Air Travel

Air Travel, Baucus, Books, U.S. Senate

Once it Worked

Posted on by christian

The Last Great Senate

Given today’s persistent gridlock in Congress, it’s easy to forget that the United States Senate was once a place where bipartisan lawmaking actually occurred on a fairly regular basis and not that long ago.

A fine new book – The Last Great Senate by Ira Shapiro – remembers a Senate full of great and gifted legislators, including Washington State’s Scoop Jackson, pictured nearby. Shapiro, a former trade official in the Clinton Administration and Senate staffer, makes a compelling case that the U.S. Senate in the 1960’s and 1970’s was a great place. A roll call of the great ones of that period, Scoop included, reads like a roster of some of the institutions very best.

Mansfield from Montana, Baker from Tennessee, Church from Idaho and Hatfield from Oregon. And there were more, Javits of New York, Rudman of New Hampshire, Byrd of West Virginia, Cooper of Kentucky and Case of New Jersey. Most are lost to memory now, but the Senate they occupied was a far different place than today’s where party leaders seem only to traffic in partisan sound bites and elbow each other for each day’s tactical political advantage.

Writing last week in the Seattle Times, Shapiro remembered the great Scoop as a fully formed, well informed and well intentioned Senator.

“Jackson was also a master legislator,” Shapiro wrote, “able to reach principled compromises to further the national interest. During the late 1970s, as energy dependence became a central concern for America, Jackson was the chairman of the newly formed Senate Energy Committee. Jackson loathed President Jimmy Carter (the feeling was mutual), who had defeated him for the Democratic nomination in 1976. Jackson doubted Carter’s readiness to be president and also disagreed with the thrust of his energy proposals, believing them to be too generous to the oil and gas industries.

“Yet, despite all these factors, and even while leading the fight against Carter’s effort to negotiate the SALT II arms-control agreement with the Soviet Union, Jackson worked tirelessly for three long years to produce a national energy policy. He respected the presidency, if not the president, and saw the need to forge compromises between consumer and producer interests, and the various regions of our country.”

Talk privately to any thinking member of Congress and they will tell you that the country faces serious challenges that aren’t difficult to identify. We must gain control of fiscal policy and the tax code is a mess and must be reformed for reasons of both fairness and increased revenue. We face serious competitive issues that are only met by world-class trade, education and infrastructure investment. Immigration policy must be re-structured and – brace yourselves – even gun violence in America must be addressed.

The problems are readily apparent, what is failing is our institutions, beginning with the federal legislature and particularly the United States Senate. Gone is the sense that a six-year Senate term gives 100 elite Americans a license to operate just a little above the partisan hustle. For the better part of three decades, as Shapiro’s must read book makes clear, many of the nation’s most pressing problems have gone begging, while the Senate has fallen into a frozen, partisan swamp of inaction.

It would be comforting to think that the institution can reform itself from within and regain some of its historic luster, but in today’s Twitter-infused partisanship that is probably asking too much. The fault, dear friends is not in the Senate, really, but in ourselves. We settle for gridlock rather than demand a Senate of Scoop Jacksons.

 

Air Travel, Baseball, Books, Britain, Brother, Football, Johnson, Politics, Reagan, Religion

Weekend Reads

Posted on by christian

Robert Caro, Jerry Kramer and More

There is a fascinating piece planned for publication Sunday, and already online, in The New York Times on legendary Lyndon Johnson biographer Robert Caro. Caro is about to release volume four of his projected five volume bio of LBJ. To date he has produced 3,388 fascinating pages.

Caro’s work is one of the greatest studies ever of the accumulation and use of political power. The piece also has great insights into the author’s methods, which could properly be described as “old school.” He dresses for work every day in jacket and tie, for example. Great piece.

Northwest Nazarene University political scientist Steve Shaw and one of his colleagues, English Department Chair Darrin Grinder, have just released an important new book that I highly recommend. The Idaho Statesman’s Dan Popkey wrote about the book – “The Presidents and Their Faith” – earlier this week. From Jefferson’s own version of the Gospels to Woodrow Wilson’s Presbyterian minister father to Richard Nixon’s Quaker roots, Shaw and Grinder give us wonderful mini-portraits of 43 presidents and their personal and political faith. With so much talk of politics and religion, the book couldn’t be timelier. Highly recommended.

