Today’s prompt is “What could you give a speech about without notice”, which makes me laugh because going off on spontaneous history lectures is a specialty of mine. History is my passion, and it’s partially connected to my profession: I do local history at my library, and often engage in research when things are slow on the floor. (This rarely happens, and even when I retreat to the archives to ponder my books and photos in peace, people come hunting me. Alas.) My ability to suddenly explode into a lecture got me invited onto a ghost-hunt inside a building I really wanted to document, so it’s not just a party trick.
WWW Wednesday
WHAT have you finished reading recently? Ike and Dick, as well as Being Nixon. I’m so deep into Nixonland that I had a dream that I went into a back-country drive bar and stumbled into him inside, enjoying a brew and some music. We talked about Ike and Dick and he nodded ruefully.
WHAT are you reading? I’m giving Killing Kennedy a shot because I watched three Kennedy movies last week, two of which were connected to the assassination. So far it’s a lot of gossip about JFK’s sex life. I’m also listening to In the Arena, read by RN himself, and to The Midwest Survival Guide, read by Charlie Berens, whose comedy I love. (Keep er movin’!)
WHAT are you reading next? Oh, lord. So, this past weekend I received three books — Lee in the Shadow of Washington, Lincoln by Gore Vidal, and Maverick by Jason Riley. The latter is a biography of Thomas Sowell. On order, I have Kennedy and Nixon, by Chris Matthews; The Declaration of Independence by Brad Birzer; and A Time to Heal by Gerald Ford. The latter was the first or second presidential biography I ever read, back in high school, and I remember it fondly. Freya India’s Girls was just released, so I’m waiting to start my ebook version of that.
I need a vacation just to read my books, and now I’m eying a George H.W. Bush biography with interest. In the words of Jim Carrey in The Mask, sssomebody stop me!
Last year I nearly did a deep dive into all things Nixon: exactly a year later, he beckoned me to follow him, and this time I did. What is it about Nixon? One book I’ve read recently, and I can’t tell you which because I’ve been grazing so many, said that Nixon’s life would make for a perfect novel with its levels of drama and tragedy. Imagine a man reelected overwhelmingly – carrying all but one state, a singular feat matched only by Reagan some years later – and then within a couple of years, leaving DC in ignominy. I’m not sure where my fascination with Nixon began – perhaps it owes to my contrarian streak and wanting to find something redeemable in him just because he’s disliked, or perhaps I saw something in all those presidential books I read back in 2023 (on the President’s Club, on life in the White House, etc) that intrigued me. At any rate, the more I read about about RN, the more interesting the man gets.
Being Nixon is a biography, but it’s one that looks intently at Nixon’s interior life, his character and personality. The conventional view of Nixon is that of a dark-jowled old man, glowering from his office and making plots from behind the Wilson desk. Nixon was more than that, though: he was a man who jumped up and down in his chair while immersed in a good movie, who roared with delight at baseball games, who entertained at parties by playing lively tunes on the piano. He was, oddly, an introvert who was nonetheless drawn toward a career that almost demanded extroversion. He could be painfully shy and conflict-avoidant, making him an odd duck at parties – unless he felt comfortable with the people he was with, at which point he came alive. He also came alive when discussing policy, particularly foreign policy. It was arguably his greatest talent, and one he exercised as vice president, president, and former president: no other chief executive of the US had made as many foreign trips as Nixon overseas.He had such a grasp on Russia and China – their nature, their interests – that even on the day before he died, he and President Clinton were conversing on Russia policy.
Being Nixon accomplishes the feat of providing both a detailed political biography – Nixon’s rise to power, being sidelined by the Kennedys, quarreling with Kissinger et. al over Vietnam policy – while at the same time studying the man himself. Nixon came from poverty and struggle: he had a thirst to prove himself. A dauntingly hard worker, the higher he climbed the further he wanted to go: he didn’t simply want to be president, he wanted to be a statesman who contributed to a new order – a global Metternich, if you will. And he did enormous things, good and ill – improving relations with the Soviet Union, opening them up with Red China. He wasn’t a Wilsonian idealist, though, but more of a pragmatist – and while he started politics clean, after he’d been in the game for a while he started seeing how others twisted the rules. That pragmatism then drifted to a willingness to engage in fighting dirty, especially after the 1960 election where he was beaten using stuffed ballot poxes and similar tricks. This openness to the dark grew when he became convinced that his office was being spied on and information was being leaked out. (He was right on both counts, though the revelation that the DoD was spying on him wasn’t public when this book was published.) His desire to get the goods on the adversary created an atmosphere in the Oval Office that tacitly encouraged things like the break-in, even if Nixon was not aware of that particular plan. Where he erred, of course, was participating in an attempt to squelch the story – painfully ironic considering that he said of Alger Hiss, when taking the communist down, that his lying and coverup had been what exposed his original crime.
