Lyndon at Last

Posted on October 28, 2026 by smellincoffee
“And if, during the long evolution from a
“constitutional” to an ‘imperial’ Presidency, there was a single administration in
which the balance tipped decisively, it was the Presidency of Lyndon Johnson.”
– PATH TO POWER

Over the last year when I have considered what books I would take on to understand LBJ, Robert J. Caro’s four-volume set (with a fifth in the works) was always recommended. No, said I, never. I disliked LBJ, thought him reprehensible in ways — his vulgarity, his humiliation of subordinates, etc — and even if I respected his power as a political actor I didn’t want to read thousands of pages of Caro. Still, sitting at my desk I see Caro all day long, and I wondered — what kind of writer was he? So, following up on Launching LBJ, which covered (briefly) the Kennedy-LBJ transition, I decided to look at Caro’s own treatment and gobbled down seven hundred pages in a weekend. Caro lives up to his reputation.

The Passage of Power is fourth in Robert Caro’s monumental “The Years of Lyndon Johnson” series, one that has been in the making so long that Richard Nixon read it and disapproved of how it reduced LBJ to ‘animal instincts’.) Why am I making my introduction to Caro through the fourth volume in his work? Well, one, it’s the only volume of Caro my library has, and two, it’s of a period in Johnson’s life of immediate interest to me. If all we had was his volume on Lyndon Johnson, Poor Kid and Congressional Aide, it would probably still be sitting on the shelves. But Passage details Johnson’s gamble: to leave his post as master of the Senate to serve as vice presidency, seeing it as his only hope of getting near 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The rise of Kennedy was wholly unexpected: he looked like death half the time, and he was almost never at work!

The gamble was desperate and dire: Johnson went from holding Washington by the short hairs to being a man in the corner who all of JFK’s buddies made jokes about. Johnson’s tendency to resort to folksy expressions and stories a la Abraham Lincoln made him an object of ridicule among Kennedy’s bright young things, who dismissed him as Uncle Cornpone. Interestingly, JFK appears to have wanted to make more use of LBJ, but there appears to have been little communication between the two as to how Johnson was to best serve. It didn’t help that Johnson had practically no alone time with JFK, so LBJ appears to have thought his best course was to withdraw despite asserting that ‘power is where power goes’. JFK and the New Frontier people were too insular and dismissive to ever take him seriously. Their blood was azure, their degrees lambskin — to them, regardless of his accomplishments, despite his previous power in the Senate, LBJ was just some hick from Texas hill country. Despite being Vice President, he was not the number two man in Washington: Bobby Kennedy, a jumped-up lawyer appointed Attorney General despite never having tried a case, was. He had the President’s ear. Johnson was lucky to be invited into the room with the New Frontier Boys.

Where the book gets interesting is Johnson’s sudden transition once in authority. The great bull, castrated and humiliated for two years, was suddenly large and in charge once again — and he had a mission. Congressional LBJ had always voted against Civil Rights measures and weakened Eisenhower’s ’57 bill — but his political decisions were at variance with the man himself, who had taught poor Mexican kids and had personally interceded several times over Civil Rights matters, forcing one group in Florida who wanted him to speak to allow the seating of black guests, even if only at their own table. Once LBJ was in the West Wing, he was able to use the tragedy of Kennedy’s death to push “Kennedy’s bill” into being debated and passed. It was quite the turn round, and Caro impresses by making me believe Johnson suppressed his sympathetic instincts as legislator to better exercise his political instincts. Yes, the ’57 bill was weakened by LBJ — but it could not have passed otherwise. A few yards of forward momentum is better than none at all.

This was a heck of a book, somehow making a man I disliked into a subject of total immersion. Granted, I’ve kept running into Lyndon over the summer and have gotten increasingly interested in better understanding him, but all the same I was glad to not run into the vulgarian in this book. We see a man riding a rollercoaster from power to despair to power again, and then attempting to use that power towards good ends. (The means are another thing: one of the other reasons I dislike LBJ was his staggering expansion of the federal government, but that’s not the subject of this book.) It should be noted that this series, the Years of Lyndon Johnson, is not purely about Johnson: this volume contains character profiles of people Johnson worked with or against, like RFK, and those are fascinating in their own right. I can now see why Caro is regarded so favorably and want to consider his Master of the Senate — eventually.