Insightful piece in The Atlantic by staff writer Conor Friedersdorf that explains why national Republicans have spent 20 years searching for the next Ronald Reagan and haven’t found him.

“Today, would be Reagans with less charisma, less executive experience and less time spent honing their thinking and communication skills are somehow expecting to succeed even as they operate in a less advantageous political environment. Of course it isn’t happening. And it’s no wonder conservatives are divided in who they support.”

And finally, I am very aware (and happy) that baseball is back in action. My Giants open today in the city by the bay. But, the best sports book I’ve read in a while is an older book, published in 1968, Instant Replay by Green Bay Packer great and University of Idaho grad Jerry Kramer. The New York Times called Kramer’s book the “best behind the scene glimpse of pro football ever produced.”

Some think the book’s candor has contributed to Kramer being passed over for the NFL Hall of Fame. If so, that’s ridiculous. Kramer is the most deserving NFL player not in the Hall and that oversight, at long last, should be corrected. Get a copy of the book and read it. It’s great.

 

Air Travel, Books, John Kennedy, Johnson, Religion

LBJ

Posted on by christian

Our Eternally Fascinating and Flawed President

The steady re-examination and reinterpretation of our 36th president is one of the most interesting developments in the shifting world of political history and biography. There are new and often very good books all the time about the Roosevelts, Kennedy and, more often now, Reagan, but the story of the big, drawling Texan is simply a political historian’s dream.

The fact that LBJ biographer Robert Caro is about to release the fourth volume of his massive and nearly life-long work on Johnson was, in and of itself, a significant news story. The book, Passage to Power, is out May 1 and covers the Kennedy assassination and deals with the fact that the ambitious then-vice president had all but given up aspirations to sit in the Oval Office. Caro has another volume still to come. To mark the release of the book, Caro has written a piece in The New Yorker and the magazine has collected seven different pieces Caro has written over the years about Johnson. The collection amounts to soul food for the political junkie.

Meantime, another fine new book on Johnson’s presidency is just out. Indomitable Will by Mark Updegrove – he’s the director of the Johnson Presidential Library in Austin – tells the story of Johnson’s Shakespearean presidency through oral histories of those, LBJ included, who lived the experience.

Dozens of other books have been written about Johnson and Robert Dallek’s two volume treatment remains among the best. There will be more.

During his presidency, Lyndon Johnson was loathed by many for what some saw as his unsophisticated manner and for having inherited the presidency that John Kennedy’s should have held much longer. Others came to despise Johnson for his escalation of the war in Southeast Asia or his vast expansion of the social safety net in the guise of Johnson’s Great Society. Still, Johnson remains one of the pivotal figures of 20th Century politics. Rarely has there been a better politician in the White House. Rarely has there been a more effective senate majority leader. Johnson’s impact on his moment in time survives years after his death and for anyone who loves politics and the American story will find the new volumes and many of the old fascinating reading. Put another way, you cannot begin to understand the politics of the United States in 2012 – the economy, health care, foreign policy, race – without an appreciation for the life and times of Lyndon Johnson.

 

 

Air Travel, Baseball, Books, Politics

They Also Ran

Posted on by christian

These Guys Never Made it to President’s Day

If you recognize the fellow in the photo as the 1924 Democratic candidate for President of the United States you are a trivia master. That smiling, prosperous looking fellow was John W. Davis and he lost the presidency in 1924 to Calvin Coolidge.

It somehow seems appropriate – the day after President’s Day – to remember the also ran’s who also ran, guys like John W. Davis. Who knows whether Davis would have been a good president? He certainly had the resume. Davis was born and grew up in West Virginia where he practiced law, served in the state legislature, got elected to Congress, became Solicitor General and U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain. So far, he seems over qualified.

When Democrats nearly destroyed the party in 1924 with a convention battle over the Klan and booze – the wet, anti-Klan crowd wanted New York Gov. Al Smith, the dry, pro-Klan faction favored the former Treasury Secretary William Gibbs McAdoo – Davis emerged on the 103rd ballot as the compromise nominee.

