Today’s TTT is books on our summer reading list; as I normally do, I’m going to look back at the last quarterly TBR to see how I did. As it turns out, I batted .500 again! The ones I missed were a Cory Doctorow title on the internet getting worse, a book on black baseball in Alabama, GIRLS, a biography of Polk, and “something by Annie Jacobsen”. But first, the tease!
“How are you, Lyndon?” the physician inquired, as the boy dramatically writhed in pain. “Oh, I’m killed! I’m killed!” Lyndon cried. When the doctor suggested administering a “shot” for pain, his young patient’s hysterics escalated: “Oh, please doctor, don’t shoot me! I want to live awhile longer!” BAD BLOOD: LBJ, RFK, AND THE TUMULTUOUS 1960s. Jeffrey Smith.
Ten Books on my Summer TBR
(1) GIRLS, Freya India. I support her brilliant substack and ordered the book, so I definitely plan on reading this.It’s a reflection by a Gen-Z woman on the commodification of girlhood — how growing up on social media made them turn themselves into brands. Her writing is really good and I’m sure I’ll love the book once I can escape the clutches of Mr. Nixon & Mr. Kennedy.
(2) Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner. Working away at this one.
(3) Inventing a Nation, Gore Vidal
(4) Bad Blood, Jeffrey Smith. RFK vs LBJ. I’ll have a review posted for this one before the week is out. It’s a fast read and I’m so familiar with the context at this point that I recognize practically all the quotes being pulled.
(5) Rupture, Regina Kay. Dark urban fantasy, I think. Outside my usual range, and definitely outside the scope of my current obsession, but it’s a debut book from a friend.
(6) Black Baseball in Alabama: Rough Diamonds of Dixie, Shane Earnest. Somewhat similar, but in this case baseball and local history are definitely in my wheelhouse. The only reason I haven’t started this yet is because because 2026 is The Year of Presidents, apparently.
(7) End of the Road: Inside the War on Truckers, Gord McGill. This is of both personal and academic interest to me; my family is full of OTR drivers, including my father, and I love reading about transportation. McGill writes on Substack at Autonomous Truckers.
(8) Communion, J.D. Vance. A memoir of coming back to Christianity via the Catholic Church. I should preface this by saying I readHillbilly Elegy back in 2016, well before J.D. was a politician, let alone the vice president, so I’m reading this out of personal interest in the man and his story rather than as a politician: my personal interest is redoubled by the fact that I have a fascination with Catholicism that dates back to 2011 and which persists today. Although I worship in a different communion, Catholic authors and priests account for the overwhelming majority of my Christian formation. It helps, of course, that a strong part of my own conversion to Christianity involved Communion or the Eucharist.
(9) Vendetta: Bobby Kennedy vs Jimmy Hoffa, James Neff.
I’ve wanted to read this since seeing Jack Nicholson playing Jimmy Hoffa giving RFK as righteous telling-off in HOFFA.
(10) Six Crises, Richard Nixon. A pre-presidential memoir. Chatgpt suggests that this may not be a healthy choice for someone trying to escape dead presidents. I actually had a dream a few weeks ago that I met Nixon in a back-country dive bar and we talked aboutIke and Dick as he shook his head ruefully.
As the Eisenhower administration began drawing to a close and a new decade loomed, America had a choice: stay the course, or shake things up? Although JFK would claim in his 1961 inaugural that the torch had been passed to a new generation, in truth his three successors were all from an older one. Two of those men vied with him in 1960, the race of which is plumbed in depth here. It covers not only JFK, LBJ, and Nixon, but also men like Hubert Humphrey, Adlai Stevenson, and Nelson Rockefeller, with varying degrees of details. While it gets into the weeds of JFK canvassing precinct by precinct, readers also experience the campaign through the culture, and the events of 1960 that shaped it — like the new role played by television, or Frank Sinatra’s love of Kennedy that took him off the campaign trail when he realized his mob buddies might present bad optics for Jack.Political wonks will love the detail, but casual readers should be warned that the early history, focusing on Kennedy working the primaries, is a bit of a slog with all the personalities involved.