This is a deep, dense book that I enjoyed taking my time with over the last two weeks; it’s been my first full review of Nixon’s life and career, and I loved the way it tried to get to know the man himself, because he was a tempest in himself, whose rise and fall and refusal to quit and self-sabotage are a tale worthy of Tolstoy or Shakespeare.
Quotations
Nixon resisted. “I can’t fire men simply because of the appearance of guilt. I have to have proof of their guilt.”
Peterson ‘straightened’, Nixon recalled, and said, “What you have just said, Mr. President, speaks very well of you as a man. It does not speak well of you as a President.”
Governor Wilson borrowed a favorite Nixon line from Sophocles: “One must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been. Clinton said, “May the day of judging President Nixon on anything less than his entire life and career come to a close.”
A Manichaean divide between light and dark is useful in religion and literature and possibly political science, but it is a device, a construct. There was only one Nixon. In Nixon the light and dark straints are intricably intertwined, impossible to disentangled. They fed each other. Nixon’s strengths were his weaknesses, and vice versa. The device that propelled him also crippled him. The underdog’s sensitivity that made him farsighted also blinded him. He wanted to show that he was hard because he felt soft. He learned to be popular because he felt rejected. He was the lonely everyman to the end.
It is one of the mysteries — and glories — of human nature that sinners can become saints. But only in prayers of another world are saints truly cleansed of sin. Often the more convincing moralists are the very ones who feel the temptation to sin most strongly. Some turn out to be hypocrites, but that does not mean their sermons are hollow. Very few, if any, great men or women are pure of heart, but inner torment and even a touch of wickedness can be catalysts to greatness.
Nixon was no saint. But the fears and insecurities that led him into sinfulness s also gave him the drive to push past self-doubt, to pretend to be cheerful, to dare to be brave, to see, often through sadly not always, the light in the dark.
Shortly after one-thirty, he was informed by his military aide, Brigadier General Robert Schulz, that President Kennedy had been shot. There was still something about General Eisenhower, now seventy-three, that made people turn to him for reassurance. A reporter asked, “General, will the nation be all right in the months ahead? IKE AND DICK: A PORTRAIT OF A STRANGE POLITICAL MARRIAGE
Nixon: I scored 128 today, Henry. Henry Kissinger: Your golf game is improving! Nixon: I was BOWLING. BEING NIXON, Evan Thomas
I increasingly find Richard Nixon a fascinating personality, and stumbled onto this while looking for Nixon books: I’ve been reading it along with Being Nixon the last week or so. Ike and Dick focuses on the relationship between these two men, who were very dissimilar but nontheless became running mates in two elections. The book does not stop with the end of Eisenhower’s term in office, but rather continues on until after the general’s passing. Theirs was an interesting relationship: Nixon was an accomplished, ambitious, and talented rising star, but he had limits Eisenhower was aware of, and so was treated cautiously for years. Nixon, who first looked at the General with the fawning respect of a younger officer to a senior one, quickly realized that good ol’ Ike had a cold, manipulative side. This is an interesting look at a pivotal political and personal relationship.
Dwight Eisenhower could have run for either party in the 1950s and won: the fact that he chose to run as a Republican annoyed Harry Truman greatly and put him into a position to mentor up-and-comers like Richard Nixon. Nixon had already made his bones as a legislator, and attained some national prominent as the man who took down Alger Hiss, accused of being a Soviet spy and convicted of perjury given that charges of treason were already passed the statute of limitations. A hard-working, well-spoken red-hunter was just the ticket in 1952. While Nixon was very much a political creature in terms of thinking about policy, in interpreting how parties and interests might be affected by this action or even a word or gesture, he was not skilled in personal engagement. He was shy, often formal or awkward, and didn’t seem to know how to coordinate his hands and his mouth during a speech. Eisenhower struggled to bond with him over activities like fly-fishing, and when Nixon was accused of using campaign donations for office use (the horrors!), Eisenhower seemed open to dropping him from the ticket altogether. The ‘fund affair’ appears to have defined their relationship fairly well, at least until the late 1960s: Eisenhower was a commanding general and administrator who saw Nixon as a tool fit for some purposes and not for others, at least at first, and he was happy to use said tool and then put it away. (One use: Nixon was very good in foreign policy, so he traveled in the president’s stead.) Nixon, who took things very seriously, was hurt by this — but he was a man who had a talent for turning pain and setback into a reason to make a comeback, if only for spite. Eventually, the two men did become more like friends, though Nixon never became the fisherman or golfer Ike would have preferred. That friendship continues until Eisenhower’s death, by which point he was signing his letters to Nixon with “Ike” — not a name Nixon ever felt comfortable using around Eisenhower. The last sections of an enfeebled Eisenhower waving a flag while well-wishers played favorite music from the hospital parking lot, and Nixon weeping at the news that his commander and mentor had passed, are fairly poignant.