Given that LBJ is alive and well when this book ends, ‘the Johnson treatment” is not done — but given how much of his earlier context Caro weaves in here for context, and the amount of Johnson that popped up during the summer, I am satisfied with entering LBJ’s name into the Hail to the Chief lists.

Quotations

[LBJ] had been enveloped by power. (“Good morning, Leader,” “Could I have a minute of your time, Leader?”, “Mr. Leader, I never thought you could pull that one off.”) Of course, they would be happy to let him running it. “He thought he WAS the senate,” Neil MacNeil says.

Among Johnson’s assistants were men who loved him, and they could hardly bear to watch the way their Chief was being treated [by JFK]. The adoring Horace Busby, to whom Johnson would have been a father figure had Busby loved and revered his father, was in fact physically unable to bear it.

“Just when you get Bobby typed as the white hope, compassionate, he’ll do something so bad it’ll jar you completely, destroy you faith in him,” a journalist wrote. “And just as you’re ready to accept the excessive condemnations, to accept him as ruthless and diabolical, he’ll do something so classy it stuns you. The inescapable truth about Robert Kennedy is that the paradoxes are real, the conflicts do exist.” Said another, “From one day to the next, you never know what Bobby Kennedy you’re going to meet.”

“Like so many other aspects of Lyndon Johnson’s assumption of the presidency — the presidential transition of 1963 — the imminence of those dates made it a transition unlike any other in American history. No Vice President had ever come to office with so little time in which to establish a record on which he could run in his own right. Johnson, Neustadt was to write, ‘faced the unprecedented challenge of assuming office and then running for election in the same first year.'”

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WWW Wednesday

Posted on October 28, 2026 by smellincoffee

Today’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is “Favorite Memory from Your Childhood”, which…is very ambitious. I think the aging process tends to apply a groovy filter to all our childhood memories, because back then we were full of wonder, hopefully surrounded by people who loved us, and blissfully unladen with responsibilities. I don’t know that I can pick a favorite memory from childhood; I had a pretty good one, I think, for reasons I didn’t appreciate at the time. My parents’ sect forbade televisions in the house, so I spent my youth outside playing with toys or reading, or inside reading and fooling around with the radio. (I used a double-deck cassette player/recorder to create ‘radio shows’ with “DJ Markham” as the host. It’s probably a good thing my school didn’t have an AV club.) There are a lot of things in my youth I didn’t appreciate at the time, like going to my grandparents’ house every single Christmas and spending the entire day there with different waves of family coming in, cresting at meals, and then breaking because they had to go to their other family things. I’d love to go back to one of those mornings; I’ve even dreamt about somehow finding my grandparents’ house in the seventies or eighties when they were younger and full of life. I’d love to sit and listen to them for hours now, when back then I was content to play Pokemon Yellow and counted myself a king because I was able to create a team with all three Blue/Red starters. (On my startlingly magenta GameBoy color. XD)

I had an odd memory from childhood, though, one involving a rally at my church. Kid-me started talking to one of the visitors, a tall — keep in mind I was a kid — man from Africa. I don’t think I’d ever heard a ‘foreign’ accent before, so I was fascinated by him and kept asking questions. After service we were standing outside talking, as people do, and he pointed to the sky, to the stars, and he said that when I looked at the stars I was seeing the same stars he saw at home. He told me that in the future, I could look at those stars and think of our friendship. When I look at the stars, and specifically the Hunter, I feel a strange sense of peace. That moment seems almost surreal now that I am thinking about it, but I have never forgotten that man or his strange gift to a boy who was learning how large the world was, but how close humanity could still be.

WHAT have you finished reading recently? Oh, so many dead presidents. Polk. HW Bush.

WHAT are you reading now? Path to Power, Robert J. Caro; Heirs to the Founders HW Brands; and The Pigman, Paul Zindel.

WHAT are you reading next? Um…science fiction!

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Twelve Books for Halloween

Posted on October 27, 2026 by smellincoffee

Today’s treble T is a Halloween freebie: I’ve never gotten into Halloween (aside from a few costume parties over the years), but I will give this the old college try. But first, the tease!

In fact, the thing Lorraine and I liked best about the Pigman was that he didn’t go around saying we were cards or jazzy or cool or hip. He said we were delightful, and if there’s one way to show how much you’re not trying to make believe you’re not behind the times, it’s to go around saying people are delightful.” THE PIGMAN

Look at that tease! No president to be found!

