

Here's some of the rereading I've been up to more recently.

Fiction

During the first year of Covid, I decided to read for a second time the twenty volume series by Patrick O'Brian, the Aubrey-Maturin novels, of which the first is Master and Commander (also the title of the splendid movie adaptation of the novels and main characters; Russell Crowe is the embodiment of Lucky Jack Aubrey, Paul Bettany less so as Dr Stephen Maturin).  Introduced to the novels thirty years ago by a friend, I quickly read the first 10 or 12 and then waited each year for the next volume up until the time of O'Brian's death in 2000.  This time I read the entire series within six months which gave me a different perspective and better sense of the flow of the story.  This is simply the best set of historical novels I've ever read.  It is as though O'Brian is writing them in the early 1800s; his treatment is consistent, not giving an inch to modern ideas or thoughts.  These characters exist fully in their time. I plan on a third go round in 2030.

Nero Wolfe, the massive, sedentary detective, who rarely left his Manhattan brownstone in the course of solving crimes with the assistance of his mobile staff, including Archie Goodwin, who narrates the tales created by author Rex Stout, was a favorite of mine as a teenager.  This time I picked up The Black Mountain, an anomaly in the series, as Wolfe reluctantly leaves home to return to his native Montenegro to bring a miscreant to justice.

In the late 1970s and into the 1980s, Bruce Chatwin wrote a series of sometimes fact-based but semi-hallucinatory books including The Songlines, about aboriginal Australians, and The Viceroy of Ouidh, about Brazilian slave traders in Dahomey (both of which I recommend).  On The Black Hill is the complete opposite; set in one place in the English borderlands of Wales, it tells of the life of two farming brothers and not a lot happens, at least on the surface.  A beautifully written tale about harsh lives relieved by rare transcendent moments.

A while ago I also reread six Philip Marlowe novels by Raymond Chandler, written between 1939 and 1953, the first of which is The Big Sleep, a great read though I still don't understand the plot.  Doesn't make a difference as you read Chandler for his writing and Marlowe's dialogue, which inspired this THC post.

I'm currently making my way through The Rumpole Omnibus.  Horace Rumpole, or Rumple of the Bailey, was the creation of English barrister John Mortimer, who followed his adventures, love of poetry, puns, and the law, and the encounters with his wife, She Who Must Be Obeyed, through several books in the 1970s and 80s.  It's like revisiting an old friend.  Immortalized by Leo McKern in the BBC adaptation.

Non-Fiction

In 1828, young Crauford Tait Ramage, then tutor of the sons of the British Consul in Naples, set off on a solo two month walking tour of southern Italy.  His account, published forty years later as The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy was edited and reissued in 1987 as Ramage In South Italy, which I first read in the 90s and reread last year.  The Italy Ramage toured was little-known, even to many on the peninsula, the towns and villages desperately poor and isolated, many still perched on hills back from the coast because a mere thirty years had passed since the thousand year threat from Saracen slave raiders had finally abated.  I love travel literature like this, which I quoted from in a 2013 post on Paestum, and that written by the likes of Patrick Leigh Fermor, Negley Farson, and Eric Newby.

A recent conversation with a friend about the truth and myth surrounding the Alamo led me to reread a slim volume by North Carolina State history prof and Texan native James Crisp, Sleuthing The Alamo.  What I wrote about the book in 2014 in Part 2 of my Remember (My Visit To) The Alamo series still holds:

Sleuthing The Alamo is an outstanding way to learn about how historians do their job.  Crisp takes the controversy around Crockett's death along with an alleged racist speech by Sam Houston and brings you along for the ride as he traces the origins of various stories and documents, going back to the primary sources to get to the truth.  It's a short, but very illuminating book written in an engaging personal and non-academic style.

Crisp also draws on his personal history to illuminate the role race and ethnicity play in how the Alamo is remembered in different ways since 1836. 

A brief passage in Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American Southwest inspired my investigation into, and long post on, Henry Lafayette Dodge.  Now that I've spent a few years living in the Southwest a rereading seemed timely and I drew even more from the book the second time around.  My original reading and move to Arizona prompted me to other read works which have enriched my understanding of the region, its history, and its peoples, including The Spanish Frontier in North America and The Mexican Frontier 1821-46, both by David Weber, No Settlement No Conquest by Richard Flint, the story of Coronado's expedition of 1540-42, and The Apache Wars by Paul Hutton.

In 1938, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union issued what became known as the Short Course, a history of communism and the Bolshevik Party, for use in the Soviet educational system.  The editor in chief of the Short Course was Josef Stalin.  In that regard Martin Amis' 2001 book, Koba the Dread (Koba was Stalin's nickname back in his Georgian youth), can be read as his Short Course history on the rule of Lenin and Stalin from 1917 to 1953.  Lengthier books like The Gulag Archipelago and the novel Life and Fate provide much more detail and insight into that regime, but my recent rereading of Koba leads me to believe it is not a bad starting place; it's like reading Lenin and Stalin's Greatest Hits, except it's recounting a horror show.  Along the way, Amis wrestles with his father's earlier infatuation with communism and his good friend Christopher Hitchen's remaining faith in Trotsky and Lenin (which he eventually backed away from).