Given how many books I’ve read recently that touched on the 1960 election, I was fairly familiar with the book’s broad topic going in. I was wholly unfamiliar with men like Stevenson and Rockefeller, though, and enjoyed my introduction, though Rockefeller and Nixon’s eventual VP pick Henry Cabot Lodge both impaired Nixon to varying degrees. (Lodge promised a black cabinet member at the same time that Nixon and JFK were trying to court both the Southern establishment and the black vote — a very fine needle to thread!). I was impressed by JFK as a campaigner; though his father’s money gave him considerable advantages, both in advertising and in mobility (JFK had a private plane, allowing him to blitz across the state while his frustrated competitors were stuck motoring through often awful roads and worse weather), the young prince was determined to connect with the people. He made a joke of his monied status rather than trying to be something he wasn’t, and his charisma allowed him to woo rough West Virginia miners as readily as he did squealing teenage girls in New York. Kennedy’s status as a Catholic (however nominal) is a recurring issue here, as the US was still a very Protestant nation suspicious of political Catholicism; part of Kennedy’s challenge was to sideline the ‘religious issue’, and one way was to use the well-practiced policy of accusing anyone who dislikes their candidate of being a bigot/sexist/racist/etc. The religious issue could also be used for laughs: when Harry Truman said that Nixon voters could go to Hell, JFK wired him and commented that he’d rather not raise ‘the religious issue’.
Another recurring part of this book is JFK trying to win over the older Democratic establishment, particularly Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry Truman; Roosevelt much preferred older candidates, and Truman appears to have only voted for Kennedy because he claimed Nixon had called him a Communist. (In other books, I’ve seen Nixon being critical of Truman’s administration for being soft on communism, and even claim that Truman had fellow travelers in his Cabinet.) The book also includes well known campaign events like the first TV debate, in which Nixon appeared pale and sweaty — this didn’t just owe to makeup, though. Nixon had only recently gotten out of the hospital and then run himself ragged doing a driving campaign, whereas JFK had deliberately taken days off to rest and prepare.
Nixon had an ostensibly easier time of campaigning; he didn’t have to bother with a primary battle, and had the ‘advantage’ of being the incumbent. Eisenhower wasn’t an enthusiastic campaigner for his would-be successor, at least not until late in the campaign when the Kennedy clan mocked him for bringing in Ike as a last resort. Being the quasi-incumbent also had its disadvantages; while their policies don’t appear to me have differed much, Kennedy presented a young, fresh face against Nixon’s more tired one. One element about Nixon that I still don’t understand is why he was so actively disliked by the media and establishment : they act as though he was the devil incarnate when at this point in his career he’d done nothing dodgy. Different books suggest it was Nixon going after Alger Hiss, a member of the DC set, but that doesn’t quite satisfy me. Was he a tough campaigner? Sure, but so were the Kennedy boys — mailing anti-Catholic ads to Catholic households to get out the Catholic vote. As the author remarks, it wasn’t as though Nixon and Kennedy were that different as politicians, but JFK wore it better. He made politics feel idealistic even if his means were not, whereas Nixon and Johnson were more transparent in being manipulators of a political machine.
1960: JFK vs LBJ vs Nixon was a thorough history of a campaign that would strongly shape American history — putting JFK and then LBJ into the White House, and stirring up the energy that would develop into the Bay of Pigs, the Moon Shot, and Vietnam. It was a time when much was changing, including the role of primaries in national elections. This was a largely entertaining take on that election, though more casual readers may be overwhelmed by its detail.
As a sidenote: I was very much amused by how many people regarded RJK as a condescending jerk, even people who worked for him.
Quotations
“Joe Kennedy,” recalled Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, who would succeed JFK in that same congressional seat, “spent $300,000 on that race which was six times what I spent in a very tough congressional campaign . . . six years later.” A frustrated Mike Neville pinned a ten-dollar bill to his shirt pocket and dubbed it his Kennedy campaign button.
JFK proposed to be no timeserver, no mere Eisenhower caretaker or Stevenson pontificator. He would be the action hero of politics, the embodiment of an up-and-coming generation, too impatient for power and, yes, glory, to wait any longer in line. In the process, he would transform the nation’s politics. “America’s politics,” Norman Mailer would write in an article for Esquire in 1960, “would now be America’s favorite movie.”