[Could a man named McAdoo have ever won the presidency? Well, a guy named Obama did.]

When that 1924 convention entered its 16th day without a nominee, Will Rogers joked that New York had invited the Democrats to visit the city for their convention not to live there permanently. When Davis finally had the nomination, it wasn’t worth much. He lost everything but the solid south and Silent Cal polled 54% in an election that also featured a Progressive Party ticket lead by Sen. Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin.

Davis gets his own chapter in one of my all-time favorite political books, which is appropriated called They Also Ran. Irving Stone wrote the profiles of the men who ran and lost in 1943. The book covers the losers from the beginning of the Republic until 1940 and it’s a great read with Stone often suggesting that the guys who lost – Davis, Winfield Scott Hancock, etc. – might have been a good deal better than the guys who won.

The book also bunches the also ran’s into parallel lives with the military men grouped together, the newspaper men considered together, etc. It is a very effective technique and a unique perspective on those who ran and lost.

It’s fun to think about the presidents we might have had – Henry Clay, for instance – or we should have had – Horace Greeley rather than a second Grant term. David Frum played the game yesterday by focusing on three important elections.

While the also ran’s failed to make it to the White House a number of them still influenced history. Davis, for example, became one of the most famous lawyers of his day. No less an authority than Justice Hugo Black considered him one of the two or three greatest advocates of the 20th Century. By the end of his legal career, Davis had made 139 oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court, including representing the state of South Carolina in one of the most important cases in court history – Brown v. Board of Education.

In that case, just as in his moment of presidential fame in 1924, John W. Davis lost. But, fair is fair, losers deserve to be remembered, too, and who knows what might have been.

 

 

Air Travel, Baucus, Books, Bush, Church, CIA, Civil Rights, Film, Poverty, U.S. Senate

The Spy from Boise

Posted on by christian

A Real Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Years ago as a very young, very naive reporter, the boss handed me a piece of wire copy ripped straight off the teletype machine and told me to find a photographer and get an interview with James Jesus Angleton.

I should have said – who? But, of course, I was too inexperienced (too stupid) to ask that question and to pause for a moment to think what I might ask the man who had recently been forced out as the long-time chief of counterintelligence at the CIA. I headed for a local hotel to try and stick a microphone in the face of man who, since World War II, had been the intelligence service’s top expert on the Soviet intelligence service, the KGB.

I found Angleton, as I recall, in a hotel ballroom – I don’t remember what he was doing in Boise – and after my innocent, stumbling approach he conceded to answer a couple of questions, the substance of which is now lost of history or, in the days of 16mm film, the cutting room floor. I think I asked his reaction to the on-going Church Committee investigation of CIA abuses. Again, as I recall, not surprisingly the old CIA hand was dismissive of the efforts of Idaho Democratic Sen. Frank Church to expose assassination plots, domestic spying and such on the part of the Agency.

I’ve long been struck by the irony of an Idaho United States Senator leading the investigation of a CIA that had come to be so influenced by an Idaho-born spy. Would you call that a small world?

My long ago and very brief encounter with James Angleton, I believe it was in 1976, came back to me recently after watching the thoroughly enjoyable new film Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and the inspired performance of Gary Oldman in the lead role of spy catcher George Smiley.

The movie, based on the great espionage thriller by John la Carre, is, in many ways, a British version of the story James Angleton lived at the CIA; the story of an alleged “mole” at the very top of the nation’s intelligence service; a counter spy Angleton was determined to find and eliminate. The quest eventually took Angleton down instead.

The Republican politician and one-time ambassador to Italy, Clare Booth Luce, once told Angleton, who began his spy career organizing operations against Italian fascists, “There’s no doubt you are easily the most interesting and fascinating figure the intelligence world has produced, and a living legend.” Others were not so charitable.

Angleton was born in Boise, Idaho in 1917, as his New York Times obit noted the year of the Russian Revolution, the son of an employee of the National Cash Register Company. After spending summers in Italy, Angleton went to Yale where he developed his life-long love of literature and poetry and was recruited into the OSS, the agency that eventually became the CIA.

