Author in Chief

Posted on April 24, 2026 by smellincoffee

“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!”

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Inside Camp David

Posted on April 23, 2026 by smellincoffee

President Herbert Hoover found himself homesick during his term in office in D.C, and decided to buy some land with his own money to develop as a mountain retreat. While security concerns did add some infrastructure, like telephone lines, the creation of Camp Rapidan was solely a personal project — though one Hoover intended to gift to presidents who followed him. Roosevelt, who did follow him, found Rapidan too rough for his own needs, but liked the idea. So was born a new camp in a more attractive location, some two hours from D.C. and largely isolated. Thus Shangri-La was born, and ever since then it has been — despite a name change — a retreat for presidents and an attractive locale to host world leaders. Inside Camp David is written by a former commander of the camp, who served during the tail end of the Clinton years and the beginning of the George W. years, and folds in stories about presidents at the camp inside Giorgione’s own personal memoirs. While formal history has been made at Camp David, this is chiefly of interest to those curious about the camp itself, and the parts of the presidents that were revealed in this more casual, rustic setting. Who would ever guess that Bill Clinton liked being a choirboy on Sunday mornings?

This was not a topic I had a huge interest in, but one day while taking lunch at work I realized I didn’t have a book to read: fortunately, I work in a library, so I grabbed something off the shelf that lent itself well to cozy lunch reading. I do have a fascination for the presidency that other libertarians probably find suspicious, so I was fairly quickly pulled in. I was surprised to learn that the camp is operated by the US Navy, and this owes in part to the odd way that the idea of a retreat was formed. Franklin D. Roosevelt liked the idea of a camp, but he much preferred relaxing on the presidential yacht, the USS Potomac. The outbreak of World War 2 forced him to claim a Works Progress Administration park, newly built, and christen it “Shangri-La”, transferring crew from the Potomac to serve as its staff. To this day, the camp has a naval officer in charge of operations, and the entire staff — from servers to groundskeepers — are bonafide members of the Navy, many of them Seabees who are doing work like planting flowers that they’re absurdly overqualified for. Although the camp has witnessed history itself — being used by Roosevelt to conduct the war, even hosting Churchill, and later being the setting of the Camp David Accords — more interesting for me was how the men themselves and their families used the place.

Like their employment of vice presidents, presidents have varied widely on how they use Camp David. Ronald Reagan loved the place, visiting most weekends he was in office: it probably helped that it gave the equestrian a place to ride regularly. Reagan’s use of Camp David is also notable in that he preferred coming alone, without the large family and friends entourages that marked other presidents who visited less, like the Clintons. For virtually every president who visits, it’s a place of relaxation — a place where their days are unscripted and they can ride, shoot, or bike at their pleasure. (One notable exception is LBJ, who viewed it as just another workspace.) The isolation allows for presidents to get away with things they couldn’t otherwise do, like drive themselves, or teach their kids to drive. Giorgione remarks that the lessening of pressure allows for presidents and first families to let their hair down — making jokes with the staff or even forgetting the eyes on them. (Gerald Ford introduced himself to camp staff as “Gerry”.) While White House memoirs I’ve read consistently mention that Hillary Clinton was a …pill, let’s say, she is evidently more pleasant company at Camp David or the commander didn’t see fit to comment. As close as he comes is noting that LBJ was demanding about his showers, and that George W. frequently wore staff out with his love of biking, running, etc. Dick Cheney also appears in a mis-step: he arrived at Camp David during 9/11 and said that the president had said for him to be put up in Aspen Cabin, the presidential suite. When Bush returned to Washington, he was not pleased that Cheney had taken over his bedroom.