Koba, along with two other relatively short books, can be used to describe why the Soviet Union failed.  Koba covers the mass murder phase from the Bolshevik counter-revolution in 1917 to Stalin's death in 1953.  Red Plenty by Francis Spufford, one of the oddest and memorable books I've ever read, explains how the post-Stalin era with its optimism that a completely planned economy could succeed, came crashing down in failure by 1970, while Russia and the Idea of the West by Robert English explains how a new generation of communists, including Mikhail Gorbachev, realized how desperately behind the Soviet Union was compared to the West, and how their own country was responsible for starting the Cold War.

Paired Readings

Elizabeth Holmes' conviction on four fraud counts reminded me of this post from about a year ago about four non-fiction books I enjoyed that could be read in pairs and serve as the basis for interesting discussion by a class or reading group.

First up:

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou

Cardiac Arrest: Five Heart Stopping Years as a CEO on the Feds' Hit-List by Howard Root

One of these books illustrates numerous failures of our systems, including that of the federal government and the FDA in preventing fraud.

The other book illustrates numerous failures of our systems, including the power of the federal government and FDA to pursue vendettas against innocent individuals.

All of which leads to a discussion of how better to prevent fraud while also discouraging abuse of the regulatory and enforcement process by government officials.

Bad Blood is the astonishing tale of Theranos and its founder, Elizabeth Holmes, an enterprise that collapsed in fraud and failure and with Holmes currently facing a criminal trial.  The book is written like a thriller and is hard to put down - I read the whole thing on a cross-country flight.

With her striking personality and appearance Holmes attracted fervent admirers and supporters who didn't closely inquire into the underlying technology of her company.  She cleverly recruited an extremely prestigious, and old, board, but one which had little knowledge of the technology involved; people like Henry Kissinger, George Schultz, James Mattis, former Senator Sam Nunn, former Secretary of Defense William Perry.

Carreyrou also explains that Holmes being a woman helped persuade most in the media not to inquire too closely into the details.  Instead she was promoted as a role model and rock star CEO by credulous media and her Board members, Perry telling the New Yorker:

"She has sometimes been called another Steve Jobs, but I think that’s an inadequate comparison. She has a social consciousness that Steve never had. He was a genius; she’s one with a big heart.”

Carreyrou also becomes a subject in his own story.  He began covering Theranos as a Wall Street Journal reporter, became skeptical about the company and Holmes, and began writing critical stories.  The author discovered that Theranos and Holmes went to the Journal's publisher, Rupert Murdoch, a $100 million investor in Theranos, asking him to stifle Carreyrou, but Murdoch refused to do so.

Cardiac Arrest is written by the CEO of a medical device company in Minnesota that was investigated by the FDA and the Justice Department which indicted him for alleged criminal violations. Howard Root resigned as CEO to fight the charges, which he took to trial where a jury acquitted him on all charges.

The book chronicles Root's increasing disbelief as the matter escalated into a criminal case and goes through in detail every step of a process which is truly mind-boggling in its complexity, and throughout which the prosecutors were clearly abusing their powers.  Above all, the discretionary power the government has to destroy someone's life is laid out for all to see as we see the stress on Root as the years go by.  A powerful tale and one that I have sympathy with having twice had encounters with federal criminal prosecutors during my career.  As the great novelist George V Higgins advised:

If there is one thing a defense lawyer knows, it's that the government can get you if it wants to.  Any government.  Federal, state or local.  Law-abiding private citizens do not believe this until some government sets out to get them, and they have to pay good money to a man like me to fight for them, but their disbelief is like unto the very dew of May; it evaporates fast.  Along with their bank balances, cheerfulness, and the order of their lives.

I'll let Howard Root have the last word here; A Letter to My Prosecutors

Next:

Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama

My Grandfather's Son by Clarence Thomas

I suspect I am one of the few people to have read both of these books.

Let's leave aside politics for a bit.  I quite enjoyed Dreams From My Father, the story of a biracial young man, who at times harbors a lot of anger, raised in unusual circumstances in Hawaii, graduating from elite Northeast universities and deciding to move to Chicago, become fully "black", and work as a community organizer.  It climaxes with his visit to Kenya to connect with the relatives of his deceased father and finds them to be the usual mix of humanity; kind, crazy, difficult, loving, accomplished, lost.

My Grandfather's Son is the tale of a young man growing up in the segregated South as the descendant of slaves, in an isolated black community that spoke its own language.  He unflinchingly portrays the difficult relationship with his father and the transformational relationship with his grandfather who made him the man he became.  He attends elite Northeast universities, deals with rage against white people, initially struggles in his career, and develops a drinking problem.