Angleton, in later years his posture stooped and his thick mane of hair streaked with gray, was, by all accounts, a Renaissance Man. He grew orchids and attended lectures on Joyce. One colleague said, ”He had a remarkable amount of knowledge about world events, art, literature.”

Former CIA officer David Atlee Phillips, who like Angleton was caught up in the whirlwind that surrounded the Agency in the 1970, wrote in his memoir, that “Angleton was CIA’s answer to the Delphic Oracle: seldom seen but with an awesome reputation nurtured over the years by word of mouth and intermediaries padding out of his office with pronouncements which we seldom professed to understand fully but accepted on faith anyway.”

It was Angleton’s zealous search for the CIA mole – the counter conspiracy theorists speculated that Angleton himself might have been the mole – that eventually lead then-director William Colby to show the counterintelligence chief the door. Angleton’s forced retirement from the CIA came in 1974. Unlike George Smiley, the fictional character in Tinker, Tailor, who was brought out of retirement to search out the mole in Britain’s MI6, Angleton was fired, in part, for too aggressively pursuing the CIA’s mole. In the process, some argue, he not only damaged the individual careers of many intelligence agents, but undermined the Agency’s efforts to run an effective intelligence program against the Soviets.

To detractors Angleton became the worst kind of paranoid operative, secretive and suspicious of everything all the time. To others he was the very personification of the dedicated intelligence agent. One magazine profile suggested that “If John le Carré and Graham Greene had collaborated on a superspy, the result might have been James Jesus Angleton.”

Angleton died of cancer in 1987 at age 69, as much a mystery in death as in life. What secrets he must have taken with him.

Old-time Boiseans will remember Angleton’s brother, Hugh, a diminutive, elegant man who owned a rather spectacular downtown gift store. Hugh Angleton, always impeccably dressed in suit and tie, served as a kind of showroom director at his store – Angleton’s. The store was filled to overflowing with rare and elegant china, jewelry and art objects. I often wondered if his more famous brother helped locate some of the exotic and expensive items that filled the display cases in Hugh’s store, which, sadly, passed out of existence years ago.

Years ago, it’s said, then-CIA Director James Schlesinger went to Capitol Hill to brief Senate Armed Services Chairman John Stennis on a major Agency operation.  “No, no my boy,” responded Senator Stennis.  “Don’t tell me.  Just go ahead and do it, but I don’t want to know.”

So it is with the intelligence agencies. So secret is what they do, as the joke goes, they could tell us, but then would have to kill us. In trying to explain this shadowy world, novels and motion pictures are more satisfying than reality. In Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, George Smiley – sort of – got the mole. The spy from Boise never did.

 

Air Travel, Books, Cold War, Foreign Policy, John Kennedy, Kennan, Nixon, Pope Francis

George Kennan

Posted on by christian

Diplomat, Scholar, Intellectual, American

You can be forgiven if you’ve never heard the name George F. Kennan.

If you’re under 50, didn’t fixate, as many of us did, on the daily threat of nuclear holocaust from the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis to the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and have always seen Russia (aka the Soviet Union) as “the evil empire,” then George Kennan might simply be a footnote in a dusty old college international relations textbook. In one way or another Kennan touched all those issues and lived a full, complicated, fascinating and fruitful life as well.

Kennan was, at the same time, an absolutely fascinating and frustrating man; contradictions that make for the great story that Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis details – warts and all – in his superb new biography. It is a testament to Kennan, the self-taught historian, that he gave Gaddis complete access to his papers, diaries, friends and thoughts and the result is biography on a grand scale.

And it is not too grand a statement to say that Kennan was the man more than any other to define Cold War foreign policy on both sides of the great capitalist/communist divide from the 1930’s to the end of the 20th Century.

Gaddis, like Kennan in his time, is a probing and distinguished scholar of foreign policy who has produced a book that surely appeals to anyone who cares about how the world we inhabit came to be this way. But Gaddis has also written a story of the life and struggles of a man who worked his way from junior diplomat in Moscow in 1933 to become the foremost scholar of American foreign policy, a position he continued to occupy until his death in 2005 at age 101.