This was a fun look into a place I knew literally nothing about before. I enjoy books that allow me to see the presidents more as people than politicians, especially given that there are some politicians I have strong opinions about and don’t particularly like disliking as much as I do.The book is good about showing that human side for most everyone covered here, and the camp itself is such an odd operation there’s intrinsic interest in learning about it. There were bits of trivia I found fascinating, like the number of foreign dignitaries who have an interest in seeing nearby Gettysburg Battlefield when they visit, and the absurd degrees that the White House goes to appease foreign visitors. Reagan allowed the Russians to replace the phone system at Camp David with their own during peace talks, and the women in the camp staff, as well as their children, were asked not to go outside wearing shorts, swimsuits, or anything too revealing as a way of showing their respect to Clinton’s Palestinian guests. Said guests returned the favor by going commando under their open robes and driving golf carts all over the flower gardens, paved paths made for the purpose apparently being marks of western decadence. Honestly, what’s the point of being the global superpower if you’re going to let terrorists destroy the tulips?

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WWW Wednesday & Memories

Posted on April 22, 2026 by smellincoffee

Today’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is, “A few happy memories from my life”. But first. WWW Wednesday!

WWW Wednesday

WHAT have you finished reading recently? Magna Carta, Dan Jones.

WHAT are you reading now? Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier. A third through and picking up steam. I think the earliest part was the slowest. I also started reading Inside Camp David yesterday when I realized I’d forgotten Rebecca at home. It strikes me as a fairly fast read.

WHAT are you reading next? I may take a look at Mansfield Park. It’s on my CCII list and would be an appropriate way to start closing April out. I’ll also be getting into Author in Chief, I think, a study of presidents who write. (Yes, inspired by Inside Camp David. No, I’m not planning on a sudden presidential obsession like the one of summer-fall 2023. No, “not planning” doesn’t mean a thing at RF, just like “planning” only rarely means something.)

Long and Short: Happy Memories

My happiest memories tend to congregate around 2007-2010, when I went off to a full university. I was leaving behind a past that had become difficult and degrading, and going to college was a genuine escape. Imagine Harry Potter going to Hogwarts for the first time and you’ll have some idea: in fact, I wrote in my journal that my residence hall, Napier, “was no Gryffindor, but it will do”. I was young, idealistic, and optimistic about the future: I lived on a beautiful campus with constant intellectual and artistic stimulation at the ready, and a group of friends whom I argued and stargazed and hiked with often. Perhaps it was simply because college is a special time of life, or perhaps it was because the campus and the town were designed for humans rather than cars: I could walk anywhere, and did, making a weekly habit of toddling down to the local public library for books. I was around people I knew and liked every day; we never planned to meet up, we just did, and I ate with friends nearly every day. Even when I was alone, there was quiet contentment to be found in curling up in a secluded corner of the university library to read or work on a paper. When I left Montevallo, I made it my purpose to recapture as much of this magic as I could, cultivating community and connection. COVID and the tornado that gutted my city have both made that a challenge, but I still find it — sitting on porches with families and friends with stories and laughs, settling under a tree with a great long book, etc. And then ther have been more extraordinary moments, like watching the sun set over St. Augustine, watching it rise over Santa Fe & the Grand Canyon, or sitting in the surf in Pensacola, hypnotized by the power of the waves.

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Harry Potter and the Epic Backstory

Posted on April 21, 2026 by smellincoffee

Let us step into the night and pursue that flighty temptress, adventure.

Half-Blood Prince and Prisoner of Azkaban routinely compete for my favorite HP novel, and for similar reasons — humor and backstory. It is far, far more than that, however: Prisoner of Azkaban had both in spades, but HBP is a different beast altogether. It is the book that ushers Harry through the end of his youth and lays on him the mantle of adulthood and responsibility — not because he turns 17, but because events in motion are ushering in the Endgame. HBP marks itself as different from the beginning, opening not at Privet Drive but in the offices of the prime minister. The PM is aghast to be visited by the “other” minister — the Minister for Magic — and informed that Voldemort is indeed among the living, and that the strange streak of deadly weather and disappearances and deaths owes to the magical world’s new war bleeding into his own. We then visit Death-Eaters before finally returning to Harry, who is snatched away by Dumbledore on a mission. Harry and Dumbledore on a mission is a recurring theme of this book, because Voldemort’s rise means Dumbledore must redouble his efforts — and recruit Harry as an ally — in his very secret plan to strike at the heart of Voldemort’s dark power. This is a novel rich in story, in laughs and heartbreak. For me, it has pushed the full-cast audio books into new terrain — I am growing to see them more and more as the optimum way to experience the story of Harry Potter.