(1) Christine, Stephen King. Easily one of the creepiest novels I’ve ever read. Christine is a car that evil appears to cozy itself in.

(2) Needful Things, Stephen King. A new antiques store seems to carry just what people are looking for. Mayhem ensues.

(3) The Shining, Stephen King. Good evening, Mister Torrance.

(4) Ancestral Shadows, Russell Kirk. A very effective collection of ghost stories. To quote from my review:

Ghost stories” invariably makes me think of legends and folklore, but Ancestral Shadows is an altogether different anthology. Instead, its stories all feature ghostly characters and themes of redemption, revenge, or realization. The ghosts here are not transparent wraiths, scaring mortals or playing tricks with the furniture. They are in the midst, caught in the veil between the living and the dead, dwelling in their own moments of time. Some are corporeal enough that they believe themselves still living, and the news of their death comes as a surprise to both them and the reader. […] each [of these stories] draw the reader and the main character deeper into a mystery, until — fully enveloped by it — there is a line dropped, a corner turned, and suddenly both parties realize something that had been hitherto hidden .

(5) World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, Max Brooks. I don’t remember much about this one, only that it was compelling and I meant to read the author’s next release when it came out.

(6) Night of the Living Trekkies, Kevin David Anderson. This is meant to be horror but it’s entirely too funny.

(7) Sphere, Michael Crichton. SF about a discovery on the ocean floor that lurches into horror simply because of the alien-ness of the deep ocean. (Do I have thalassophobia?)

(8) The Good Guy, Dean Koontz. I don’t remember what this book was about. I remember it was unsettling enough that I have never read Koontz again. It’s been 16 years.

(9) Hallowe’en Party, Agatha Christie. Somebody dies at a Halloween party.

(10) Sleep No More, Greg Iles. Greg Iles is known for his southern gothic thrillers set in Mississippi, so this one with its supernatural vibes was both unexpected and effective.

(11) Enemy of God, Bernard Cornwell. Similar: Cornwell is known for realistic historic fiction, but his Arthur stories flirt with fantasy, and not in the “Oh ho! My fair lady, I have come to rescue thee!” sense”. It’s more in the the feeling of dread and uncanniness, the literary equivalent of knowing something sinister and terrible is watching you in the dark. Did I mention this is about King Arthur and Merlin?

(12) Turn of the Key, Ruth Ware. As much as the ending disappointed, the ride there was seat-of-the-pants stuff. A young woman is babysitting in an old English country estate turned tech palace, and starts getting the sense there’s something in the house. Is it a ghost? Is it a sentient AI? Who—OOO-oooo knowwwwws?

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Poppy

Posted on October 26, 2026 by smellincoffee

While I have had George H.W. Bush listed on my Hail to the Chief  page for a while, in truth neither of the two entries would satisfy a purist like myself. One was a collection of letters, which was a useful supplement, and the other was a memoir by George W. reflecting on his father – and I didn’t even review that one, just shared quotes from it. So, George H.W. Bush!

This is an unusual entry for this project because this is the first book concerning a president I actively remember: while I was alive during Reagan’s second term, my first president was George HW, and I remember being taken to my grandparents’ house to watch either the debates or the election night results in 1992.  When I read a couple of titles listed to him last year, I made no pretense at objectivity.

George HW Bush is a straightforward biography of the man, who became a Navy pilot during World War 2 and returned to civilian life to play ball at Yale,  pitch woo to the future Barbara Bush, and then get involved in the oil business.  He got involved in politics, and public life became his vocation after the oil secured his financial health. A lifelong Republican, he pitched to the Goldwater crowd early on but quickly realized he was deeply uncomfortable  vying for election by espousing beliefs that were not his:  he tacked back toward the center and there he remained, becoming increasingly active in Republican party action. When Watergate began unfolding, he had the unenviable position of being the new RNC chair, forced to confront a man he admired. While he and Reagan were adversaries at first – Bush dismissed Reagan’s novel attempt at balancing the budget while increasing defense spending and cutting taxes as ‘voodoo economics’ – they quickly became working partners. Naftali suspects Bush may have been more culpable  in re: Iran-Contra than Reagan, in part because Reagan’s memory was fading in his second term and he was reliant on his diary to remember policy decisions and actions. This is just an interpretation, though. (At any rate, I am completely unbothered by selling guns to fight commies – it’s just that whole ‘Congress said specifically not to do this’ thing that gets in the way.)