And, yet, how many of the premier politicians of that era proved much better, more principled? Perhaps a Taft or a Humphrey. Certainly not an LBJ careening from left to right to left again with each change of his constituencies. And certainly not JFK, who remarked, quite frankly and quite obviously, “We were interested not so much in the ideas of politics as in the mechanics of the whole thing.” No, it wasn’t Dick Nixon’s ideological “flexibility” that separated him from his peers—it was his pronounced lack of charm in displaying that flexibility.
Once asked to reply to a British journalist’s comment that her surly husband appeared “like a Sioux brave about to take a scalp,” RFK’s wife (and mother of his eleven children) Ethel responded with a touch of humor—and truth: “Why should I, since he generally is about to be?”
And RFK remained very much a fanatically loyal McCarthyite—if not to the crusade, at least to the crusader. When Joe McCarthy died in May 1957, a distraught Bobby shuttered his Senate office for an hour. “I want to do this,” he wept. “It was the only time I had ever seen tears in his eyes,” recalled Bobby’s personal secretary.
“You can trample all over [Jack] and the next day he’s there for you with loving arms. But Bobby’s my boy,” boasted Joe to Tip O’Neill. “When Bobby hates you, you stay hated.”
While a father struggled to pay for a daughter’s wedding, favored son Jack Kennedy had everything bought for him. “I got a wire from my father:” he informed audiences. “‘Dear Jack: Don’t buy another vote, I’ll be damned if I’ll pay for a landslide.’” Hubert Humphrey wasn’t laughing.
“Did you hear the news?” a mocking LBJ inquired of Minnesota Republican congressman Walter Judd, himself a medical doctor. “What news?” “Jack’s pediatricians have just given him a clean bill of health!”
“Ninety per cent of this press corps,” contended Chicago Tribune correspondent Willard Edwards, “which ranged between 50 and 100 at various periods in the campaign, were all-out supporters of Kennedy. They were not only opposed to Nixon, they were outspoken in their hatred and contempt of him . . . it was loud and open.
Aided by H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman and a new recruit to his inner circle, Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon moved to shut down John Kennedy’s Vietnam War but not Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society (“We get the action,” crowed GOP liberal Hugh Scott, “and the conservatives get the rhetoric”).
That last one elicited some bitter laughter from me — boy, that’s one thing that’s never changed.
President Richard Nixon was a sweetie-pie who wrote letters so tender to Jackie Kennedy she cried, and she wrote him gracious letters back. The idea of Nixon being sweet and caring does not sit easily with modern readers, but that is one of the slow-blooming fruits of studying Nixon. What a piece of work is man — and what a piece of work was Nixon, this glowering political strategist whose fears and paranoias destroyed a career of absolute accomplishment. This lonely, distressed introvert who could beam like the Sun during a baseball game, who could exchange fire with the secret service — “The sonabitch is in here tying his shoes!” — and who could write lovely letters to a woman whose very soul was bleeding — he is the man we love to hate, and yet….he was a man, an enormously complicated man whose virtues and vices held hands and ushered him into history for good or ill. Kennedy and Nixon is a joint biography of two men who entered Congress together, who debated politics on train rides together, whose politics were not that different — and yet who were rivals. Yet they were more than rivals; Kennedy’s ease and charisma were envied by Nixon, and even as Nixon struggled against the Kennedy family for control of politics, he couldn’t help but admire Jack Kennedy. There was a delicious longing in Nixon to be more like Jack — to be loved, to have that ease with the people. This was quite the book.
This is not a book I would have read before this year, in large part because I regarded JFK as admirable mostly in his ability to make speeches, and I had no idea how interconnected the lives of these men were. Seeing teases of their relationship in other books, though — their debating on trains, their having offices across the hall from one another, their very similar Cold Warrior approaches and more ‘moderate’ domestic policies — intrigued me. American history typically treats Nixon as a villain, but the more I read him the more compelling he becomes. Yes, I can see his faults, his most grievous faults, and yet I keep finding a man who is unexpectedly gracious, unexpectedly courageous. He’s going to dominate this review, and I’m not sorry: JFK has no shortage of writers who lionize him, because he was genuinely inspirational. He was a war hero and a man who faced off against Khrushchev time and again and spurred America on to the moon — but part of me suspects his memory is so grand in the American imagination because he was shot, because he died young and tragically with a weeping wife trying to collect pieces of his skull from the back of a sedan. Dick Nixon didn’t get that opportunity, though he’s quoted in this book as alluding that he very well might have. Someone said that if so and so had done his TV make up in the first Nixon-JFK debate, he might be president; Nixon responded that he also might have been dead. Oswald, with his weird fetish for Castro’s Cuba, would have knocked off one Cold Warrior as easily as another.