The Guardian newspaper wrote upon his death that few people can “claim to have changed the shape of the age they lived in,” but Kennan certainly had. “Virtually singlehandedly, he established the policy which controlled both sides of the cold war for more than 40 years.”

As Henry Kissinger noted in his New York Times review of George F. Kennan – An American Life: “The debate in America between idealism and realism, which continues to this day, played itself out inside Kennan’s soul. Though he often expressed doubt about the ability of his fellow Americans to grasp the complexity of his perceptions, he also reflected in his own person a very American ambivalence about the nature and purpose of foreign policy.”

Kennan’s personal story is every bit as interesting as his public life. Born in Milwaukee, graduate of Princeton, Kennan joined the U.S. Foreign Service in 1925. He was sent to Moscow 1933 to set up the U.S. embassy when Franklin Roosevelt established diplomatic relations with the Communist regime then headed by Josef Stalin. Kennan traveled extensively, wrote brilliantly and voluminously, mastered several languages, including Russian, and by the late 1930’s was in Berlin watching the world explode.

Back in Moscow in 1946, Kennan authored his famous “long telegram” that brilliantly dissected Russian post-war aims and served as the foundation for the development of his policy of containment.

Kennan came to deeply regret that his notion of containment, basically a willingness to confront the Soviets economically, culturally and with ideas, was perverted into becoming a purely military response. The conclusion of his long telegram stressed his essential belief that U.S. democratic values would eventually win the day against Soviet communist values.

“Finally,” Kennan wrote in 1946 in words that he would repeat time and again over the next half century, “we must have courage and self-confidence to cling to our own methods and conceptions of human society. After all, the greatest danger that can befall us in coping with this problem of Soviet communism, is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.”

Kennan’s approach to diplomacy – we could have used some of his clear thinking before stumbling into Vietnam and blundering into Iraq, two military misadventures that Kennan opposed – was to understand the motivations, the history, the culture, the literature, the fears and hopes of your adversaries and then to apply that knowledge to prevent confrontation. While he admittedly became more of a cynic about politics later in his life, he came back time and again to the belief that western democracies, if they were smart and true to their ideals, could win the battle of ideas with anyone.

Gaddis has written a brilliant biography; a history of the Cold War; a book about one man’s life that illuminates the path along which we came to the world in which we live. I cannot praise this book enough.

 

Air Travel, American Presidents, Andrus, Baseball, Books, FDR, Obama, Politics

Confidence Men

Posted on by christian

No Passion for Anonymity Here

So many things we associate with the modern American presidency, including its imperial nature, where created by Franklin D. Roosevelt nearly 80 years ago. Roosevelt perfected the presidential news conference, used the mass media skillfully and repeatedly, polished the symbols of the office to a new sheen and he invented the modern White House staff and Cabinet machinery.

After reading Ron Suskind’s book Confidence Men over the holidays, a sharply critical assessment of Barack Obama’s first two years in office often fueled by the mistakes of his dysfunctional economic team, I’m betting that the president has quietly cursed FDR for that last invention – the White House staff and Cabinet operation.

The overarching theme of Suskind’s book – a president who can’t or won’t control his own staff is going to have a tough time running the country – is, at its core, an indictment of the modern way of politics in our nation’s capitol. Big egos, retained minds, power for power’s sake and a supreme level of confidence in one’s own view of the world are, in Suskind’s telling, at the heart of the original Obama economic team and its response to the Great Recession.

The two principle (and bad) actors in Suskind’s tale are Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and former Clinton Treasury official Lawrence Summers. Now-Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who was then White House chief of staff, plays a less central role, but still comes off like the opinionated, profane bully that everyone – admirer and not – seems to agree he is. For whatever reasons those unsvaory traits endeared him to the cool, no drama president.

Suskind’s book has had its detractors, including Geithner and the White House press office. Reviewing the 515 page tome in the New York Times, columnist Joe Nocera, a guy who almost always writes with insight and balance about the economy and politics, called the book “bloated” and “reeking of self-importance.” I agree. But Nocera also says the book “is an important addition to the growing library of books about this president. It tells you things — lots of things — that you didn’t know before. Very few of those things reflect well on Obama and his initial team.” I also agree.

