My Amazon Review of Julian Jackson's "De Gaulle"

France Incarnate

UK history professor Julian Jackson has written a very long (928 pages in the print edition) and very extraordinary biography of Charles De Gaulle. Born into a conservative middle-class family De Gaulle found his way to the St.-Cyr military academy. After serving in World War I, part of the time as a POW, De Gaulle became what we would now call a defense intellectual. He was way ahead of his time in his advocacy of tank warfare in 1934 that would be more fully developed by Heinz Guderian with his “Achtung-Panzer!” that was used with devastating effect against France in 1940.

De Gaulle saw up close the rot of the Third Republic and lost patience for representative government. It was by the force of his will that after the French surrender he formed the beginnings of the Free French while in exile in London. There he had to hold together a disparate coalition of his own countryman and defend French interests against Churchill and Roosevelt. Needless to say he exasperated his allies especially after Churchill gave him the go ahead for him to deliver his June 18, 1940 radio speech that made him the voice of France. To say that De Gaulle was egotistical, prickly and obstinate would be an understatement.   

De Gaulle initially fails as a postwar leader in 1945, but with France on the edge of civil war in 1958 over the Algeria issue, France’s elected representatives turn to him to lead the country. His constitution creates a strong executive and ends the series of round-robin governments that haunted France in the Third and Fourth Republics. Jackson’s tick-tock on the events of winter and spring 1958 brings to life what was at stake at that time. Similarly his tick-tock on the 1968 student/worker demonstrations that almost forced De Gaulle from power demonstrates the high drama of that time.

Jackson’s De Gaulle is a serious and widely read intellectual. He is the ultimate political realist who believes that geography and history, not ideology, determines geopolitical power.  Hence his suspicion of the U.K. and of the Jean Monnet vision of a united Europe. Jean Monnet

We also see De Gaulle as a family man with a very shy wife and his Down syndrome daughter, Ann, who he loved very much. We also see his personal rectitude where he installs an electric meter to monitor his personal use when he was in residence at the presidential palace.

Yes, the book is long, but a reader with patience will learn a great deal about a person who dominated France for 30 years and exerted significant influence internationally during the turbulent 1960s.

For the full amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R1VAD1K7VY7TVT/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of Ian Kershaw's "The Global Age: Europe 1950-2017"

From Renewal to Decline

After giving a rave review to Ian Kershaw’s “To Hell and Back” three years ago, I was looking forward this sequel on the history of Europe from 1950- 2017. Unfortunately I was somewhat disappointed. Perhaps it is difficult for historians to write about events they lived through, and like him I lived through many of the events he discusses.

In 1950 Europe was in ruins and the nuclear sword of Damocles was hanging over the continent by the American and Soviet super powers. The Marshall Plan was just beginning to take effect and it remained to be seen whether or not a real recovery would take place. Twenty years later Western Europe was largely booming and in the east a drab poverty was the rule of the day.

To Kershaw Europe’s great success during that period was the establishment of the welfare state. To me, on the other hand, the great achievement was placing the economy largely on a market-oriented footing that enabled the boom. Here much credit goes to the German economic miracle.

Kershaw is a child of 1968, but never mentions his own role in the youthful cultural and political revolution that took place then. He was 25 at the time. Although I experienced 1968 in America it is my understanding that far from being separate, the cultural revolution was part and parcel with the political revolution. Even the most serious of politicos of the day we caught up in sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll.  Nevertheless Kershaw rightly states that to the youth in the East, the western revolutionaries were clueless had had no idea how repressive a state could be. In other words they were spoiled children.

Kershaw gives great credit to Gorbachev in ending the Cold War Personality is important, just as the roles of Hitler, Stalin and Churchill were important in his earlier volume He also rightly gives credit to German prime minister Helmut Kohl However, he fails to credit the very deft handling of bringing about the end of the Cold War to the Bush-Baker team in the U.S.

He is way too critical of Margaret Thatcher’s harsh neo-liberalism. In my opinion Thatcher saved Britain by being Churchillian in reorganizing the economy for economic growth. Kershaw is way too concerned about the collateral damage, but to paraphrase the master builder Robert Moses, “you have to break eggs in order to make an omelet.  

Although the E.U. started with great promise, its survival is open to question. The first failure was its lack of intervention in the Yugoslavian Wars, a humanitarian disaster that required U.S. military force and diplomacy to bring it to an end. The E.U. failed to listen to the anti-immigrant stirrings in the late 1990s that would come to a full boil in 2015. To all too many Europeans the E.U. is being run for the elite by a group of nameless and faceless bureaucrats. That is one reason why the U.K. wants to leave. Kershaw is part of that elite. And to top it off, Europe remains unwilling to fund its own defense.