Half the book covers Nixon and Kennedy’s rise together; Nixon outstrips Kennedy at first, but ultimately its JFK who comes from behind in his own private moonshot. What strikes me most is how really similar both men were as far as policies; they were close enough that they could swap sides when not in power. Nixon as Ike’s VP caught fire for Eisenhower not being aggressively enough anti-communist (he contemplated nuking Korea, people, what else do you want?), but once Nixon was just a lawyer it was he who could return fire against a JFK whose desire to stop Communism had to be tempered by responsibility. Where they differed almost seems a question of character: Kennedy was young, aspirational, inspiring — Nixon serious and glowering. When they began debating, Nixon was advised to “kill the assassin image” that resulted from his zealous prosecution of the suspected Communist traitor Alger Hiss: Nixon intentionally soft-pedaled on Kennedy, even agreeing with him — it didn’t help that Nixon genuinely admired and liked Jack. When Kennedy was struggling with severe back issues, Nixon told him that he could use Nixon’s ceremonial office just off the Senate, rather than having to struggle from his own office.
Ultimately, regard for the Kennedys’ charisma and political tactics would drive Nixon to poison his career: after being convinced that he’d been done in by dirty tricks, particularly potential mob influence in Chicago and the federal government spying on him on behalf of Kennedy, Nixon was increasingly willing to engage in dirty tricks of his own. That opened the road to Watergate and ruin. Even after Kennedy was shot, the Kennedys continued to haunt Nixon through RFK and then Ted Kennedy. A lot of the last quarter of this book focuses on Nixon’s increasing paranoia, linked to RFK and Ted’s aspirations, that the Beltway was out to get him. They were, but the means he chose to combat them were ultimately his undermining. One of the book’s more interesting elements is the inclusion of transcripts which show Nixon’s obsession with finding out how much the state had been spying on him — something that was in fact happening (this only recently revealed), and led to him making the decision to bug offices and entertain the idea of doing break-ins to find information that was being withheld from him.
This was a fascinating book to spend a few weeks with: it goes a long way to showing how wonderfully human Nixon was, but how sad his ejection from grace was. As a joint biography, it works wonderfully not because of the men’s rivalry, but because of the men. The book presents Nixon neither as hero nor villain, but as a profoundly human figure: ambitious, gracious, insecure, courageous, resentful, and often undone by his own fears. His fall from grace feels all the more tragic because his achievements were so substantial and his better qualities so evident. Kennedy remains the more naturally inspirational figure, but Nixon emerges as the more complicated—and perhaps more compelling—man.
Today’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is, “Something to know before visiting my country or city”.
Well, for starters, don’t come between May and October because most of the year we endure the Great Sticky Siege. As regards Selma specifically, my ladyfriend probably started giggling because she knows exactly what I’m going to say, because I have an entire rant about it, but I’m going to surprise her and say this: people visit purely for Civil Rights history, which is valid given our role in it, but Selma has a history which is far deeper and richer than 1960s politics. Selma is one of Alabama’s few original river towns to survive into the modern day, along with Montgomery; the rest, like St. Stephens, Claiborne, and Old Cahawba, all died. This owed in part to its geographical advantage: it’s a high bluff on the Alabama river in the middle of Alabama’s richest farming soil, and until the 1920s that meant it commanded agriculture commerce. Everything came to us, and then it went elsewhere. First by rivers, then by rails. Railroads obsessed Selma’s civic and business leaders after the War. The town assumed signal importance during the Civil War, being burned in the last week of the conflict, but rebounded to become so influential that at one time, both of Alabama’s US Senators hailed from here. Then came cars and highways and — well. We missed the interstate bus, and now we’re struggling to find our way in the new world. We have an impressive architectural heritage that could rival Natchez if we received cruise lines like they do. The Alabama river is so dammed up, though, we’ll have to find another way.