To be honest, reading this book was a bit like reading a long Wikipedia entry: I already had the measure of the man, especially gleaned from his letters,  and I mostly read this for completions sake. I plan on reading Meacham’s far larger treatment of Poppy in the future, but it’s eight hundred pages and I have been unwittingly seduced by Caro’s four-volume work on LBJ.

LBJ: Gotta be my turn now. Ain’t nobody else left.
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James “Veni, vici, secessi” Polk

Posted on October 26, 2026 by smellincoffee

Note to readers: there will be two or three president reviews this week, but I solemnly promise I am reading other things. I actually began revisiting another YA title from my youth this weekend, while at the same time starting to read another volume of Caro.

Polk is an interesting figure among the presidents, for he’s easily one of the most consequential executives DC has ever had, and yet most Americans probably could not name him. He’s also unusual in that he came into office promising to serve one term, and one term only, intending to accomplish four things and being able to leave office having done them. Borneman calls him the most assertive wielder of executive authority in the pre-Civil War period – quite a trick considering his mentor was Andrew Jackson!

While Polk fulfills its role as a biography, it focuses in large part on the Mexican war, with a great deal of focus at quarrelling generals who appear to have viewed themselves as politicians and future office-holders rather than simple military men. Their political ties, appallingly, appear to have altered how they generaled, with armistices being arranged on the field to the frustration of Polk’s larger designs. They were large indeed: Mexico, and the question of Oregon. While the United States’s northern border was fixed early on through a treaty with Great Britain, the annexation of Texas was bound to create problems with ol’ Mexico. These were not problems Polk necessarily wanted to avoid, any more than Bismarck wanted to avoid problems with Austria and Denmark when forging the German Empire from the iron kingdom of Prussia.

As has happened with a few other books during this project, here I encountered mostly Polk the politician rather than Polk the man, and I suspect I would have enjoyed this more had I read it when I was in my 1840s-1850s season a year ago. As it was it felt distinctly like I was reading this to say “I read it”. That feels unfair to Polk, who did do what he set out to do, including reducing the tariff. That’s far more important than it sounds, because South Carolina threatened nullification or secession on tariff policy until Andrew Jackson went abusive-boyfriend on it. (One thing I have learned from this president project: tariffs are a big deal.) The Mexican War is also very much his, because one of his frustrations were Whig generals who kept signing armistices when Polk had not yet exacted what he wanted from Mexico: recognition of having conquered California, and a firm settlement on the southern border at the Rio Grande.

Well, so goes Jas. Polk.

Quotations

“In the fall of 1812, Sam Polk determined to send his almost-seventeen-year-old son to Philadelphia to receive the care of Dr. Philip Syng Physick, later known as ‘the father of American surgery.’”

“Meanwhile, because the legislature rarely met for longer than a month, Polk was able to complete his legal studies with Grundy and gain admission to the state bar when the circuit court convened at Columbia in June 1820. The Polk clan surely celebrated, and Sam Polk even provided his son with his first case by managing to be arrested for public fighting.”

“These land issues, and other issues such as banking reforms, frequently found Polk opposing the position of his legal mentor, Felix Grundy. When Grundy’s normally persuasive oral arguments were stymied by the parliamentary maneuvers and debating skills of his one-time student, he was heard to mutter: ‘I have been preparing a club here with which my own head is to be broken.'”

“The Washington that James K. Polk rode into late in the fall of 1825 was barely more than a quiet little village. The two dominant structures were the White House and the Capitol, each much smaller than future additions would render them. In between, both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue held a variety of boardinghouses, hotels, stables, and shops. Few members among the 48 senators and 213 congressmen could afford to maintain private dwellings, particularly because sessions of Congress tended to run only from early December to March or April. Most members roomed in boardinghouses and joined together in collegial ‘messes’ to procure their meals. Along with other Tennessee representatives, Polk took a room and joined a mess at Benjamin Burch’s house on Capitol Hill.”

“To quell the rush to dinner from the reception area on her first evening as mistress of the house, Sarah ordered the Marine Corps band to play ‘Hail to the Chief’ and turn a would-be stampede into a regal procession. By the end of her White House years, that old Scottish anthem—’Hail to the chief who in triumph advances’—would become the traditional announcement to clear the way for the president.”