I’m currently overdosing on RN at the moment, being nearly through with Being Nixon and re-listening to his post-presidency memoir, In the Arena, but I enjoyed this volume among them for the unique context. We often regard Nixon as a man alone, but here he grows in relationship with another singular personality and we get to see him as an earnest protege, a partner, and friend. It also shed light on a lot of Nixon’s other often overlooked aspects — his Quaker-derived racial sensibilities, for instance, that led to him become friends of a sort with Martin Luther King Jr. There’s more Nixon coming — I should finish Being Nixon tonight, and this weekend I’m expecting a book on Nixon and Kennedy’s relationship to arrive in the mail.
Quotations
“Well why do we fight Communism in the first place? Because Communism threatens freedom and when we use unfair methods for fighting Communists, we help to destroy freedom ourself . . . And when through carelessness you lump the innocent and the guilty together, what you do is give the guilty a chance to pull the cloak of innocence around themselves.” Nixon, speech against McCarthy
Eisenhower kept acting as if a decision to intervene was in the process of being formed, but, as Nixon intuited, he was only going through the motions of making up his mind during hours of National Security Council meetings when he’d go around a long octagonal table asking for comment while he doodled—sometimes fiercely, often producing perfectly proportioned drawings of cups in saucers, and sometimes the faces of the participants, and occasionally poking his pencil through the paper.
“Does the man think of nothing else but politics?!” – Eisenhower on Nixon
“If Richard Nixon is not sincere, he is the most dangerous man in America.” – MLK Jr
Shortly after one-thirty, he was informed by his military aide, Brigadier General Robert Schulz, that President Kennedy had been shot. There was still something about General Eisenhower, now seventy-three, that made people turn to him for reassurance. A reporter asked, “General, will the nation be all right in the months ahead?”
On his seventy-eighth birthday, October 14, the Army band stood below his third-floor window and for fifteen minutes played some of his favorite tunes, including “The Yellow Rose of Texas” and “The Caissons Go Rolling Along.” When they got to “The Beer Barrel Polka,” Ike came to the window and kept time with a tiny flag that had five white stars on a dark background; it was the first time in six months that the public could see the general, who now weighed 148 pounds, and, as it turned out, it was the last time. All of this—the music and the sight and sound of people cheering—was enough to make him dab his eyes with a handkerchief.
He returned to New York on the weekend before the inaugural—January 20 fell on a Monday—and on that Sunday, Eisenhower telephoned. It was, he told Nixon, his last chance to say, “Hi, Dick!” After that, it was going to be “Mr. President.”
Paul Blart: Mall Cop, 2009. This is an….action-comedy somewhere on the level of Home Alone 3. It’s fairly moronic, with lots of “Kevin James is fat” esque physical comedy. The plot concerns a security guard at a mall (remember those?) foiling a bizarre plan by a gang that involves ….credit card fraud? Despite the fact that there’s only one kid in this, it felt like a kid’s movie because of the ludicrous plot and execution, not to mention the amount of skateboarding, biking, etc performed by the extremely large gang.
The King. The Mua’Dib plays Prince Hal, who his ailing father summons to court to inform that he is too much of a reprobate to inherit the throne of England: this is quickly superseded by reality when both the designated heir young Thomas, and the king, die from causes natural and non-. (Don’t feel sorry for young Thos, he was quite a brat.) Joel Edgerton appears as Falstaff, Hal’s man at arms, and Robert Pattinson appears as the French prince. Supposedly very loosely based on Shakespeare’s Henry plays, but that’s a bit like saying Apple’s Foundation was based on Asimov’s Foundation. Robert Pattinson as the French dauphin was a dreadful casting choice. Timothee gives a rousing speech that is not drawn from Shakespeare in the least. I loved the battle-scene visuals, especially the trebuchets at Harfleur, and the English army assembling at Agincourt.