WWW Wednesday
WHAT have you finished reading recently? Five Days in November, Kennedy and Nixon, and SHELLI: R-Evolution. The latter releases in a few days but I read an advance copy sent to me by the author. Review for K&N is done but I’m still in ‘edit and ponder’ mode. (Happy City was in edit-and-ponder mode for several years, but I’m fairly sure K&N will be posted tomorrow.)
WHAT are you reading now? Still Angle of Repose. One of my church members said to me Sunday, “Stephen! We need to have a Wallace Stegner chat.” He was disappointed that I hadn’t finished it yet (give me time people, do you realize how many books I want to hoover up?)
WHAT are you reading next? The Rupture, Regina Kay. Dark fantasy release from a friend. I can’t even say “dark fantasy isn’t really my thing” because I’ve literally read three and a half dark fantasy westerns by Rhett C. Bruno and Jaime Castle.
A corrupted memory with daddy issues. This job gets weirder all the time.
An experimental incubator synth, with high-octane empathy protocols, has just run off with a baby. The baby is due to be delivered soon, but it appears this unit has become attached to the baby she’s carried for so many months; she’d rather die than lose the infant. What happens next shocks both Jake and his synth partner, an illegal organic-synth bybrid named Shelli, and turns into quite a SF adventure. Imagine two partners who are given reason that they can’t trust one another’s minds, that the past has been made plastic, that things have been done which cannot be undone — and that a simple case of an apparently neurotic synth will lead to high-stakes action in the heart of DC.
The problem with reviewing some thrillers is that the twists are high-voltage enough that they will break through a simple precise. We begin with a simple incident; Shelli is not satisfied with appearances, and she wants to dig deeper. After certain evidence details bring an old case to mind, both Jake and Shelli are disturbed to realize that all records of the case are gone. In hopes of figuring out what’s happening, they go to Florida to visit the former case manager, but he gives Jake — and Jake alone — a dire warning. Drop this. There are things waiting in this Pandora’s box that should not be unleashed. Because Jake is warned about involving Shelli specifically, he goes alone, and (as one does when probing into cold cases everyone wants to remain dead as the grave) gets into trouble, and things steadily escalate. What makes the tension all the more sweeter is that at one point the reader will realize things the main characters cannot; it begins as a blip of “Huh, that’s strange” and steadily overtakes the plot.
I can’t say anything further without violating spoiler protocols, but R-Evolution contains all of Brode’s strengths from this series. Shelli is innately interesting; her bond with Jake is complex. The near-future setting allows readers to settle into a feeling of ‘the world mostly as you know it, but with synths’, and so the disasters that threaten are more real in a way than SF works that deal with wholly imagined cities and entities. Jake is grounded in the law enforcement bureaucracy of our world, just — in some near future. At the same time, this isn’t simply an action SF novel with robots; in the tradition of SF, it touches on philosophy — particularly, autonomy and sentience. While reading it, Firefly’s Serenity came to mind, as did TNG’s “Measure of a Man”. R-Evolution also touches on political philosophy, and in a way that is deliciously timed for America’s 250. Was it intentional? I have no idea, but for readers like myself who have been revisiting the American Revolution in history this year — who have sat in Independence Hall and listened (or read) Mr. Dickinson and Mr. Adams arguing whether or not our rights are inherent or fabricated, if they were writ in the soul rather simply in government edicts — it’s compelling in ways beyond “how do we stop this bad thing that is happening”. And yet at the same time, it remains Shelli’s story — Shelli, the synth who captures synths who misbehave; Shelli, the synth who became a human hybrid; Shelli, who like R. Daneel Olivaw has to live every second trying to figure out where she stands vis a vis humanity — and what she owes it, and to synths.
Great continuation of this series. I can’t believe we’re closing the sixth month of 2026 and this is only my first SF read, but hopefully the rest will be comparable!
SHELLI: R-Evolution will be released on June 19th, 2026.
Quotations
“Together again,” Jake said, sitting on a stack of boxes in the back of a utility van. “And traveling in style.” Shelli stood, statuesque, ignoring the vehicle’s unsteady motion. “Infiltrating 2Morrow Dynamics without being detected is the goal. The aesthetics were not my concern.”