“The point as it relates to James K. Polk is this: all the fears that the Whigs had voiced about Old Hickory being a military chieftain and exercising dictatorial powers had proven unfounded. The truth is that by the time Jackson sat in the White House, the temperament of his earlier years had moderated. He may have threatened to hang John Calhoun over the nullification crisis, but even Old Hickory backed off when it came to the attempts of his administration to acquire Texas. His protégé, however, pulled no such punches.”

“Let the President answer the interrogatories I proposed,” Lincoln said dramatically, as if he were back in an Illinois courtroom. “Let him answer fully, fairly, and candidly. Let him answer with facts and not with arguments. Let him remember he sits where Washington sat, and so remembering, let him answer as Washington would answer.”

“Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion,” Lincoln lectured Herndon, “and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose—and you allow him to make war at pleasure.

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FDR

Posted on October 23, 2026 by smellincoffee
Ohh, I’m the salt in the ocean!
I’m the sun in the sky
Imma Franklin D. Roosevelt
I’mma million-dollars, s’long
as I’ve got a snap in my finger
Got a rhythm in my walk
Got the devil to pay
I’m livin’ in a great big way!
(“Livin’ in a Great Big Way”, Louis Prima)

When I began working on this project in earnest a year ago, I knew then that FDR was going to be…interesting. I’ve mentioned before that I was a World War 2 nut in high school: this translated, via the impressionability of youth, into being an FDR nut. There is an enormous passage in William Manchester’s The Glory and the Dream that is basically a paean to FDR, and in high school I copied it down. For me, too, FDR was a singular figure: he is the only president whose monuments I have visited (I have gone to Warm Springs and stared mournfully at the bed where he died, after admiring his enormous collection of walking sticks.) My impression of him began changing in college, shaken by learning about Japanese internment and his betrayal of Eleanor, and then after I moved more toward Austrian economics and libertarian political philosophy, I couldn’t help but be critical — and yet at the same time, teenage me still lives in little crevices of my brain, and when he sees FDR he wants to take off his hat and cheer. Over the years my criticisms of FDR have not even been partisan; sometimes they come from ordinary, human grounds, like his haughty dismissal of Hoover, and his overall patrician dismissal of others. And yet — as a boy I memorized his First Inaugural, and his speech to Congress after the Japanese assaulted Pearl Harbor, and his voice rings in my mind’s ears and sometimes pops up in my writing. With that said, let us sit down by the fireplace and listen to Franklin Delano Roosevelt for a spell.

First impressions: I knew FDR was rich, but I didn’t realize how ridiculously privileged he was. In the South, it’s possible for someone to be considered wealthy despite being hard-up — we call it ‘family money’ — but the Roosevelts were so well-heeled they could open a shoe store called OOPS ALL HEELS. When Franklin and Eleanor married, their annual income from trust funds gave them the equivalent of a quarter-million annual ‘salary’, but their lifestyle was so extravagant they still needed supplements from Franklin’s mother Sara, who gave him still more money after he quit being a lawyer to pursue public service and she decided he needed a supplement. There is something to be said for those who want for nothing but still have a desire to serve, I suppose — noblesse oblige and all that. Not much attention is given to FDR’s tenure as governor of New York, which was astonishingly short. I thought the old boy had served his time, then decided to pursue the presidency: instead, he was more like Nixon, pursuing the gubernatorial seat to position himself for higher office. Fortunately for him, Black Thursday, the Great Depression, and the Army’s attack on veterans squatting in DC and demanding money happened all at the same time, and nothing short of being caught with a live boy or a dead girl in bed could stop Roosevelt from winning the election.