Suskind’s book came out last fall at almost the exact time that Joe McGinniss’s much maligned hit piece on Sarah Palin arrived in book stores. Five months later no one is talking about The Rogue, but Confidence Men has lasted, perhaps because the subject is so much more important.

The history of the modern presidency dating back to FDR provides a guide to some of Obama’s missteps. He made two fundamental mistakes in staffing his White House; mistakes of inexperience committed by a rookie perhaps. First, he failed to appreciate that past behavior almost always forecasts future behavior. Summers, a man who had accumulated enemies during his tenure in the Clinton Administration, went from there to Harvard to serve as president and bombed. Summers’ comments about and inability to work with women cost him his job in the Ivy League and he brought, if you believe Suskind, all that baggage to the West Wing of the White House. A sub-theme in Suskind’s book is that the White House is a “boys” domain where Summers and others systematically kept senior women advisers, including current Massachusetts U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, out of the loop as they struggled to right the economy. 

As for Geithner, it’s difficult to think of a more inappropriate choice to help steer the economy out of a housing-inspired collapse fueled by Wall Street greed than the guy who presided over the New York Federal Reserve Bank during the meltdown. There is a chilling account in Suskind’s book of Geithner socially and comfortably rubbing shoulders with his Wall Street friends, while being almost completely uncomfortable with reporters, members of Congress and most of his administration colleagues. You can’t help but wonder what Obama was thinking with this appointment, particularly since he had the full support of people like the tough and independent former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, who would have made a perfect Treasury Secretary in Obama’s early days.

Instead Obama went for big egos, big resumes and big Wall Street connections and Summers and Geithner brought big problems with them.

The second lesson of Obama’s initial years is the importance of discipline and loyalty and by that I don’t mean the blind loyalty of an H.R. Haldeman, but rather the kind of loyalty that requires you, as a White House staffer or Cabinet member, to carry out the boss’s orders or leave. By Suskind’s account, the Obama White House was endlessly “re-litigating” decisions that should have been made and implemented, apparently because guys like Summers and Geithner were convinced they knew more than the president. In short: no discipline, little loyalty.

One of the hotly disputed stories in Confidence Men is Suskind’s detailed reporting on Geithner’s failure to carry out Obama’s ordersto implement an orderly take down of Citibank. Geithner”slow walked” the Treasury process for weeks, according to Suskind, to avoid carrying out a decision that his boss had made. Suskind properly points out that such behavior is a firing offense everywhere but Washington, D.C.

Imagine how Obama’s fortunes might have changed had he called in his Treasury Secretary and told him of his disappointment in Geithner’s failure to carry out a direct order and that the price for that insubordination would be public humiliation and dismissal. A president with steel in his spine – Harry Truman say – would have called a news conference, laid out the story and said as of this moment we have a new acting Treasury Secretary. A public firing is a thing of the past in national politics. It shouldn’t be. In the hands of a young, inexperienced president it was a valuable tool that Obama apparently chose not to wield.

Roosevelt, of course, assembled a White House staff and Cabinet that was far from harmonious. Harold Ickes, the imperious Interior Secretary, warred openly with Henry Wallace the brainy and unconventional Agriculture Secretary. Both of them fought with FDR’s trusted insider Harry Hopkins, but none of these guys ever overshadowed the president. Roosevelt saw too that. Insubordination was not a subtext of Roosevelt’s presidency.

For his White House aides, Roosevelt sought, as it has been famously said, men with “a passion for anonymity.” They were there to serve the president – and the country. The young president seems to have selected men, at least on his economic team, with their own agendas and no passion for serving in his shadow. Obama has now re-shuffled his White House staff to get ready for the re-election battle and a hoped for second term. We’ll see if he’s learned any management lessons from his ragged first term.

Again a Roosevelt comparison is apt. Roosevelt clearly learned on the job in the 1930’s. Repeatedly throughout his presidency, FDR shuffled and re-shuffled his Cabinet and personal staff. Some, like Ickes became indispensable and stayed for the duration, but others like Gen. Hugh Johnson, who controversially headed the National Recovery Administration, and Joe Kennedy, the first SEC chief and Ambassador to Great Britain, were sent packing when their judgment or usefulness came to question. Twice, in 1940 and again in 1944, Roosevelt dumped incumbent vice presidents from the ticket he headed.