Shelli had calculated the precise amount of speed and strength required to knock _________ down without causing permanent damage. However, despite her promise, she had enjoyed it.
“I’ve read your file. You’re no killer.” “Was that profile written before or after I became a father?”
“Jack, oh Jack! What have they done?” – Jacqueline Kennedy
In his memoir of working in the Secret Service, Within Arm’s Reach, Dan Emmett said that he was inspired by seeing an agent on television jump onto the presidential convertible during the JFK assassination to join the service. That agent was Clint Hill. Five Days in November is his memoir of JFK’s fatal trip to Texas, the family’s crushed return home to Washington, and the nation saying goodbye to its 35th executive. It is written by a man clearly haunted by the fact that he could have, should have, done more, despite any reader familiar with the details knowing otherwise. The memoir is rich in photos, including shots I’ve never seen before — like a rear shot of Jackie and the kids watching the funeral from the Truman Balcony — and is often moving. Obviously there are moments like little Jack saluting his father — a move he’d been practicing for an Armistice Day visit weeks before — but Jackie and Caroline kneeling at JFK’s casket and kissing the flag was also powerful. More than anything, though, this memoir drove home the close connection between JFK and JBK despite his frequent adultery, and how much he appreciated her own celebrity. The early days of this are full of him joking that they’d all come to see her, not him. While more appropriate for November reading, this was an engaging if somber read that lets Hill take readers through JFK’s last days and see behind the scenes.
Today’s TTT is “bookish wishes”, with an implication that we’re talking about books on our wishlist. I have far too many books to read at the moment as it is (and I mean active interest, like I keep wanting to start my third dish when I’m still chasing peas around from dish the first), so I’ll just do books I looked at on Amazon recently.
Teaser Tuesday
“Jack, oh, Jack! What have they done?!” – FIVE DAYS IN NOVEMBER
The Last Ten Books I Looked at on Amazon
(1) Visions of the Divine: An Artistic Journey Into the Mystery of the Eucharist, Stephen Auth.
(2) The Kennedy Detail: JFK’s Secret Service Agents Break Their Silence, Gerald Blaine & Lisa McCubbin
(3) The Road to Dallas, David Kaiser
Readers who have been bravely enduring my president obsession this past..year:
(4) The Rupture, Regina Kay. A fantasy novel by someone I “grew up with”, in the sense that we met online over a quarter of a century when I was smellincoffee and she was faith130 on the old 3DO gaming forums.
(5) States of the Union: A History of the Union through Presidential Addresses, David Kaiser
(6) 1960: LBJ vs. JFK vs. Nixon: The Epic Campaign that Forged Three Presidencies, David Pietrusza
(7) The Passion of Ayn Rand’s Critics, James Valliant. Earlier this week in a library group, someone posted a question: what do people see in Ayn Rand? I have a mixed opinion on Rand, seeing her philosophy as both invigorating but ultimately damned by its view of humans as primarily philosophical rather than biological creatures — but I tried to write a response to explain artistic integrity in The Fountainhead, or to point out that The Virtue of Selfishness has the same core conceit as any movie in which the main character decides to “follow their dreams”. When I hit “Post”, I was told the original post had been locked for commenting. I was sadly, not surprised. However, it evidently led to me looking for books that talk about Rand in an interesting way. This one was disappointing: it’s less about philosophy and more about the weird interpersonal drama of Rand and her ….boyfriend, I guess.
(8) TR’s Last War: Theodore Roosevelt, the Great War, and a Journey of Triumph and Tragedy, David Pietrusza
(9) Bad Blood: Lyndon B. Johnson, Robert F. Kennedy, and the Tumultuous 1960s, Jeffrey Smith. Annnnd now I have “Bad Blood” stuck in my head.
(10) Alice: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, from White House Princess to Washington Power Broker.
Fun fact: not only am I posting a JFK book today (it was a quickie — mostly pictures) but I have Vendetta, a history of RFK vs Hoffa waiting for me at the post office. I did not imagine catching the Kennedy bug.