I think what has made FDR’s name in history is not his ‘bold, persistent experimentation’ during the Great Depression, but rather his leadership during World War 2. Or more specifically, his leadership before World War 2, when Hitler and Japan were treating the global map like their own private game of Risk, and most of America had zero interest all in getting involved. Per Smith, Roosevelt did not want to get involved: he was exhausted after eight years in office, doubted to Eleanor and others if he could continue, but saw that he had no choice. There were no worthies waiting to take his place in the ranks; so he persisted. Smith believes Roosevelt’s aim was to help Europe defend itself as best it could, not get involved directly: it was Japan who made the decision to enroll America in World War 2, and Hitler’s decision to declare war on the US short-circuited any debate on balancing Europe vs Asia. Had Hitler not declared war, a largely disinterested American public could have easily gone full-in on Asia and ended Japan’s day in the sun earlier. (Then again, I’m sure some could argue that it was the pressure of fighting a two-front war that forced the US to go whole-hog on World War 2, and made total victory possible in the first place. Pearl Harbor and the Axis declarations made World War 2 a vanquish-or-perish zero sum game.)

Despite its girth, Smith’s FDR rolls along fairly quickly; he mentions but does not dwell on FDR’s romantic indiscretions. I was struck by the obviousness of his impending death in the 1944 election, though: I observed this in McCullough’s Truman. Everyone in Washington was seeing FDR fade in real time — but he was viewed as the only option despite having blood pressure that was insane. His ‘low’ numbers far exceeded optimums, and his high numbers put us into the realm of “How are you even still alive?” (Election Day 1944: 260/155.) Smith’s FDR is also more charitable of the FDR/Al Smith relationship: while Shlaes had Al resenting FDR ignoring him after taking high office, Smith’s sees them as remaining close. That’s an interesting discrepancy. I read this volume largely for completion’s sake — No Ordinary Time was too closely focused on World War 2 to count as a proper biography — but it was enjoyable enough, and I can see Jean Edward Smith coming around again. I’d considered reading his treatment of Eisenhower before going with Age of Eisenhower.

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The BBC’s Fellowship of the Ring

Posted on October 22, 2026 by smellincoffee

I have been meaning to revisit the realms of the Shire and Rivendell and Gondor for some years now,, but recently an older friend of mine announced his intention to begin his annual walk with Frodo on October 1st. “I’m going alone,” he said. Straightening my pack, I said “Of course you are – and I’m coming too!” I, however, tried a slightly different path – that of the audio adaptation.

As it happened, early in the spring during a big audiobook binge (I was dogsitting a lot and was spending at least an hour a day on the road), I’d begun a version of The Hobbit and listened to most of it, stopping because I was tiring of the dwarves’ voices and because I’d just encountered the Midnight Library of Baseball and needed to listen to every single one of its eighty past episodes. Because this version of The Hobbit was adapted for use by NPR, its voice acting was American, which struck me as unusual. One of the dwarves, I think I recall, sounded like he was from Appalachia. There’s also singing, but the most salient thing about this production was how viscerally distressing its Smaug was. There are two schools of thought: you can make your dragon Jeremy Irons, or you can make him disgusting. NPR went with disgusting.

The BBC’s radio adaptation of LOTR was quite a different beast, and a wonderful one. Because my comments for all three adaptations will be largely the same, I’m offering only the one general one. The cast is properly British, as a work intended to be a mythos for England ought to be. There’s a good variety of regional accents, and the voice actors themselves are a solid bench of talent. My only quibble was with Aragorn, whose actor was a little too…frilly for me. He has a dramatic rasp and a subtle affect that I have heard associated with British royalty before, but it does not make me think Aragorn, King of Gondor, Isildur’s Heir. Gandalf, Frodo, and Sam were so well chosen, though, that I must overwhelmingly give the voicework an A.

What really gathers laurels, though, is the music. Each third of the production had a signature, at least for me: the happiness of Fellowship, epitomized in Frodo’s absurd song about a cow jumping over the moon; the Song of the Ents, produced by a bass choir that’s so epic and manly it could convince anyone in Bag-end to take up the sword, and the fascinating choice to render some narration and exposition in Return of the King…via opera. It works! Music is present throughout the work, doing right reverence by Tolkien himself who planted the saga with songs. We get ominous chanting, bard songs, lore-drops, mournful ballads, and celebrations. What a magnificent artist Tolkien was, to have composed such verses and integrated them with a prose story that was already rich in itself. The hardest volume to listen to is Return of the King, because there are so many baddies – and the Orcs and Nazgul all sound hideous and dreadful – and because our protagonists are weary, exhausted, and soul-sick. I think some added narration to tell us what’s happening could have been useful during action-heavy parts: I would have no idea what Smeagol did at the end without having read the books already and watched the films, because the only notice we get is Smeagol yelling about HISSS PRECCCIOUSSSSSS and then Frodo missing a finger.