If The Goblet of Fire eased us into the exit of normality onto the freeway of Intense Magical Drama, one whose stress we experienced more intensely by virtue of being crammed into a little car with Dolores Umbridge, in Half Blood Prince we are fully in the thick of things. School is happening in the background, yes, and in fact Harry has an interesting school year. His nemesis Snape has finally gotten the promotion he’s long desired, to teach Defense against the Dark Arts, and Harry has a new potions teacher (Horace Slughorn) who was quite fond of Harry’s mother. Better yet, Harry uses an old textbook with annotations from the previous owner, a boy who was something of a potions savant, and grows in confidence now that he’s no longer being brow-beaten by Snivelus. Quidditch continues apace, as well. But Half Blood Prince has a far more serious undercurrent that continues growing stronger with every chapter until towards the end when all the minor chatter about exams and House Cups is swept away by Dumbledore and Harry’s quest to understand the rise of Voldemort — and his rebirth. What led to the young Tom Riddle becoming the dark wizard he was, and why did Voldemort seem to die in the attempt to kill Harry, only to be reborn? The answers lie in the particular dark arts that Voldemort was pursuing: this is hardly a spoiler, given that his name means ‘flight from death’ and his followers call themselves Death-Eaters. I won’t go into spoilers, of course, but in the last fifth of this book Dumbledore introduces Harry to a theory he has regarding Voldemort’s approach to defeating death, an approach they must frustrate by research, hard work, suffering, and boldness. The battle against Voldemort will not be bloodless, not even at this early stage.

Shifting now to the audio: the new voice actors are good, especially the man (Bill Nighy) voicing Slughorn. He had a rough mark to beat, as I adore Jim Broadbent’s Slughorn (despite being more morally dodgy than his book version) , and he also has a demanding performance. A running part of the book is Dumbledore sharing memories from various people with Harry regarding Voldemort’s rise, and Slughorn unwittingly played a large part of who Voldemort came — something he’s very ashamed of. Harry is tasked with getting Slughorn to share the memory with him, and Slughorn is extremely defensive and emotionally touchy in general about this. He loved Harry’s mom and feels partially responsible for her death, so there’s a lot of emotion work here: there’s also a drunken singing scene with Hagrid, which is hilarious. I don’t know if the lyrics are in the actual book, but at one point Harry is thinking and Slughorn and Hagrid are besottedly pouring themselves into some wizard folk song, and despite knowing what darkness the reader is in for, I couldn’t help but be tickled. There’s an incredible amount of emotion work throughout this book, actually, and the atmospherics are top notch as possible. Toward the end there is an extended bit of dialogue in a tower where there’s a fight going on below, and as the scene progresses we can hear the fight getting closer, closer, closer, and while the emotion in the room is rising we can also feel the stress and pressure that the combat is putting on the people in the tower. They’re all circling around action, but not yet taking the leap.

This was quite the performance: the more of these I listen to the more addictive and compelling I find them, so I wind up sitting in the car after I get home from work just trying to make it to the end of the chapter, or falling asleep with the story playing and then waking up in the middle of the night to turn it off so I can get some sleep. I really cannot recommend the full cast audio editions enough, and I almost dread the arrival of Deathly Hallows because it means this exquisite ride is almost over. Yes, I will be listening to the stories again, but there’s nothing, nothing like that first time. It makes me think of the month I got into Red Dead Redemption 2, and I wound up playing the last two chapters through nearly in one weekend, not because I was in a hurry to finish but because the story was so good I kept wanting to wade in deeper despite knowing the faster I went the sooner I’d find myself rather rudely deposited back in the real world. This is simply masterful and deeply human entertainment.