What possesses a twenty-year old to read five hundred page biography of a president he knows nothing about? Evidently, I was impressed by his speechwriting. In December 2006, President Ford died, and I was honestly grieved. In my ‘memorial’ post for him, I mentioned that I’d come across one of his speeches on AmericanRhetoric (the website responsible for my old party trick of reciting presidential speeches) and was impressed by him enough to read his autobiography. Reading it in 2005 gave me an enormous admiration for President Ford’s character, and I could not help but revisit it as part of my America @ 250 project. My fondness for Ford as a man, my appreciation for his character, has never wavered in the twenty years since though my politics have changed several times in those decades. Revisiting it on the anniversary of President Reagan’s death, I found myself appreciating this memoir of a decent man in an indecent office yet again — despite sometimes thinking the sheer amount of text could have done with some trimming.
Gerald Ford, uniquely among America’s executives, was not elected in: he was appointed as Vice President after Spiro Agnew resigned, and then succeeded within a matter of months into the presidency as Nixon’s administration began sinking beneath the drama of Watergate. Ford incorporated this into his inaugral address:
If you have not chosen me by secret ballot, neither have I gained office by any secret promises. I have not campaigned either for the Presidency or the Vice Presidency. I have not subscribed to any partisan platform. I am indebted to no man, and only to one woman — my dear wife — as I begin this very difficult job.
That is the spirit this book is written in, and it is what made Ford then and now, even when he was frankly boring me a bit with incredible detail on foreign policy decisions — who will be the new ambassador to India? As accomplished as Nixon was, there’s no doubt he was an incredibly difficult person to be around: in Kennedy and Nixon, he declared himself that his personality was awful. Jerry Ford was…completely different. He came up in Congress; his love was Congress. When he left the White House, he asked Marine One to circle not the White House, where he’d been for scarcely two years, but the Capitol. The Capitol was the same place he insisted on having his oath of office administered in; it was the place he returned to for speeches not as an executive facing off against adversaries, but a colleague who had just found himself elevated in extraordinary circumstances. In this era, Congress still worked: it made decisions that affected foreign policy and complicated domestic policy, making it difficult to be an overweening executive. Ford had an easy spirit, one that could work with others to accomplish common goals — but he’d also dig in his heels, as he did as a young man when he threatened to quit the football team (where he was fairly accomplished) if they agreed to Georgia Tech’s demands that a black player be benched during their match. While my libertarian self harrumphs at some of his policy decisions, one gets a sense from this book that he was principled but willing to be flexible: sometimes too much so, frankly, as when he wanted bans against “Saturday night special” handguns because of an uptick in handgun violence. One never doubts, however, he had the best of intentions.
I cannot honestly say this is a fair review of a presidential memoir; I read it 20 years ago and began to admire the man, and I read it again knowing far more about the background but still not able to put Ford in a box and rip into him like an opposing attorney. There is an earnestness about Gerald Ford that I love; he is clothed not with charm and flair like Kennedy, or cold cunning like Nixon. He is an everyman; he is Mr. Smith, come not just to Washington but to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It is, of course, fascinating to see him as a witness to Watergate, to realize that he is not merely filling an office but is being thrown into the center of the action. In one of my recent Nixon books, I was struck by the paralysis of the RNC: Watergate started causing problems when Nixon was riding stag, without Agnew, and they couldn’t begin to start responding without having a stable veep at the helm. And the Democrats controlled Congress, so the man chosen had to be able to not only restore trust, but to work with Congress. The man and the hour had met. While that future veep gets deep into details on policy, it’s still fun to be in the room when history is being made– when he’s trying to figure out how to deal with China, with Russia, with the ailing economy.(I was happy to learn from this that Nixon admitted his wage and price controls were a mistake: it would’ve been better if Nixon or Ford had said that not only did they make things worse, but they were a gross overreach of the executive into matters that a Constitutional government has no place in addressing.) We get a sense of the man thrown into responsibility, and then — given how closely responsibility is linked to meaning — finding he loves the job too much to not fight for it. He was succeeded by Jimmy Carter, another very decent man who — like Ford — was not unfit for the office because of intelligence, but simply because the Oval Office is most effective when someone Machiavellian is wearing its ring. It’s sad, but — I fear — true. I was happy to revisit this, especially for the letter Ford wrote one of his sons who was entering adulthood: one of the quotes from that I often think of. It’s not pithy; it’s not sexy. It’s functional, and sincere. It is Jerry Ford. Would that his spirit lived more fully in DC today.