These adaptations were a very pleasant way to spend car rides and frighten restaurant clerks at the drive-through. And a final thought: when I read LOTR the first time it was for the story, but this time I noticed the writing. That’s the great flaw with audiobooks, I can’t highlight them and I don’t want to pull off the side of the road to write quotes down. I shall have to return to the printed source.

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William McKinley

Posted on October 22, 2026 by smellincoffee

After three days of trying to make progress in Robert Merry’s William McKinley, trying in vain to see the subject through a multiple of well-tailored fat man smoking cigars and blocking my way to their chosen man to guide America into the 20th century. I gave up. Kevin Phillips had a far more accessible route to McKinley, and he’s also author of The Cousins War which I’ve been wanting to try. Phillips is indeed accessible, but his biography of McKinley is unusual. It runs not strictly by the clock, but rather by subject – examining McKinley’s rise in the Republican party, his stances on tariffs and monetary policy, his foreign policy, and then his life in retrospect after he’d gotten shot and TR  succeeded him.

That “after he’d gotten shot” reference is exactly the way Phillips handles McKinley’s assassination herein; it’s incidental, almost off-stage if McKinley’s boots weren’t still sticking onto the platform.  That said,  Phillips’ treatment of McKinley’s life manages to provide usable context: he explains why silver/gold had become such an issue at that time  (silver mines were performing wildly and threatening to undermine the silver/gold exchange, but different groups of people would profit or hurt) and points out that the United States getting involved in the Philippines  was a little more complex than DC building an empire by shooting Spain and looting its corpse.  The sudden rise of Germany, and its interest in the Philippines and Haiti,  pushed Anglo-American interests together. If we didn’t get the Philippines, the reasoning went, the Germans or the Japanese would get them instead – and we intend on being good stewards, not dictators. Phillips goes on to point out that Cuba was set free, and Puerto Rico/the Philippines given large measures of local democracy, with the Philippines already marked for independence when the Japanese rolled in for some adobo.

Phillips is very interested in interrogating earlier treatments of McKinley,  particularly those who would push him out of the limelight for TR. It was McKinley who carefully built a broad base of support so stout that he managed to break the eastern machine’s dominance of conventions: he was hailed as the RNC’s delegate on the first ballot, not something ol’ Abe himself managed.  While there’s practically nothing on McKinley as a youngster, judging by my Merry experience that seems to be commonplace:  we see him as a lawyer who quickly rises through political ranks until he’s the creme de la creme and Blaine – who was always the bridesmaid and never the bride at presidential conventions  and elections – is left grumbling in the corner.

I still have my Merry biography and will be continuing in it, now I hope with more ease given that I’m not pushing forward in total ignorance. Judging by both Phillips and Merry, McKinley appears to have been a genuinely good man — someone sincerely kind, and devoted to his chronically ill wife Ida.

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Teaser Tuesday, October 19 | WWW Wednesday

Posted on October 21, 2026 by smellincoffee

I’ve been without internet when not at work, so I didn’t have my Tuesday meme post scheduled the way I usually do. Hence, you get it on Wednesday!

McKinley peered at the world through deep-socketed gray eyes that seemed almost luminescent. Kindly and sweet-tempered, he once invited into his closed carriage, during a downpour, a hostile reporter who had been attacking him in print throughout a congressional reelection campaign. “Here, you put on this overcoat and get into that carriage,” he told the rain-soaked journalist. “I guess you don’t know who I am,” replied the surprised scribe. “I have been with you the whole campaign, giving it to you every time you spoke and I am going over to-night to rip you to pieces if I can.” “I know,” said the congressman, “but you put on this coat and get inside so you can do a better job.” PRESIDENT MCKINLEY: ARCHITECT OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY

WWW Wednesday

WHAT have you finished reading recently? William McKinley, Kevin Phillips; and a radio drama of The Two Towers.

WHAT are you reading now? Listening to a radio drama of Return of the King, nosing into PJ O’Rourke’s Parliament of Whores, thinking I need to get back into Into the Planet.

WHAT are you reading next?

Oh, Mr. Polk has been sitting in the 1840s for over a year now, having watched me work steadily deeper into the ‘impending crisis’ late last year and then suddenly bound a century forward to frustrate LBJ by reading all the presidents around him but not him.

