End of the Year Reconciliation

I went silent, didn't I?  I can pretend it was because I wrote too much at work that I didn't want to come home and write more.  Or I can say that since I was reading intertwined biographies, I couldn't truly assess one until I completed all.  But these excuses are camouflage.

But other things impinged on my dedication to keeping the blog up to date.  Most are now resolved, others have become the new reality, the most prominent being that I am now retired three weeks.  Time to read all day long if I feel like it, just have to feel more like writing summaries of those efforts.

So rather than trying to compose something unique and insightful for each book I have plowed through these past several months, let me write about them in a more comprehensive compare and contrast essay, like school.

I don't remember which Hollywood actor said when questioned about the President responded "read history."  That's what I have been doing in order to accrue some perspective on presidential talents, or lack thereof, and also other biographies that illustrate the characteristics of leadership.

After reading Chernow's Hamilton, I read his two books Titan on J D Rockefeller and House of Morgan on JP.  Titan was the more interesting of the two.  JD, especially in his earlier years, was a perfect example of an entrepreneur before that was a common term.  Chernow focuses on his upbringing, family tensions, and religious beliefs to explain later corporate and charitable actions.  On balance, he does not seems as diabolical, money-grubbing and nasty as common lore portrays him.

JP Morgan is personally not as interesting as Rockefeller.  I read that book in part because one of my employees worked for years at Morgan and as a history of an organization and the American financial markets, it was superb.  Finance was of course Chernow's crucible.

After hearing him speak in Chancellor's Hall where he announced to the audience his next book would be on Grant, I patiently awaited until Amazon let me pre-order and then plowed through another of his tomes.  Like with Rockefeller, Chernow shows Grant as the outgrowth of his family and his early failures.  Those constraints and determinants make his successes in battle all the more superhuman.  They also are the basis with which Chernow attributes the bad decisions he made when choosing advisers when President: the naive belief that his chosen friends were all honest and that those relationships would never be used for personal gain.

Because I enjoyed the descriptions of the Civil War in Grant so much, I read Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals about Lincoln and his cabinet members.  Goodwin's writing style makes Chernow seem stiff and aloof.  Her interpretation of the events and people around the Civil War are a wonderful contrast of perspective and preferences.  I ended up liking the book more than I thought I would given its Torah like reverence in the last administration but these definitely are two books that a graduate history professor would make back to back required reading for such a compare and contrast exercise.

Now we arrive at the end of November, Thanksgiving week, when my daughter-in-law is here from Texas and buys me two of the three Edmund Morris tomes on Teddy Roosevelt.  So even though I feel like I am preparing for a final exam on American presidents, TR would not have been next in my queue but for Emily.  Thank you thank you.  Volume one is a page burner.  This is the book that makes me want to sit and read all day long.  When I get up every now and then, I report out that I am now with him in the State Capitol, on San Juan Hill, in Saratoga.

Unfortunately, Em got volume 1 and 3 and I am dead in the water waiting for Theodore Rex to arrive in the mail, having ended volume 1 with his election to the presidency.  I was forced last night to pick up a cast off volume on President Jackson, American Lion, which reads like an Austen novel of social status and gaffes.  I needed to backtrack to answer the question, Who the hell was Margaret Eaton and why did all of DC care?  This book does not read like the others, a reprise of government, politics and economics over a powerful man's lifetime.  It reads like a 19th century novel on village sexual foibles.  Why would Trump say he wants to be remembered as Jacksonian?  I'd rather be measured against TR's 38 published books rather than Trump's 38,000 tweets.

Let me say a bit more about what I unexpectedly have come to like and envy about Teddy.  It all comes down to his hyper drive, his perpetual motion, energy and brains.  It seems impossible to fill in each day with such meaningful, productive and insightful actions as he did daily.  His prodigious literary output has been probably my motivation to write this morning.

My preliminary conclusions after this self-directed course in the American Presidency is that the country had in at least these instances the man of the hour, the right person in the office.  (The sidebars especially in TR about his opinions of Cleveland and McKinley remind me that they were not all giants.)  The pachinko machine that sorts out leadership in high office is still blinking for the current incumbent; we've really had a string of "tilts" and "do-overs" lately, haven't we