In light of the striking similarities and differences in their lives, and where Obama and Thomas ended up, reading the books in tandem would generate fascinating discussions about their respective family and social backgrounds and their personalities which led them to follow their respective paths.

Mastering The Tides Of The World

I've written before of some of the unexpected lessons and pleasures of writing history related posts.  Now that I've been at this for a few years it is not uncommon to see connections between posts I wrote at different times, even though I failed to see those connections at the time.  A case in point is about contingency in history and specifically the inability of humans to predict the long-term impacts of our actions and how they may appear successful, unsuccessful, conscientious, or reckless, depending on when they are evaluated.  This post revisits and recombines a couple of earlier pieces.

In Federalist 1, Alexander Hamilton wrote:

It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force. 

If there be any truth in the remark, the crisis at which we are arrived may with propriety be regarded as the era in which that decision is to be made; and a wrong election of the part we shall act may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind.

But it is often difficult to determine what the right decision or wrong election may be, or at least to accurately predict the consequences.  In his remarkable eulogy for Neville Chamberlain in November 1940, Winston Churchill eloquently (and graciously, considering how shabbily Chamberlain treated him before he became Prime Minister) expressed this uncertainty:

It is not given to human beings, happily for them, for otherwise life would be intolerable, to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events. In one phase men seem to have been right, in another they seem to have been wrong. Then again, a few years later, when the perspective of time has lengthened, all stands in a different setting. There is a new proportion. There is another scale of values. History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. What is the worth of all this? The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honour.  

In JRR Tolkien's The Return of the King, a similar sentiment is expressed in the words of Gandalf at the Council of Gondor during the great debate on how to best resist Sauron:

Other evils there are that may come . . . Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succor of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.  What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.

Churchill and Tolkien differ in their emphasis, of which I've previously written.  For Churchill it can be difficult to determine how a decision may play out even in the immediate future, with rectitude and sincerity our only anchor in this process.  Tolkien seems to be saying we can know the right decision to be made now, and it is a decision that must be made, but how it plays out in the longer-term will be determined by others.  The similarities and differences may derive from their personal experiences and personalities.  Churchill, born in 1874 and Tolkien, born in 1892, both served in the Western Front trenches in France but while Churchill's views were rooted in his study of history, his upper-class upbringing and sense of Englishness, Tolkien's love of Nordic folklore, along with his committed Christianity, gave him a different perspective.

Iain Pears' 2002 novel, The Dream of Scipio, confronts us directly with both the need to make decisions and the uncertainty and consequences of those decisions.  The Dream of Scipio is unsettling from its opening passage, "Julien Barneuve died at 3:28 on the afternoon of August 18, 1943.  It had taken him twenty-three minutes exactly to die, the time between the fire starting and his last breath being sucked into his scorched lungs.  He had not known his life was going to end that day, although he suspected it might happen", until its terse and chilling closing paragraph.

Scipio is an inverted version of the author's best selling novel, An Instance Of The Fingerpost (1997), concerning a curious series of events taking place in and around Oxford in mid-17th century England, as told in parallel narratives by four participants.  Like Fingerpost, Scipio is set in and around a specific geography, in this case the Avignon region of southern France, but unlike the earlier story it is set in three different time periods over a 1500 year period.  While Fingerpost concerns itself about the same events seen from multiple perspectives, Scipio tells of different events that all raise the same questions about how one should act and make choices in life.  The narrative in Fingerpost is more straightforward, even with the variations in the tale, but is more oblique in its approach to the larger questions it raises, questions that are front and center throughout Scipio, which employs an intertwined narrative moving back and forth across its three time periods.

The earliest historical setting of Scipio is the crumbling Roman province of southern Gaul around 475 AD.  Manlius Hippomanes is a member of the dwindling elite of wealthy Romano-Gallic aristocrats, educated in classical philosophy and literature in a world that no longer has use for either, and from which the last of the Roman Legions who protected them disappeared a decade before.  While the Goths approach from the west and the Burgundians hover threateningly to the north some of his compatriots dream of being rescued by a renewed Roman Empire and others, like the real-life Sidonius Apollinaris, actively resist, Manlius believes himself more practical minded and steers a course designed to save what he believes can be saved and to do whatever must be done to achieve that goal, even at a high cost.

The second story tells the tale of Olivier de Noyen, an aspiring poet and courtier of Cardinal Ceccani, a real historical figure, in the Papal Court at Avignon as the Black Death approaches and then engulfs the city during the middle of the 14th century.  His role as courtier to a Cardinal involves him in the complicated plotting over whether the Papacy should stay in Avignon or return to Rome and leads to an encounter with another historical figure, the rabbi Gersonides, eventually forcing him into choosing what, and whom, to save and to betray.  De Noyen is also a collector of ancient manuscripts and discovers a copy of The Dream Of Scipio, a puzzling tract written by Manlius, who by this time is considered a Catholic saint; an ironic ending for the aristocrat considering his true beliefs and actions. 