FDR managed and led his staff and Cabinet even as he remade the modern presidency. Every president since – including the inexperienced Obama – could learn from his approach that insisted on discipline, loyalty and a firm understanding of just who was in charge.

 

Air Travel, Books

Good Reads

Posted on by christian

Ten Books to End the Year

Still looking for a last minute gift idea? How about a book? It has been a good year for good books.

In no particular order, here are ten that I found memorable during 2011.

1. Train Dreams by Dennis Johnson. This thin, but deeply satisfying little novella is set in northern Idaho and truly captures the mood of the landscape as it must have been in 1920. Johnson’s writing is haunting, spare and beautiful. This is a book that will stick with you.

2. Jack Kennedy by Chris Matthews. The MSNBC host hasn’t written the great biography of the martyred president, but he has written a warm and insightful book about politics and the impact one man can have on the country. A must read for a political junkie.

3. The Killing of Crazy Horse by Thomas Powers. The best single book I’ve ever read about the long, twilight struggle of Native Americans against the relentless westward pressure of white society. The great Sioux warrior is at the center of Powers’ narrative, but this book has the broad sweep of history about it and the story is wonderfully well told.

4. To End All Wars by Adam Hochchild. This is a marvelous account of the First World War told from the perspective of those who opposed the war in Great Britain. You may find, as I did, that you put this book down with a sinking feeling in pit of your stomach. The war that still shapes our world was both tragic and pointless.

5. Midnight Rising by Tony Horowitz. Horowitz, a marvelous storyteller, sets out to rescue the abolitionist firebrand John Brown from the caricature shelf of history. Horowitz puts flesh on Brown’s story and helps us understand why people followed him all the way to the gallows. You’ll come away thinking that the Civil War really began with Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry.

6. Arguably by Christopher Hitchens. This book is a collection of mostly short essays, reviews and columns by the late writer. Hitchens’ depth and range is evidence from first page to last in a big door stop of a book. The writing is superb, the connections remarkable, the sadness that the man is gone hangs on every page of this remarkable collection.

7. In the Garden of the Beasts by Erik Larson. This is the story of the improbable ambassadorship of William Dodd, a university history professor who ended up in Berlin in the 1930’s to witness and report on the consolidation of power by Hitler and his Nazi henchmen. Dodd was little supported by the striped pant set, the career State Department bureaucrats, by enjoyed the confidence of Franklin Roosevelt. You may find yourself scratching your head about the antics of Dodd’s round heeled daughter who at one time or another was engaging in love affairs with a Nazi, a Russian spy and the occasional U.S. and other visitor to Berlin, a place that was a true garden of the beasts.

8. A. J. Liebling: The Sweet Science and Other Writings. Liebling was one of the great reporters of his generation, but mostly unknown now to anyone under 50. This Library of America collection of his writings is a feast of great prose, especially so the pieces on Paris and the scoundrel governor of Louisiana Earl Long.

9. The New Deal: A Modern History by Michael Hiltzik. A financial columnist for the Los Angeles Times, Hiltzik has produced a fresh, critical and highly readable review of the Depression era and the political and policy response of Roosevelt and others. Hiltzik doesn’t stretch to make the point, but skillfully draws the unmistakable parallels that exist from FDR’s administration to Barack Obama’s.

10. And, no list of mine is complete without at least one baseball book. You can do much worse than The House That Ruth Built by Robert Weintraub. The book tells the story of the characters who once owned the New York Yankees (or perhaps more correctly the story of the earliest characters who have always owned the most storied franchise in baseball). The book focuses on 1923 and how the “the big ballpark in the Bronx” came to be just as the Great Ruth hit his stride. Makes me long for spring.

Happy reading and Happy Christmas.

 

Air Travel, Baseball, Books, Giffords, Humanities, Politics

Calvin Trillin

Posted on by christian

Deadline Poet, Funny Guy, Serious Reporter

Calvin Trillin has covered the civil rights movement, produced some of the best long form journalism in recent times for The New Yorker, and written about food, travel and politics.