Quotes:
Archbishop: Surely you don’t intend to idle here until they decide to come out. Falstaff: …that is, precisely, the definition of a ‘siege’.
Falstaff: I die here [at Agincourt] or I die over a bottle in Cheapside. This seems a better story.
Dauphin: Well, then, boy – let us make this field famous, this little field of Agincourt
LBJ, 2016. Woody Harrelson plays LBJ, and particularly his aspiration for presidential power in the context of the rise of the Kennedys, culminating in LBJ’s speech to Congress in which he effectively takes on Kennedy’s cause of civil rights as a memorial to the late president. The Brothers K are wonderfully snotty: Bobby is especially punchable. (I may have paused the movie so I could watch my favorite scene from Hoffa, in which Jimmy Hoffa gives RFK a verbal beatdown.) I couldn’t help but compare this to All the Way, the Brian Cranston movie in which Cranston plays LBJ pushing the Civil Rights bill through the Congress. Both of these movies demonstrate LBJ’s skills at political manipulation, but Harrelson’s portrayal is more ‘human’ in that it frequently shows an LBJ who is hurt, frustrated, etc – not just the pushy bully. In one scene, he handles the Kennedy cabinet’s resistance to him by retreating with ice cream and whisky. It’s an interesting study in character, in which a man who craves power is frustrated by the up-and-coming ‘new frontier’ generation, then gets another chance — but finds it poisoned by Kennedy’s death.
Undercover Blues, 1993. Dennis Quaid and Kathleen Turner are a married couple who are both James Bond types working for an undisclosed government agency, but they’re on maternity leave. Problem is, the world keeps turning and baddies keep plotting, so they wind up having to work with baby in hand. This is a comedy/action movie in which Stanley Tucci plays the comic relief, as a bungling back-alley robber who keeps stalking Quaid to get his revenge but gets humiliated every time. Watched with friends, and we immediately followed it with….
Zorro: The Gay Blade, 1981. Ehm…a Mexican don’s father dies, and the don learns that his father was the famed Zorro of legend. Donning the costume for a party, he is inspired to fight for truth and jootice for the peoples while speaking in an outrageous accent. After humiliating the local equivalent of Lord Farquad, the don injures himself while trying to escape and asks his brother, a ‘poof’, to assume the mantle while he heals. The brother is very flamboyant, shall we say, with a taste for loud costumes and a marked preference for the whip. This is another action comedy that adds a lot of absurd humor with the characters’ voices, accents, and grammar. (The don sounds like he’s trying to imitate Desi Arnez in I Love Lucy.) I spent the entire film not noticing that the same actor was playing both brothers, in part because their makeup and intonation was very different.
Thirteen Days, 2001. The Commies are putting missiles capable of nuking much of the southern United States in Cuba, and Kennedy and his boys have to find a way making the Reds see sense. Bruce Greenwood, whom I only know as Captain Pike (Star Trek 2009), here plays JFK, though his Bahston accident frequently disappears. Kevin Cosner’s is much more consistent, though I learned that he and Tom Hanks (who did a Boston brogue in Catch Me If You Can) sound weirdly alike when they’re doing that accent. I’m generally familiar with the way the Cuban missile crisis worked out, but I enjoyed the acting. Oddly, not Cosner’s only JFK-related film.
JFK, 1991. “Is that Jack Lemmon?!” “Gary Oldman?” “Joe Pesci?” “Walter Mathau?!” “Tommy Lee Jones in a hairpiece?!” “JOHN CANDY?” This is a long conspiracy-theory film about the JFK assassination, produced by Oliver Stone. I went into it knowing it played as fast and loose with the facts as most politicians, so I didn’t take any of its claims seriously. Technically, this is a very impressive film, especially the recreations of 1963 and 1966 Dallas and New Orleans – and there’s no shortage of acting talent. The movie is not simply a conspiracy theory in action, though: it delves into some serious territory, like the investigator’s effective alienation of his family as he sinks deeper and deeper into his obsession for The Truth. Unfun fact: while I was watching this, I started getting notifications about shots being fired at Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
Parkland, 2013. Do I need to watch another JFK fil- PAUL GIAMATTI! PLAY PLAY PLAY! Parkland is a drama based on the Kennedy assassination that centers on Abraham Zapruder, who was taping Kennedy’s visit to Dallas when he unwittingly documented history, and the hospital staff who tried to save JFK’s life despite the baseball-sized hole in his skull. Parkland Hospital also treats Lee Harvey Oswald after he’s shot by Jack Ruby. This was a much different approach to the story, one I rather liked.