The final setting is Vichy France during WWII, and centers on Julien Barneuve, a scholar and intellectual, emotionally numbed by his experience in the trenches during the prior war.  When someone observes that he is sitting in a library while the world burns he replies:

The world did burn.  I was at the cremation.  And it would have been better if I had stayed in a library.  One person, at least, would be alive now who is dead, because I wouldn't have been there to bayonet him.

With the defeat of France in 1940, Julien accepts an appointment from a friend as a minor functionary in the Vichy regime, a position from which he believes he may be able to save as much as possible from the barbarian Nazis.  At the same time he is studying de Noyen's poetry and through him Manlius' Dream.  Julien, after rediscovering hope through reuniting with his long elusive lover, realizes it requires he make choices between Vichy, the Resistance, and the actions needed to protect his love, even as it dawns on him that he has fatally misread both de Noyen and Manlius.
(Prisoners taken by Vichy militia)

All three protagonists live in dark times of crisis for civilization; the end of the classical era amidst rampaging barbarians; the advent of the Black Death; and the seeming triumph of the Nazis.  All are confronted with decisions about what is worth saving and face conflicts between friendship and loyalty.  Each make compromises to try to preserve something they believe is of even more value.  Terrible consequences follow many of those decisions, some recognized beforehand, some unanticipated.  The Dream of Scipio asks should we decide how to make a decision based upon its perceived consequences or are there values more important, regardless of consequences, since we cannot know in advance what those consequences may really be.  It asks, what is civilization?  How do we preserve it?  What if we are mistaken about what civilization consists of?  What if, in saving civilization from barbarians, we become barbarians ourselves? It asks, but does not answer.  Pears writes elsewhere:

Every cataclysm is welcomed by somebody; there is always someone to rejoice at disaster and see in it the prospect of a new beginning and a better world.  Equally, however much an act of God, there is always someone ready to take responsibility for any event or, failing that, to have blame thrust upon them.

In trying to answer these questions characters commit what they know to be terrible acts in order to preserve what they believe is best in the world, while others commit acts that have horrible consequences they did not intend.  

At the same time, most of the main characters are obsessed with how they will be remembered, yet in every case they are either forgotten or remembered in a way divorced from the reality of their lives and in ways they would not have appreciated.

Pears does not betray to the reader his own views, wanting us to constantly feel uneasy and on guard.  Julien's closest friends are Bernard, a skeptic, atheist, and man of the left who ends up with the Resistance, and Marcel, religious, and a man of the right who offers his friend a job with Vichy.  Pears deliberately makes it difficult for us to clearly sympathize with either and disrupts any preconceived notions we may have.  Julien recalls an incident when, as children, Marcel threw a stone, breaking a church window, a deed for which Bernard takes the blame:

This was the event Bernard had referred to, one of those moments of childhood from which the whole of adult life can be projected.  Julien, nervous, innocent, but standing fast.  The insouciant Bernard, making the grand gesture in the name both of friendship and of self-aggrandizement, his actions extravagant but generous.  And Marcel, a little cowardly and frightened, afraid of authority, not wishing to take on the ownership of his deeds, content for others to be punished instead of him.  The resister, the collaborator, and the vacillating intellectual . . . 

Except that Julien remembered it like that only because Bernard retold the story many years later and brought it back to his mind.  Imposed his narrative on what had become the faintest of recollections; created memories by his skill as a raconteur  . . . 

But, on a few occasions, he was almost certain he remembered that it was Bernard who had thrown the stone and run away, and Marcel who had been beaten.

In this passage, Pears also touches on the issue raised in Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty - how do we come to know what we know?  When are the stories we tell ourselves over and over again about ourselves and others just stories rather than memories?  How much does memory influence the answers to the questions Pears poses the reader?

For readers who wish to delve deeper there is a further layer of interpretation. While the fictional Manlius never wrote a book titled The Dream of Scipio, Somnium Scipionis (Dream of Scipio) is a famous piece by the 1st century BC Roman writer and politician, Cicero, which tells of the dream of Scipio Aemilianus (the destroyer of Carthage in 146 BC), in which his grandfather Scipio Africanus (who defeated Carthage to end the Second Punic War in 201 BC) appears and instructs his grandson on what makes a good Roman citizen, while at the same time pointing out the relative insignificance of Rome in the scheme of the cosmos, and discussing virtue from a Stoic perspective. In the novel, Olivier de Noyen initially thinks that what he has found is just another copy of this work before realizing it was composed by Manlius.  In turn, Cicero's work was the subject of a 5th century AD commentary by a Roman aristocrat, Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius, a contemporary of the fictional Manlius, and both Cicero's original and Macrobius's work have prompted philosophical examination over the centuries.(1)