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Rumble Fish: Keep Cooly-Cool, Boy

Posted on October 19, 2026 by smellincoffee
“Rumble fish. They’d kill each other if they could.”

Many years ago, when the Earth was young and dinosaurs roamed the land, I encountered a book called That Was Then, This is Now at a Waldenbooks in Montgomery, Alabama. It proved to be my introduction to S.E. Hinton, and I later read everything I could find by her. The three titles I remember most, though, were my introduction, plus The Outsiders and Rumble Fish. Rumble Fish was especially startling.

Rumble Fish is the story of Rusty James, a troubled young man who has no place wherein he belongs. Much of his life is staked on being the little brother of The Motorcycle Boy, an impossibly cool, somewhat eccentric, and undeniably Tuff member of Tulsa’s population of undesirables. (Tulsa is not named, but given that Hinton’s other gang works appear to be rooted there, I’m going on assumptions.) Readers familiar with The Outsiders will remember its gang culture, particularly the constant fights between Greasers (working class boyos) and the Socs, the prep-school toughs. By the time Rumble Fish rolls around, the gang wars have died off, both those between the prols and the bougies and the internecine greaser wars. The Motorcycle Boy gets credit for ending them, but as he said it was mostly the dope that did the rumbles in.

Rusty James wants nothing more than to be like the Motorcycle Boy, but he’s caught between his admiration of his brother and the fact that the Motorcycle Boy is…weird. Their father was a lawyer who might have amounted to something: his formal diction is an anomaly in a world of tough-talking street types. As a kid, the father didn’t too much matter; he was odd, but that was it. As an adult reader, I wondered what makes a lush of a lawyer fail so dramatically in life. One could say the booze, but there are a great many members of the bar who have been members of other bars and still flourished.The father has imparted his unusual ways of thinking to the Motorcycle Boy, culminating in references to Greek mythology that Rusty James does not understand and inwardly despises.

Rusty James is, despite being an unpleasant person – he fights too quickly, he has no conception that lovin’ on a girl at a party would offend his girlfriend, and he has no interest in a productive life whatsoever – sympathetic. He is a lost boy whose icon will, in the course of this little novel, fail him. The Motorcycle Boy has his own issues, and in the end Rusty James will see him fall – to his own confusion.

This is a fascinating novel. Its sentences have lingered with me for over two decades, especially Rusty James’ friend’s weary question to The Motorcycle Boy – “Why is it that no one has taken a rifle and shot you yet?” – followed by the response, that every society no matter how primitive has an innate respect for the insane. There is something uncanny and eerie about the Motorcycle Boy, as if he does not quite belong. Rusty James’ frustration over him can be reflected by the reader’s own confusion. Who is the Motorcycle Boy? What’s his deal?

I still don’t know. This is one of those novels I’ve never stopped thinking about, and I’m glad I found a used copy of it while exploring an indie bookstore so that I could ride with the Motorcycle Boy again. I continue to marvel at Hinton’s ability to create complex and damnably interesting characters at a young age.

Quotations

“That ain’t fair!”
“When the hell did you start expecting anything to be fair?”

“Man, those guys would have followed you anywhere. Hell, most of them still would.”
“It would be great,” [The Motorcycle Boy] said, “if I could think of somewhere to go.”

“California,” he said, “Is like a beautiful wild kid on heroin, high as a kite and thinking she’s on top of the world, not knowing she’s dying, not believing it even if you show her the marks.”

“Pass me the wine,” Steve said.
“There ain’t anymore.”
“That”, he said, “is the most depressing thing I have ever heard.”

“Progressive country, integrated mugging.”

“What a funny situation,” said the Motorcycle Boy after a long silence. “I wonder what I’m doing here, holding my half-dead brother, surrounded by bricks and cement and rats.”

“An acute perception does not make you crazy. However, sometimes it drives you crazy.”

“Your mother, “ he said distinctly, “Is not insane. Neither, contrary to popular opinion, is your brother. He is merely miscast in a play. He would have made a perfect knight in a different century, or a very good pagan prince in a time of heroes. He was born in the wrong era, on the wrong side of the river, with the ability to do anything and finding nothing he wants to do.”

“I wonder,” Steve said wildly, “Why somebody hasn’t taken a rifle and blown your head off.”
“Even the most primitive societies have an innate respect for the insane.”

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