Nixon, 1995. Oliver Stone again; Anthony Hopkins as Nixon with a great supporting cast, chiefly James Woods as Bob Haldeman, his chief of staff, and J.T. Walsh who portrays Ehrlichman. (Walsh was also in Hoffa to good effect.) The film is largely about Nixon’s longing for greatness and his frustration with the media and the DC establishment, which opposes and undermines him. It’s especially potent because he has a love-hate relationship: he’s a man who came from nothing, worked hard as hell to make it to the top, and wants to be taken seriously – but instead he’s treated with disdain. His anger and suspicion of the establishment (which he calls “the beast”) are especially triggered when the press bombards him with questions about some meaningless break-in while he’s expecting accolades for ending Vietnam, establishing a treaty with the Russians to start controlling the nuclear arms race, and establishing relations with the Chi-Coms. There’s a lot of really good camerawork here – circling characters to increase tension, or using skewed frames for the same. Some actors do phenomenal work, especially Sam Waterston as the CIA Ghoul in Chief.
Reading at a park attached to a public library while listening to kids play baseball. Ain’t spring fine? Montevallo, Alabama
What a month! Despite April being peak tornado season in Alabama, this year the skies were perfectly clement. Not until this past week, in fact, did we have any rumblings of tornadoes at all — seemingly all of our rain for the spring was dumped on us within a couple of days. If you are new to Reading Freely, April is always nominally devoted to English literature and English history, though some years have been misses on that front because of other passions. 2026, however, was fairly well on target with few strays. Not only did I do a fair bit of English history, finally getting into Dan Jones’ works proper, but I knocked out two bits of English lit that were also on my Classics Club list.
Read of England
Read of England began as my way of creating space to read Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, but over the years has largely been about English history and English historical fiction. This year, however, I read two classics of English lit and introduced myself to an intoxicating new-to-me author, Daphne du Maurier. I read:
Two English classics
Three other novels by English authors
and five England-related histories, including two Dan Jones
a du Maurier short story, “The Birds”, which was as weird as the Hitchcock movie that was based on it, but not quite as horrific as I wasn’t seeing birds dive-bomb schoolgirls.
and begin ANOTHER work by du Maurier, The Scapegoat. It’s currently competing with Richard Nixon for reading time.
America @ 250
I read three books about the American presidency: one on Lincoln’s assassination, a history of Camp David, and a review of American presidents as authors. I also watched an LBJ movie and three movies about JFK. I’m waiting on Moviewatch, though, as I think I can finish the Nixon biopic I started before a dogsitting stint.
New Acquisitions
While visiting my local indie bookstore, Fair Oaks Books, the proprietor used me as an excuse to get off the phone — “Excuse me, I have to go, I have a customer” — thus obliging me to actually buy something instead of drink coffee and swap gossip. Fortunately there were two Tom Wolfe books in the Two-for-a-dollar box, so I picked up Bonfire of the Vanities and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. (The following week he let me borrow Being Nixon as a thank-you for popping by to wish him Happy Independent Bookstores Day.) also bought used copies of Lincoln by Gore Vidal (a novel, part of his Empire series), Lee in the Shadow of Washington, and Maverick by Jason Riley, the latter being a biography of Thomas Sowell.
Coming in May…
There are at least four releases in May I’m looking forward to: the American-market release of GIRLS by Freya India, on Gen Z women and the dystopian digital world; End of the Road: Inside the War on Truckers; I Would Walk Five Hundred Miles, the latter a recounting by Sean Dietrich of his Camino experience; and Brad Birzer’s The Declaration of Independence: A Radical Experiment in Liberty.
Nonbook Commonplace Quotes
More profoundly, if we are prepared to accept that “reality” is whatever we choose it to be, by virtue of what we pay attention to, then what’s the limit? Arendt said that Hitler sold to his people not just a political program, but an entire picture of reality itself. It was a synthetic reality that delivered them from the miseries of Weimar’s humiliations, fragmentation, and loneliness. If you had told people ten, twenty years ago that we would have seemingly sane adults developing romantic relationships with AI lovers, they would not have believed you. Who would do such a thing? Now we know. […] The fact that Celeste does not care that she has developed a relationship to a machine is the most important thing about this. Her son is trying to make her understand that this is not real love, that there is something dangerous about this. But she doesn’t care. She wants what she wants. Personal happiness is her absolute telos.” Mom’s AI Lover, Or: That Hideous Chatbot. Rod Dreher.