“You must realize that on the road of life, there will be disappointments, and that the best way to avoid another is to plan better and work harder.”
I have not sought this enormous responsibility, but I will not shirk it. Those who nominated and confirmed me as Vice President were my friends and are my friends. They were of both parties, elected by all the people and acting under the Constitution in their name. It is only fitting then that I should pledge to them and to you that I will be the President of all the people.
Coming up: I’m practically at the end of Kennedy and Nixon and will post a review this weekend; I’m close to the end of SHELLI: R-Evolution. I’d ordered Vendetta, a look at RFK and Jimmy Hoffa’s relationship, but the supplier cancelled. Possibly for the best. I now have two books written by Nixon.
Send help.
Also, I will read a proper Ford biography before this project is over: while I do trust Jerry to speak for himself, I also want an outside view.
ALSO: this is read 76 for the year. Ford was president during the 1976 Bicentennial. Totally an accident..
“Let us pray here in the Old North Church tonight that those who follow one hundred or two hundred years from now and may look back at us and say: We were a society which combined reason with liberty and hope with freedom. May it be said above all: We kept the faith, freedom flourished, liberty lived. These are the abiding principles of our past and greatest promise of our future.”
– President Gerald R. Ford, Bicentennial address. 1976. Modern America: k Modern America: lol
WHAT have you finished reading recently? To Rescue the American Spirit.
WHAT are you reading now? A surprise SF title and A Time to Heal by Gerald Ford. Also trying to finish Kennedy and Nixon. Oh, and I have a good start on Angle of Repose. I might have a problem.
WHAT are you reading next? Probably one of these three. I’m still in my reading mood and I just watched two D-Day movies.
Today’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is, “A Story About Your Best Teacher”. I don’t think I can pick a best teacher; I have been blessed with more than a handful of people who were passionate about their students and their subject, and who managed to bring the two together. One man is worth mentioning, though, and I’ll call him “Mr. M” for now. Mr. M was my first college-level history professor; he was approaching retirement when I began taking classes with him, and as such was delightfully candid with his sidebars. His political philosophy was something akin to Bob Heinlein — a mix of libertarianism and militant anti-communism. (The first time I ever heard the name “Ayn Rand” was in his classroom!) When he was thinking, he had a habit of closing one eye and looking up as he pondered. He liked telling funny stories that connected with a point, and had a wonderful voice for it. (He was deep, dry, and sarcastic.) What I remember most about him, though, is that he introduced me to history as a worldview, a pattern of thinking. I remember vividly when he assessed our textbook, saying he felt that the author handled this part fairly well, but that they were weak on this part, and my eighteen year old mind was blown. I was still a kid, really, and the idea that textbooks were not The Authority – that they were written by people, that these people had limitations and biases – was entirely new to me. In another instance, we were discussing one of my incorrect exam answers (he was always concerned if I scored less than a hundred given that I always made hay with the bonus questions), and he told me not that I was wrong, but he explained to me the difference in characters between the king I’d vainly tried to remember and the actual king. As I remember, it was a matter of which English king tried to fight for religious toleration for Catholics. It was a moment of nestling so deep into history that kings became not answers to questions, but real people whose personalities we could grasp. Mr. M was an inspiration and mentor to me, and we remain in contact – he was actually my baptismal sponsor. Unfortunately, after decades of teaching he has evidently decided he is more interested in listening, as he rarely pipes up in Adult Formation unless we deliberately ask him what he thinks! Oh, and how’s this for a coincidence? Mr. M was in my facebook memories today!
I am not entirely sure why I called him Mark Twain incarnate after all these years, though.
“Christ, Jerry, isn’t this a wonderful country? Here we can talk about this and you and I can be friends, and eighteen months from now I’ll be going around the country kicking your ass in.” That, I thought, was a one hell of a way to speak to the next President of the United States. But it was vintage [Tip] O’Neill. A TIME TO HEAL, Gerald Ford
I am reading something other than dead presidents, but it’s a surprise SF novel. This is my Kindle shelf at the moment:
Reading Freely 