Cicero himself was caught in the same dilemma presented in the novel.  Born in 106 BC, Cicero was one of the "new men" who rose to prominence in the last years of the Roman Republic.  Devoted to the preservation of the Republic, he opposed the ambitions of Julius Caesar, after earlier supporting him, and approved, after the fact, of his assassination, an act which, in retrospect, doomed the Republic he loved.  When Octavian, Caesar's 19-year old nephew, and adopted heir, showed up in Rome in the aftermath of Caesar's death, Cicero felt confident he could manipulate the young man, using him as a tool to restore the Republic, but the calculating Octavian ultimately allied himself with Marc Anthony, an enemy of Cicero, and together they put an end to Cicero's plan.  As a price for their alliance, Octavian agreed to Anthony's demand that Cicero die.  Eighteen months after Caesar's death, Cicero's hands and head were nailed to the Rostrum in the Roman Forum.  The Republic and Cicero were dead.

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(1)  Though Macrobius is little known or read today, I came across this passage in Boswell's Life of Johnson, regarding Johnson's father introducing the young man to his Oxford tutor in 1728:

. . .  he behaved modestly, and sat silent, till upon something which occurred in the course of the conversation, he suddenly struck in and quoted Macrobius; and thus he gave the first impression of that more extensive reading in which he had indulged himself. 

Chaos Under Heaven

Josh Rogin (1) is a foreign policy opinion writer for the Washington Post, a self-declared "agnostic Democrat" and a China hawk.  We listened to Bari Weiss interview Rogin on her podcast and which got me intrigued enough to read Chaos Under Heaven, his book on U.S.-China relations during the Trump administration, a book I recommend to others.

Rogin's starting point is that the China regime is a threat to the U.S., a threat that has greatly accelerated under Xi Jingping, and a threat that has compromised many U.S. institutions and public figures.  The author puts it this way:

Virtually everyone I interviewed for this book had an awakening story; a moment in their personal or professional lives when they realized that the grand strategic competition between the United States and China was the most important foreign policy issue in the world and the most important project they would work on in their lifetime.  Many also said this was an awakening to the aggressive and malign character, behavior, and strategy of China's leadership: the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), a hundred-year old revolutionary organization that is determined to expand its influence and increase its power, and which has few limits to the methods it will use to advance its own interests.

Put simply, a China that is militarily expansionist, economically aggressive, internally repressive, and increasingly interfering in democratic societies poses enormous challenges for the United States along with all of our allies, friends and partners.  The effects are already seen in our national security, our investments, our industries, our schools, our media, and even our elections.

. . . Washington had lost the bet it made twenty years ago, when it had granted China permanent normal trade relations in the hope that helping China expand economically would cause it to liberalize politically and that would lead to peaceful coexistence.

I largely agree with this assessment though it was not my view twenty years ago.

The author views the Obama administration as being "played" by China into viewing the relationship being between competitors with room for cooperation while, in reality, China is inherently hostile to the U.S. 

We saw this play out in the relative evaluation of Russia v China between the Obama and Trump administrations.  The incoming National Security Advisor for Trump, Michael Flynn (2), thought China a bigger threat than Russia; the Obama administration thought the opposite.  In her House Intelligence Committee testimony of September 8, 2017 Susan Rice, Obama's NSA, complained about her meeting with Flynn:

"We spent a lot more time talking about China in part because General Flynn's focus was on China as our principal overarching adversary. He had many questions and concerns about China. And when I elicited - sought to elicit his perspective on Russia, he was quite, I started to say dismissive, but that may be an overstatement. He downplayed his assessment of Russia as a threat to the United States. He called it overblown. He said they're a declining power, they're demographically challenged, they're not really much of a threat, and then reemphasized the importance of China." (pp.46-47)

I suppose Rice thought, particularly in the context of 2017, that her anecdote was clever.  It doesn't look that way now.

After that setup we move quickly to the Trump administration.  Early on, Rogin writes of his invitation to join meetings of mid-level bureaucrats trying get the administration to take a tough line on China, with Josh acknowledging both his sympathy toward them and his access being based on his willingness to write in support of their desired policies.

I'd summarize his take on the Trump administration as making some of the right steps to reverse the course set by the Bush and Obama administrations but beset by flawed implementation due to the erratic nature of Donald Trump and his inability or unwillingness to spend the time needed to understand the details of the relationship between the two countries, though the president's instincts seemed supportive of the hard liners, as well as unresolved conflicts between those in his administration promoting a much harder approach and those, primarily linked with Wall Street, who favored a more accommodating stance.  The hardest of the hardliners were people like Peter Navarro, Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn who, according to Rogin, were willing to blow up the entire relationship while another group centered around Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, Matt Pottinger and Robert O'Brien in promoting a more aggressive approach towards resetting the relationship.  The Wall Street crowd was lead by Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, Gary Cohn, a 25-year Goldman Sachs executive who headed Trump's National Economic Council for two years, Larry Kudlow, and other friends of Trump from the Street like Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman who were outside the administration but had the President's ear at times. (3)

Rogin describes the policy arguments and political infighting all under the eye of the unpredictable and erratic President.  Given Rogin's personal policy preferences and the nature of this type of reporting generally I can't say whether he gets it all accurately portrayed in every detail but given the personalities involved and what I saw of the administration's actions his overall picture rings true to me.