What you lose when you’re not reading is that you become cocooned within your own experience, in a way that becomes narcissistic and claustrophobic. – Dominic Sandbrook, interview. “Does reading make you a better person?“
Today’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is “A Celebrity We’d Like to Meet”. Interestingly, one of my favorite authors (Rod Dreher) recently announced he’s returning to the United States, and has chosen Birmingham as his new residence for the time being. I’ve caught him twice at events in the Magic City, and I’m up there several times a month, so I’m hoping to see him more often. I’ve subscribed to his substack for years, and he wants to hang out with area readers, so that’s something to look forward to. And now, WWW Wednesday!
WHAT have you finished reading recently? Rebecca and “The Birds” by Daphne du Maurier.
WHAT are you reading now? Being Nixon by Evan Thomas and The Scapegoat, by du Maurier.
WHAT are you reading next? Being Nixon is going to keep me busy for a while, I think, as it’s six hundred pages and dense.
Today’s treble T is a freebie, and my initial impulse was to highlight some booktubers I enjoy. However, embedding videos is always hit and miss with youtube, so I’m going to highlight recent books in my browsing history.
But first, the Tuesday Tease!
Again and again the rockets sped into the air like arrows, and the sky became crimson and gold. Manderley stood out like an enchanted house, every window aflame, the gray walls colored by the falling stars. A house bewitched, carved out of the dark woods. REBECCA, Daphne du Maurier
Someone joltedmy elbow as I drank and said, “Je vous demande pardon,” and as I moved to give him space, he turned and stared at me and I at him, and I realized, with a strange sense of shock and fear and nausea all combined, that his face and voice were known to me too well. I was looking at myself. THE SCAPEGOAT, Daphne du Maurier
And now, window-shopping…two of these I’ve actually bought or borrowed, and several others are very tempting.
(1) Masters of the Planet, Ian Tatterstall. A work on human origins.
(2) Those Damned Rebels, a primary source look at how the British experienced the Revolutionary War.
(3) A Fierce Glory, a history of the battle of Antietam and its consequences.
(4) Being Nixon: A Man Divided, Evan Thomas.
(5) Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK, Gerald Posner. A large history written to rebuke conspiracy theories, but astonishingly not the largest. There’s a 1600 page book (Reclaiming History) written to address Oliver Stone’s JFK movie specifically.
(6) JFK and Vietnam, John Newman
(7) The Unexpected President, Scott Greenberger. On the life of Chester Arthur.
(8) How States Think, John Mearscheimer
(9) The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of US Primacy, Stephen Walt.
(10) Lincoln, Gore Vidal. The lone novel on this list! I’m thinking of trying his Narratives of Empire series of novels. It begins with Burr, but I’ve ordered the Lincoln book to start with.
“Do you think she can see us, talking to one another now?” she said slowly. “Do you think the dead come back and watch the living?
Imagine your life being so overwhelmed by other people’s memories of a woman that her name is emblazoned over your story — and still worse, you don’t have a name in your story, only the title that both you and she share. The future Mrs. de Winter is a young woman in service to a loud American one, serving as assistant while the American vacations in Monte Carlo. The young woman happens to meet a handsome stranger who takes an interest in her, and before her client can even recover from a cold, the lass and her mysterious gent are married. Upon arrival at her new home, Manderly, the new Mrs. de Winter finds herself not only horribly out of place — she has no idea how to be the lady of a great house — but feeling like an intruder. The staff all loved the former Mrs. de Winter, whose quarters are now closed, and the present Mrs DW finds herself trapped in the gravity of the hole the former’s death left. She has no idea, however, how deep and dark that hole can be. Rebecca is another immersive novel with a ‘stand up in shock’ type twist and a heck of an ending.