And oh, yes, he just may be the funniest guy in print in America. He’s coming to Boise next week.

Here is one of Trillin’s latest “Deadline Poems” from the Nation magazine.

Newt’s Surge

The pundits all can confidently speak

Of Gingrich as the flavor of the week.

The people who want anyone but Mitt

Now say, in desperation, Newt is it.

Yes, Newt’s astute – a crafty wheeler-dealer.

His baggage, though, would fill an eighteen-wheeler –

Affairs and ethics problems and, to boot,

His mouth is something often he’ll shoot.

And if he’s scratched because he lacks decorum?

What happens then? Get ready, Rick Santorum.

 

Trillin will present the Idaho Humanities Council’s 15th annual Distinguished Lecture in the Humanities on December 8 at the Boise Centre. Tickets are still available.

Trillin’s humor may be his trademark, but his body of work is truly impressive, including one of his U.S. Journal pieces for the New Yorker written from Boise in 1979. His little book on his late wife – About Alice – will have you laughing on one page and tearing up on the next. It is one of the sweetest pieces of writing you will ever hope to read.

Trillin relates the story of first meeting Alice at a party and pursuing her to another party days later.

“At the second party, I did get to talk to her quite a lot. … Recalling that party in later years, Alice would sometimes say, ‘You have never again been as funny as you were that night.’

“ ‘You mean I peaked in December of 1963?’ I’d say, 20 or even 30 years later.

“ ‘I’m afraid so.’ ”

Many of Trillin’s essays on food are classics of the genre. He once said: “The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.”

He completely subscribes to the sensible notion that the higher the restuarant the more mediocre and costly the food. “I never eat in a restaurant that’s over a hundred feet off the ground and won’t stand still,” he says.

Trillin was Johnny Carson’s guest 30 times on the old Tonight Show and he’s a semi-regular now on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show.

If you want some fun in the company of an American original, order up a dose of Calvin Trillin next week. His latest book – Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin– is a collection of pieces dating back 40 years. It’s funny, profound, literary – all quite like Calvin Trillin.

 

Air Travel, Books

The Paris Wife

Posted on by christian

Summer Reading, Hemingway and Paris

There were times while reading Paula McLain’s novel about Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley Richardson, and their life in that greatest of all cities, that the Paris the two of them inhabited in the 1920’s was a good deal more interesting than either of them were at the time. Of course, it’s hard to outshine Paris – then or now.

McLain’s book has been praised and panned by critics. I see a little of both in the book. The imagined scenes of Ernest and Hadley rubbing elbows with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos and Gertrude Stein lock in an impression of what these talented, but deeply flawed individuals must have been like. The Paris and France that these characters consume is rich and interesting and real.

The same cannot always be said for the love story between the young Hemingway, trying to establish himself as a writer, and the sturdy, mostly sensible Hadley who seems to shrink in significance as her ambitious, demanding husband gains his voice. She was, after all, Hemingway’s starter wife and perhaps a bit old fashioned for the times and the man. As one reviewer notes, Hadley was a “helpmate,” a woman who gave comfort and support to the emerging artist. She was not, as the attractive cover of the book tries to suggests, a fashion maven with sexy ankles.

I was struck reading this novel, which with its flaws; I have nonetheless recommended to friends, that Hemingway’s posthumous memoir – A Moveable Feast – paints a sympathetic portrait of Hadley. Hemingway even admits in that book that losing wife Number One was one of his great mistakes. And Hadley is sympathetic in McLain’s telling; I just wanted her to be a bit more assertive, less willing to accept everything the great man dished her way. Maybe Hemingway also found that he wanted something more than a helpmate when he was coming of age as a writer and then, as he hinted at the end of his life, he came to regret that he never quite again had what Hadley, the Paris wife, had given him when he was too young to know what a gift it was.

The Paris Wife is a good, if not great summer read. If you like Paris and wonder what the 1920’s there must have been like, it’s most worthwhile. The book will pick you up and plunk you down in a different era and permit you to wander there, soaking up the place that, as Hemingway said, will stay with you forever.