The book reaches its climax with the Covid-19 pandemic, for which Rogin condemns the China government's obfuscation and obstruction during the initial phases of the outbreak and then in preventing an investigation of the causes (Rogin thinks a lab leak is the most likely source).  

Rogin reports that during the early phase (January-February) China and the U.S. tried to cooperate but he relates a February 6 call between Xi and Trump that is startling.  According to Rogin, in that call Xi "asked Trump not to take any more excessive actions that would create further panic".  He "also told Trump that China had the coronavirus outbreak under control, that the virus was not a threat to the outside world, and that it was sensitive to the temperature and therefore would likely go way when the weather got warmer".  Four days later, at a White House meeting with state governors, Trump said, "Now, the virus that we're talking about having to do - you know, a lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat - as the heat comes in", without revealing that "a lot of people" meant Xi.

At the same time the administration was being very careful in its public statements because in private discussions China diplomats were threatening the halt of exports of badly needed medical supplies if the U.S. said the wrong things.

Finally becoming aware that he was being misled by Xi, on March 18 President Trump referred to Covid-19 as "the Chinese virus", although it was only in mid-April that administration officials first stated publicly that a leak from the Wuhan lab was a possible origin of the pandemic (statements triggered by a April 14 column in the Washington Post by Rogin based upon his obtaining a document leaked from his government sources).(4)

It remains unclear to me what the Biden administration posture on China is.  In fact, it may be unclear to the participants.

What is the nature of the threat?

I spent a lot of time in China between 2000 and 2011.  At the start I was cautiously optimistic, but by the end of the decade my views were changing.  And since the ascension of Xi Jinping it has become evident that rather than China becoming part of the existing world economic system it is seeking to reshape that system to both protect the role of the Chinese Communist Party and to dominate that system.  The levers it controls are much broader and more effective than the Soviet Union, which was a military power but an economic and technological pygmy.  

The intertwining of China with the global economy has enabled China to make global companies advocates for its policies, continually promoting even deeper economic ties.  This was a phenomenon I recognized during the decade I spent involved with that country.  My responsibility was running global environment and safety programs that were consistently applied no matter where we operated.  In that role, I was increasingly interacting with social responsibility "stakeholders".(5)  In our meetings they seemed to believe that multinational companies would be able to influence China government policies on environment and safety.  After a few years on the ground in China, my view was the opposite.  I knew that any global company would, if China said "jump", ask "how high?".  These NGO stakeholders had the power equation reversed.  It remains true.  American and European companies fear the China government much more than that of the United States.  They've been converted into lobbyists for China.

It is difficult enough for manufacturing companies to disentangle from complex global supply chains centered on China, even if they want to, but the American financial services sector is engaged in active collaboration with the regime (as for the tech sector, see this recent article on Apple's arrangement with China that allows it to continue to do business there). Americans investing their savings and retirement accounts into managed plans are often investing in China companies whether they know it or not.  Virtually every large American bank and financial services company is strongly linked to China or working to improve those links.  And they know who calls the shots.  Recently, Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan, quickly apologized for making a joke that offended the Chinese Communist Party, something he would never do in similar circumstances in the United States.

Just as in the Trump administration, the Wall Street crowd wields power in the Biden administration.  In the case of Biden, while Goldman Sachs plays a role, as it does in all administrations, it is BlackRock execs who are most closely tied to both the administration and China.  BlackRock, the largest money manager in the world with $7.8 trillion under management, was recently approved as the first foreign-owned company to operate a wholly-owned business in China's mutual fund industry, a move that drew criticism from George Soros who called it a "tragic mistake" that would "damage the national security interests of the U.S. and other democracies".  Brian Deese of BlackRock (I worked with his mother many years ago) runs the National Economic Council and Adewale Adeyemo is #2 at the Treasury Department.  The White House Office of Presidential Personnel, which manages all political appointments for the administration, is run by Catherine Russell.  From 2009-13, Russell was Chief of Staff to the Second Lady, Jill Biden, and began working as a staffer for Joe Biden in 1987.  Russell is married to Tom Donilon, National Security Advisor to President Obama from 2010 to 2013 and currently Chairman of the BlackRock Investment Institute, the firm's global think tank.  Donilon's brother Mike is a Senior Advisor to President Biden.