Although Rebecca has a slow start — our unnamed narrator hanging around enduring her boss talking down to her, then developing a friendship of sorts with Mr. de Winter, the man with the tragic past — once the action moves to Manderly it pulled me completely. Our narrator is a woman from humble circumstances; she wears flannel skirts, not crinolines, and even if the circumstances weren’t what they are, she’d be out of place. She’s a bit like Mr. Branson in Downton Abbey, the mechanic who had to suddenly adapt to living “upstairs”: many of the servants don’t take her seriously, especially the former maid to the late Rebecca de Winter, Mrs. Denvers. In addition to living in this grand home, made all the more intimidating by how the memory of Rebecca is an active presence within it, our narrator also has to try to fit into Cornwall society. They, too, remember Rebecca, and it’s not long before the narrator is an emotional wreck convinced she’s made the worst mistake of her life. And then, dear reader, it gets….all kinds of interesting, and turns into a mystery-thriller instead remaining a relationship drama. Many characters take on a new life in the second half, and those that were already mildly interesting become much more so — and the atmosphere at Manderly grows thick.
I wish someone had told me earlier that du Maurier was this fascinating! I’ve already started listening to “The Birds”, her short story that Hitchcock adapted into the famous movie, and am planning on giving The Scapegoat a look.
Quotations
We all of us have our particular devil who rides us and torments us, and we must give battle in the end.
“I suppose your ancestors often entertained royalty at Manderley, Mr. de Winter?” This was more than I had hitherto endured, even from her, but the swift lash of his reply was unexpected. “Not since Ethelred,” he said, “the one who was called Unready. In fact, it was while staying with my family that the name was given him. He was invariably late for dinner.”
It was an ancient mossy smell, the smell of a silent church where services are seldom held, where rusty lichen grows upon the stones and ivy tendrils creep to the very windows. A room for peace, a room for meditation.
Dear God, I did not want to think about Rebecca. I wanted to be happy, to make Maxim happy, and I wanted us to be together. There was no other wish in my heart but that. I could not help it if she came to me in thoughts, in dreams. I could not help it if I felt like a guest in Manderley, my home, walking where she had trodden, resting where she had lain. I was like a guest, biding my time, waiting for the return of the hostess. Little sentences, little reproofs reminding me every hour, every day.
“History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it,” said Winston Churchill, and write it he did – histories of the World Wars and the Anglo-American people. Across the pond, American executives were also doing their writing. Author-in-Chief is an oblique take on American presidents, examining them through the lens of literature and authorship. While most of the presidents’ books are directly tied to politics – being titles that were meant to introduce their authors to the voting public, or to offer a parting shot at defending their legacy – there are a few exceptions. The title is not comprehensive: Trump’s business books are almost entirely ignored, as are Carter’s many post-office works. (The Art of the Deal is mentioned twice, once to point out that the same editor who approved it also signed off on Obama’s Dreams from my Father.) The accounts of these men are grounded in an ongoing review of how the literary world was changing in America at the time – publishing becoming easier, books more common – until the contemporary era in which books take more and more of a backseat to electronic and digital mesmerization. The book is generally fair-minded and does not shy away from claims that Kennedy’s books were largely ghostwritten, despite the tendency of authors to shy away from critiques of martyrs like himself and MLK.
Frankly, I find the writing not connected to political aspirations far more interesting than the campaign books, because those are fairly predictable. I don’t read campaign books, myself, the only exception having been Ron Paul’s Revolution, and that was years after the election he wrote it for. Books associated with campaigns were used early in the 19th century, but were not the ghostwritten junk food we get today. Lincoln, for instance, published the transcripts of his multiple debates with Stephen Douglas, which went a long way to communicating not only his principles and values, but the thinking behind them. They were real arguments, not just the so-there! polemics we get every four years from hopefuls. Nonpolitical books include Theodore Roosevelt’s The Naval War of 1812, which was exhaustively researched, if sometimes pedantically written: the book was immediately purposed as a reference text on both sides of the pond. Roosevelt went on to write other titles, but he was never as diligent about them as his first work. Jefferson and Adams both produced works unrelated to their presidential ambitions: Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia began as a response to European allegations that everything in the New World was stunted compared to the Old World counterparts, and turns into a rambling text covering everything from natural philosophy to law in Virginia. Adams’ study of Republics through history was written to inform attempts to create a working Republic from the united States, though Adams’ approach was less synthesis than I thought: Fehrman writes that large portions of the book are Adams’ copying materials from other histories and adding commentary. Woodrow Wilson also penned several works on political theory and practice with an eye towards making American governance more parliamentary; later on, of course, he simply made it more authoritarian.