He rightfully calls out unregulated finance capitalism to for causing the 2008 financial crisis. Although the crisis had its origins in the U.S., Wall Street was aided and abetted by greedy European banks chasing yield. Further, while the U.S. required its banks to recapitalize, Europe did not. Hence the crisis lingers today where negative interest rates are becoming normal.

I don’t think Kershaw was harsh enough on the communist governments of the East. I was in East Berlin and Moscow in the spring of 1990. The contrast between East and West Berlin was striking. Simply put the West was alive and the East was dead. In Moscow such common drug store items as Bayer Aspirin and Tampax was not available even for upper middle income consumers.

I have two other quibbles he leaves out data on the collapse in birthrates across Europe, especially in the East, Italy and Spain. That is evidence of the lack of a future orientation and it will make the welfare state promises made to elderly untenable. Lastly he completely leaves out the rise of antisemitism, the scourge of Europe in his first volume.  It is not only coming from the far right, but we see it in the Moslem immigrants and in Britain’s Labour Party.

Despite my criticisms, Kershaw has given us a very usable history of how modern Europe came into being and for that he deserves credit.

For the full amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R1AIX5VT8R7ZF4/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of Michael A. Cohen's "American Maelstrom: The 1968 Election and the Politics of Division"

America on the Brink of a Nervous Breakdown

Boston Globe columnist Michael A. Cohen has written a very engaging history of the 1968 presidential race and why it matters today. To me it is very personal as I remember voting for Bobby Kennedy in the California Democratic primary via absentee ballot while in the U.S. Army and my wife to (unknown to me at the time) was a student volunteer for him during the Indiana primary. America was under siege facing an unwinnable war in Vietnam with casualties mounting, the cities ablaze as a consequence of the assassination of Martin Luther King and ongoing campus demonstrations against the war which were extended to the riots at the Democratic Convention.  America was truly on the brink of a nervous breakdown.

Into this milieu comes the presidential campaign which is set afire by the unexpected withdrawal from the race by President Lyndon Johnson. Cohen’s dramatis personae are on the Democratic side Eugene McCarthy, Bobby Kennedy, George Wallace (running as an independent) and Hubert Humphrey and on the Republican side Richard Nixon, George Romney, Ronald Reagan and Nelson Rockefeller. Although Cohen is a liberal and is dismayed by some of the failures of Johnson’s Great Society which were apparent as early as 1966, he by and large treats his subject even handedly. In fact of all of the candidates the careful and calculating Richard Nixon comes off the best. He quotes at length Nixon’s acceptance speech at the Republican convention which if given today would be viewed as a breath of fresh air in a much polluted political environment. Further the 1968 convention was another stop on the road to the demise of what was once called liberal Republicanism.

We see in the Democratic primaries the forerunner of today’s Democratic Party which is an amalgam of the elitist liberals and students who backed Eugene McCarthy and the African American and Hispanic voters who backed Bobby Kennedy. It was the white working class, which at the time was the core of the Democratic Party, who were thrown under the bus. They would at first be become Wallace voters as a weigh station on their way to the Republican Party of Nixon and Reagan.

People tend to forget that Wallace running as an independent with a coalition of southern segregationists and white working class voters was running very strong in September 1968 garnering over 20% of the preferences as measured by the pollsters, but his nomination of General Curtis “Nuke” Lemay scared off planeloads of voters reducing his Election Day share to 13.5%. It is important to note four years later, Wallace was on the verge of winning the Democratic nomination. On the day he was shot he was the big winner in both the Maryland and Michigan primaries. In many respects he was the Donald Trump of his day with a brand of white working class populism.

Thus we see in 1968 the breakdown of the New Deal coalition of southern segregationists, urban workers and liberal intellectuals into ultimately a new party of liberal intellectuals, African Americans, Hispanics and a menagerie of identity politics interests. Although still there in name, the white working class voters have moved on. Where they were once the core of the party, they are now on the periphery.

In contrast the Republicans picked up the southern segregationists, much of the white working class and lost their liberal bloc as typified by Nelson Rockefeller. Remember the classic “limousine liberal” was the Republican mayor of New York, John Lindsay.

Cohen has very acute descriptions of the arrogance of Eugene McCarthy, the hold Johnson had over Humphrey, George Romney’s lack of depth, the ego of Nelson Rockefeller and the fact that Bobby Kennedy, the sainted liberal hero of today, ran to the right of McCarthy. In fact Cohen notes that Reagan spoke approvingly of Kennedy. Thus I view “American Maelstrom” as a very readable and important work of history. 

The full Amazon URL is:

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