The issues around disentangling ourselves from China are complex.  I don't understand all of them, nor their implications.  I hope someone does.  Just as we have levers with China, China has levers with us.  I do know the failure to take control of our own actions will just result in a deeper dependence on China.  Here is one example.  If the U.S. were to try to greatly expand its development of solar and wind power and the use of batteries, technologies requiring enormous quantities of metals and rare earths, it will face a choice.  Either expand domestic mining and milling operations or become dependent upon China, particularly for rare earths, letting that country determine our future.

For further reading on China:

Balding's World

Tanner Greer 

Michael Pettis 

Henry Gao

China - U.S. Relations in the Eyes of the Chinese Communist Party 

Groping the Elephant of Common Prosperity 

The Triumph and Terror of Wang Huning 

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(1)  Let's get this out of the way right now.  I'm continually getting confused between Josh Rogin, Seth Rogen, and Joe Rogan.  They need to caucus and decide who has to change their name.  Please guys, do this for me.

(2)  Yes, I know, he's nuts.  How much of that was always there and how much induced by the Mueller gang's persecution which broke him financially and apparently emotionally, I can't tell.  But he was correct in his relative assessment of Russia and China.

(3) Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump make only passing appearances in the book but my sense is that their views were probably closer to the Wall Street crowd.  One can only imagine what a real press would make of Hunter Biden's China connections.

(4) The chronology also undermines the retroactive attempt to pin discussions of the lab leak theory on Trump's "xenophobia".  We now know that on January 31, 2020 virologists were communicating among themselves, and with Dr Anthony Fauci, that a lab origin was possible.  After Fauci arranged a conference call (the details of which remain unknown) a couple of days later, the same scientists, on February 4, completely ruled out a lab origin and then began the media campaign denouncing anyone believing such a release was a possibility as a conspiracy theorist and racist.  With the revelations of NIAID's relationship with the EcoHealth Alliance it is evident that the conspiracy and racist charges were deliberately made to divert attention from the connections between the Alliance, Fauci and the Wuhan lab.  All of this happened before references by Trump to the Wuhan or China virus.

The technique of accusing anyone critical of the Chinese government as being racist is not limited to this circumstance, and it is one China is well aware of and uses in its own propaganda.  For a recent example see this op-ed by Michele Bethel in the Wall St Journal.  Bethel's stepfather founded MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research in 2000 and Michele had been a Board member for the past seven years, lived in Shanghai for several years and speaks Chinese.  Ms Bethel became concerned that the Institute's work with Chinese institutions could "unwittingly . . . be aiding the country’s repressive security apparatus or its military, whose officers have published articles declaring biology a new domain of warfare."

According to Ms Bethel,

When I first aired these concerns a few years ago, other board members took offense. One said that any serious inquiry into the ambitions of the Chinese Communist Party would be “racist.” A key member of the institute asked me to “stick to science” and not to mention China again.

On reading the Reuters article last month I raised my concerns again. Board members again dismissed the issues I cited, saying scientific progress is paramount. One characterized my motives as “political”—a head-scratcher, given that I don’t wear my centrist political views on my sleeve. 

Do any of these Board members really think these concerns are "racist"?  I doubt it, but it is a convenient tool to bludgeon anyone who raises questions.  The bigger issue is the extent to which the academic world has been compromised by the flood of Chinese money into its institutions.

(5) "Stakeholders" in this context refers to self-appointed NGOs who actually don't care about the future of a particular company but have larger ideological goals in mind.

The Pleasures Of Reading History

I've written before about the unexpected pleasures that give a deeper understanding, encountered while reading and writing about history for this blog.  Recently, I came across a journal article and a book that brought to my attention things I did not know, and hadn't thought about, in this case involving slavery (for a discussion of other readings on slavery go here).

Did you ever think about the implications of the Dred Scott decision on the issuance of patents?  I had not, but U of Kentucky law professor Brian Frye did, and wrote about it in Invention of a Slave, originally published in the Syracuse Law Review (2018) (1).

When issued in 1857, Dred Scott instantly became the most controversial decision of the Supreme Court (for background read Dred Scott's Trial), in particular because of Chief Justice Taney's opinion finding that blacks, whether slave or free, could not be citizens of the United States.  I'd already been aware that as a result of this declaration the State Department ceased to issue passports to free blacks, a policy overturned by Abraham Lincoln soon after his inauguration in March 1861.  Professor Frye explores the consequences of the case and US patent law when it came to the issue of patents by the Patent Office.

Here's Frye's summary:

On June 10, 1858, the Attorney General issued an opinion titled Invention of a Slave, concluding that a slave owner could not patent a machine invented by his slave, because neither the slave owner nor his slave could take the required patent oath.  The slave owner could not swear to be the inventor, and the slave could not take an oath at all.  The Patent Office denied at least two patent applications filed by slave owners, one of which was filed by Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi . . . But it also denied at least one patent application filed by a free African-American inventory, because African-Americans could not be citizens of the United States under Dred Scott.