While several presidents wrote memoirs to defend themselves out of the gate, others like George H.W. Bush have patently refused. Bush appears to have regarded this kind of self-defense as beneath the office, contending instead that if he had gone good work, it would be appreciated later down the road by more objective historians. He referenced specifically the redemption of Harry Truman by David McCullough, an author who also went a long way to reviving interest in the life and legacy of John Adams. Interestingly, Michael Korda appears here as a young ghostwriter; these days he is a historian and biographer in his own right. The question of ghost-writing comes up a lot in the second half of this book, as every president from Kennedy onward has made use of one. This is not always to their benefit: Fehrman argues that Reagan’s first attempt at biography, Where’s the Rest of Me, was far superior to An American Life in that it conveyed his personality, his own style. The production of An American Life was also hindered by Reagan’s spotty memory. Obama receives a large section towards the end of the book, in part because he was a man formed by literature, especially fiction, and saw it as a valuable way to get inside the heads of people he would see as otherwise alien. Like Kennedy, his early writings gave him name recognition and pushed him toward politics even before he’d started thinking about it. (Kennedy was so fixated on winning a Pulitzer prize that he forwarded a list of the nominees committee to his father, assuming the Kennedy don would ply wallets or twist arms as needed to get it done.)
This was a fun book. I liked seeing the presidents in this literary context, and not simply because I’m a huge reader myself. I’m the sort of person who always beelines for the library in someone’s home, enjoying the insights one gets into people from the books they bring into their homes and minds. To me, seeing these men as earnest authors – as men who wanted to write, who sometimes viewed writing as more personally compelling than even their ambitions – was fascinating. Sometimes it was a means to an end: the men might simply want the cachet that being An Author conveyed. This was apparently true of Kennedy and Teddy, though T.R. was also obsessed with doing the best work possible and delivering a definitive history of his subject. If Obama saw reading as a valuable way to get into the minds of others, he saw writing as a way to better clarify his own thinking: I very much resonated with this, as writing is the way I better ‘inwardly digest’ books.
Quotations
Short, bald, a quill pen stuck in his hat, Weems traveled the countryside in a book-laden wagon he dubbed the Flying Library. Whenever he pulled into a town, he hollered out: “Seduction! Revolution! Murder!” It was a strange thing for a former Episcopalian minister to say.
Jefferson needed books to think, legislate, and persuade. To him, the tools of a writer and the tools of a politician were the same.
Jefferson’s early retirement frustrated his friends. “The present,” James Monroe wrote in an acerbic letter, “is generally conceived to be an important era.”
No one ever described Adams as a writer better than Adams did himself. In another letter to Jefferson, he summed up his style by alluding to a lush mountain in The Iliad: “Whenever I sit down to write to you,” the author confided, “I am precisely in the situation of the woodcutter on Mount Ida: I cannot see wood for trees. So many subjects crowd upon me that I know not with which to begin.” So Adams, as both a writer and a reader, would wander, chopping for a while on this tree, then trimming a branch on that one, then deciding to plant a sapling in the clearing up ahead.
“To be wholly overlooked,” [Adams] once wrote, “and to know it, are intolerable.”
During lectures, [Theodore] Roosevelt would interrupt and interrogate his professors. One resorted to pleading, “Now look here, Roosevelt, let me talk. I’m running this course.”
“I am going to begin to be a historian again,” Wilson said, “and I am going to have the privilege of writing about these gentlemen without any restraints of propriety.”
Ex-presidents had plenty of ways to make a buck—endorsement deals, consulting fees, marketing stunts—but Truman rejected all of them. He hated the thought of doing something that would exploit or demean the executive branch, and that standard applied to underfunded ex-presidents as well. “I’d rather starve,” he said.
Reagan’s literary side even popped up in his movies. In 1952, he starred in She’s Working Her Way through College, a musical about a burlesque dancer trying to get an education (and to overcome some ugly stereotypes). Reagan played a professor who gives a speech denouncing bias in all its forms, and when he didn’t like the speech in the script, he rewrote it himself. Studio head Jack Warner couldn’t believe it. “What’s this I hear,” he demanded of the director, “about you letting a damned actor write his own speeches?” Then Warner watched Reagan’s version: “You win.”
The narrative of his life, told in his books and best speeches, often felt like the key to his appeal. “We’re not running against a real person,” one of Hillary Clinton’s staffers complained in 2008. “We are running against a story.”
During the 2012 campaign, Herman Cain was accused of running for president to boost his book sales. “If you know Herman Cain, you know nothing is further from the truth,” he replied. “And if you don’t believe me, I invite you to get a copy of my new book, This Is Herman Cain!”
Reading Freely 