My Amazon Review of Jon Meacham's "The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels"

Eternal Vigilance is the Price of Liberty

As I write this review Jon Meacham’s  “The Soul of America” is Number One on the New York Times Bestseller List and deservedly so. This book should be required reading for every Republican member of Congress who is afraid to stand up to Donald Trump. After reading “The Soul of America” they will realize that standing up to him would put them on the side of the greats of American history. Further radical leftists who seem to hate everything about America should read “Soul…” because they will learn that America is a work in progress towards a more perfect union. They will learn that when the chips were down such dead white guys as Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and yes Ronald Reagan did a pretty good job in moving our country forward. Hopefully they will also realize that the multi-cultural America of today brought us Donald Trump.

Meacham tells great stories as to when and how America was going off track, the better angels of our nature took command. For example when slavery divided our land, Lincoln unified it. When a few year later the KKK was running wild, Grant crushed them. I wish Meacham would have done a “might have been” had James Garfield survived his assassination and reinstituted reconstruction. Segregation might have died in its crib in the 1880s instead of waiting until 1954.

Meacham gives credit to both Harding and Coolidge in their defusing the 1920s revival of the KKK. This bit of history is not generally taught. Where Meacham is most acute is his discussion of Huey Long’s challenge to Roosevelt in the 1930s. Here was a politician who understood media and would say practically anything to get attention. Sound familiar. Similarly when much of the country was terrorized by the very media savvy Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith stood up to him and his henchman, Roy Cohn. Although Eisenhower did not act quickly his wait him out strategy worked as McCarthy burned himself out. The link to today is Roy Cohn who mentored Trump in the dark arts in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Meacham also intertwines the stories of Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King in their bringing on the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. He also rightly notes that much of the progress achieved by our leaders were brought about by very active citizen movements giving backbone to our better angels.

I have few criticisms of the book. He rightly notes how Truman’s victory over the segregationist Strom Thurmond in 1948 led to the desegregating of the military. However, had the Republican Tom Dewey won, it probably would have happened anyway. Dewey as governor of New York led the fight for path breaking civil rights legislation. Also although he gives some credit to Lyndon Johnson in his role in passing the 1957 civil rights act, much of the credit should go to Attorney General Herbert Brownell who authored the initial bill that was watered down by Johnson. The lesson here is that there are more than a few better angels among us and they can come from very unexpected places.

So let us hope there are angels in place to lead us away from a president who lies when he is moving his lips and divides us by appealing to our most base instincts. It’s time to get to work as we are called to defend liberty.

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My Amazon Review of Jake Tapper's "The Hellfire Club"

The Deep State

At a time when there is real paranoia about “the deep state” CNN anchor Jake Tapper lends credibility to those charges. Why is he doing it? His book is set in early 1950s Washington where Joe McCarthy reigns and a deep state exists in the form of the Hellfire Club where legislators mix with lobbyists and executive branch members. Members of the club include McCarthy, the Kennedy brothers and the Dulles brothers, truly a bipartisan cabal.

Into this mix comes Charlie Marder, an appointed Congressman a professor out of Columbia University and prior to that a war hero. He is there with his zoologist wife Margaret and we watch her dismay as Charlie’s good intentions sink into the muck of Washington D.C.  We find dead bodies, blackmail, influence peddling and McCarthy getting with his buddy Roy Cohn getting more and more out of control. Above it all stands President Eisenhower who is steering a moderate path amidst the craziness. But make no mistake, the Hellfire Club represents the deep state and it is modeled after an 18^th Century British Club of the same name and purpose.

Tapper has a fine sense for detail about the era and he did his research on the wild ponies of the Maryland shore that Margaret is studying. However as much as he tried the book doesn’t quite hold together and at many time it strains credulity. It seems to me there is more fluff than substance.

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My Amazon Review of William Hitchcock's "The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s"

The Eisenhower 50’s

University of Virginia history professor, William Hitchcock has a written a very sympathetic, and I think accurate, history of the Eisenhower era of 1944 – 1961. I grew up as a child of the era in a middle class apartment neighborhood in Queens. To us the 1950’s was not an era of blandness and racism as liberals would describe it, but rather it was one of hope and optimism. It was truly a time of a broadly shared prosperity. We were well aware of Jim Crow in the South, but every day Jackie Robinson took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers we cheered him on and knew that the world was becoming a better place.

Eisenhower’s opening acts were to make peace in Korea and to stay out of France’s war in Indochina. To be sure his time represented the heyday of the CIA with successful coups in Guatemala and Iran. Further he deftly dealt with Senator Joe McCarthy watching him burn out.

Just before the election of 1956 Eisenhower faced the dual crises of the Hungarian Revolution along with the Anglo-French/Israeli invasion of Egypt during the Suez crisis. Hitchcock calls Eisenhower a realist in failing to intervene in Hungary after the Soviets invade. I am not so sure, The U.S. could have done more. As to the Suez crisis he completely ignored the reason for Israel’s participation. Namely it was a reaction to the Egyptian sponsored fedeyeen raids from the Sinai into Israel attacking civilians. He is too casual in lumping Israel in with Britain and France with respect to motivation.

The Russian launching of their Sputnik satellite in 1957 triggered a major crisis in the administration and led to calls of a missile gap. Although there may have been one in 1957, by 1960 the U.S. had clear military superiority over the Russians with the development of the Atlas, Titan, Minuteman and Polaris missiles. The missile gap that JFK talked of in 1960 was a myth.

Throughout his administration Eisenhower concentrated his efforts on building up U.S. strategic forces and trying to reach a modus vivendi with the Soviets. He tried with a Summit meeting in 1954 and tried again with the planned summit meeting in 1960. That summit blew up when Eisenhower was caught lying about the failed U-2 over-flight mission over the Soviet Union. Here Hitchcock is particularly acute in going through the “tick-tock” of the entire episode.

One of the heroes of the book is Attorney General Herbert Brownell who was leading the charge on civil rights. It is here where Hitchcock differs from Caro in his telling of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. According to Caro Johnson was the prime mover, but according to Hitchcock it is Johnson who so waters down the bill to make it far less relevant. Remember the Senate was voting on the Eisenhower Administration’s bill. It is also here that Hitchcock makes an error in recounting that it took 60% of the Senate to over-ride a filibuster. That is true today, but in 1957 it took 67%.

Although many historians are critical of Eisenhower’s slow walking civil rights in the 1950s. Hitchcock rightly notes that Eisenhower used federal troops to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957 and was vilified throughout the south. Kennedy was no different as he also slow walked civil rights until 1963.

Hitchcock notes that Eisenhower leaves Kennedy with crises in Laos and Cuba where a CIA sponsored invasion is on the offing. Unfortunately Kennedy got caught up in the momentum of the moment with disastrous results. But that all takes place prior to Eisenhower’s farewell address where he warns of the power accumulating in the military-industrial complex he largely created.

All told William Hitchcock has offered a terrific history of the era and foreign policy of the Eisenhower Administration. I highly recommend it for both lay and professional readers.

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