The Patent Act required a Patent Oath in which the applicant had to swear to be the "original" inventor and that they were an American citizen.  Before Dred Scott, the Patent Office had granted many patents to free African-Americans, the first known being Thomas Jennings in 1827 for a method for "dry scouring" clothing.  Many other followed and there are probably more than currently identified as the patent application did not require the applicant to disclose their race. 

Following Dred Scott, slave owners objected to the position taken by the Patent Office claiming slaves were more creative than free African-Americans(!!) while free African-Americans objected to the new bar on granting them patents. 

In August 1857 (five months after Dred Scott), Oscar J.E. Stuart, a lawyer and planter in Mississippi, wrote the Secretary of the Interior (where the Patent Office was housed) inquiring how to patent an invention of his slave Ned for a "double plow and scraper".  The Secretary forwarded the letter to  Attorney General Jermiah Black for a formal response.  Black responded he could not opine until Stuart submitted an application, which Stuart did.  In November, the new Commissioner of Patents, Thomas Holt, a Southerner, responded the invention could not be patented since neither Stuart nor Ned could take the oath.

As Frye writes:

Holt presumably applied the logic of Dred Scott and concluded that if slaves could not be citizens of the United States, then they could not take the patent oath, and slave owners could not patent the inventions of their slaves.  In other words, Dred Scott denied citizenship to African-Americans in order to help slave owners, but Holt applied the logic of Dred Scott in order to prevent slave owners from claiming ownership of the inventions of their slaves. 

In June 1858, AG Black issued his opinion agreeing with Commissioner Holt.  After Black's opinion, Slave owners tried to get the U.S. Congress to amend the Patent Act to allow owners to obtain patents for the inventions of their slaves but the effort failed, though in 1861 the Constitution of the new Confederate States of America specifically allowed for such patents.

In 1859, Jefferson Davis tried to obtain a patent for the invention of one of his brother's slaves, Benjamin T Montgomery, and was turned down for the same reasons.  In 1866, Davis' brother Joseph, sold his plantations to Montgomery, who even as a slave had become a successful merchant, at first secretly, because sale of property to a black violated the state's Black Code instituted after the end of the Civil War, and then the following year publicly after legislation was passed allowing such transactions.

Did you know that in the 1850s there were Brazilian and Cuban merchants in New York City actively hiring U.S. ships and crews to travel to Africa and bring slaves back to Brazil and Cuba?  Reading The Last Slave Ships: New York and the End of the Middle Passage by John Harris was a revelation.

In 1807 the importation of slaves into the U.S. became illegal and in 1820 Congress passed legislation making Americans engaged in any importation subject to the death penalty (though this was only imposed once, in 1862).  Likewise, under British pressure other nations banned the slave trade, though not slavery itself.  In 1850 Brazil, the largest importer of slaves in the Western Hemisphere (nearly 50% of all Africans imported into the Americas came to Brazil) banned the trade, though slavery would be legal until 1888.  Because of the large U.S. merchant fleet and availability of crews Brazilian and Cuban slave traders set up shop in New York City using a number of subterfuges to disguise what they were doing which was illegal under U.S. law though the slaves were not imported into the U.S.

The Last Slave Ships tells how the scheme worked, the ineffectiveness and at times collusion, of American authorities, and the efforts of some Americans but primarily of the British government to stop the slave trade. 

While there were many new aspects to me, it was one particular issue that I found particularly striking.

The British devoted a large part of their navy to trying to intercept slave ships, supported by a small American squadron and, at times, by the Spanish navy.  When a slave ship was intercepted what became of the freed Africans?  I knew about the interceptions and even that more than 100,000 captives were freed but never thought about what happened next.

It turns out the Africans could not be returned to the ports from which they had embarked because these were run by kingdoms and tribes who were conducting the raids that had enslaved them in the first place.  These Africans were from inland areas not accessible to Western navies.

Instead the British took the Africans to their islands in the Caribbean where they were indentured to work on the sugar plantations for several years and were then freed.  The Americans took freed Africans to Liberia, settled earlier in the century by freed American slaves.  The Africans were indentured, the start of a caste system with descendants of American slaves ruling over native Africans, a system that last well into the 20th century.  As to the Spanish, they took their freed captives to Cuba where they were indentured, though apparently the terms of the indenture were often not honored and the Africans effectively reduced to slavery until it was abolished in 1886 (2).

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(1) I came across the article completely by accident.  While following a reference that had nothing to do with slavery I came across an index of law review articles, including Frye's which caught my eye.

(2) This prompted me to do some research on these African coastal slave states.  They were very prosperous in the 17th and 18th centuries when the Atlantic slave trade was booming, with most of their revenues derived from the trade.  However, as the trade shrank in the first half of the 19th century and virtually ceased after the American Civil War, the search for replacement revenues led to a switch to agriculture which actually increased their need for slaves, as the labor intensity required more slaves from the inland areas subject to annual sweeps by the coastal slave states.  This persisted until the European carve up of Africa towards the end of the century, which created its own set of problems.