Quotations

“I don’t mean to be rude – ” he began, in a tone that threatened rudeness in every syllable.
“ – yet, sadly, accidental rudeness occurs alarmingly often,” Dumbledore finished the sentence gravely. “Best to say nothing at all, my dear man.”

“What have you been doing to that book, you depraved boy?’
‘It isn’t the library’s, it’s mine!’ said Harry hastily, snatching his copy of Advanced Potion-Making off the table as she lunged at it with a clawlike hand.
‘Despoiled!’ she hissed. ‘Desecrated! Befouled!’
‘It’s just a book that’s been written in!’ said Harry, tugging it out of her grip.

“Do you remember when I said we were practicing nonverbal spells, Potter?”
“Yes.”
“‘Yes. sir.'”
“There’s no need to call me ‘sir’, professor.”

“I am not worried, Harry. I am with you.”

“Think your little jokes’ll help you on your deathbed?”
“Jokes? No,no, these are manners.”

“Tonks deserves someone young, and whole.”
“But she wants YOU, Remus.”

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Tuesday Teases

Posted on April 21, 2026 by smellincoffee

Today’s TTT is ‘April showers’, which a challenging one. One obvious approach that comes to mind is books in which rain is a major element, either in shaping the plot or in creating an atmosphere. The problem is that I can’t really think of any off-hand, and I don’t want to do weather nonfiction because I’m fairly certain I’ve done that for a list before…so I’m going to have to bow out of this one!

Edit: Marianne of Let’s Read just did a Top Five Tuesday hosted by Meeghan Reads, and their topic is politics which I think TTT has always steered clear of.

(1) Go Directly to Jail: The Criminalization of Everything, Gene Healy. Several essays on how the rapid expansion of federal crimes not only creates injustice by ruining lives for petty, bureaucratic matters, but distorts services in ways that diminish the lives of everyone.

(2) Saving Congress from Itself, James L. Buckley. Argues that Congress is overwhelmed by petty work — listening to committee reports on grants-in-aid — and spends very little time on issues of national interest, and none in defending its Constitutional prerogatives from the executive branch.

(3) The Iron Web, Larken Rose. This is a fascinating thriller that is also a political dialogue; a teenager and a wounded Federal agent find themselves living in the compound of a so-called terrorist group/extremist cult, which is engaged in a Waco-style standout with armed goonie boys. As the standoff proceeds, the teenager and the agent both have arguments with the ‘terrorists’ about politics: the thriller part has a heck of a twist ending. This heavily favors voluntarist politics.

(4) Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed, James Scott. This is one of the more conceptually interesting books I’ve ever read: one of its recurring themes is that the state seeks to increase the ‘legibility’ of things in order that it might better control them. This is, of course, EXTREMELY relevant in the data age: every bit of information that corporations and the government hoover up about us makes it possible for them to render us more legible/known/transparent. Scott also points out that the process of making things more legible often destroys or diminishes them.

(5) The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, Jonathan Haidt. One of my best reads ever. Its precis, shared in my review:

Jonathan Haidt delves into the nature of morality, following the pursuit of it from philosophy to evolutionary psychology. Haidt produces three core ideas: one, David Hume was correct in positing that people are more intuitive than rational; two, moral concerns don’t have a singular source, but fall along six separate axes, each derived from our natural history, despite being couched in flourished religious and philosophical language; and finally, that morality is double-edged sword, binding us with one another as well as against others

Teaser Tuesday

Richard would become one of the most celebrated kings in British history; he remains the only monarch to be commemorated with a statue outside the Houses of Parliament. This is ironic, for of all the kings who reigned after the Norman Conquest, Richard probably spent the least time – and took the least personal interest – in his English kingdom. MAGNA CARTA, Dan Jones

I’m being rather a brute to you, aren’t I? This isn’t your idea of a proposal. We ought to be in a conservatory, you in a white frock with a rose in your hand, and a violin playing a waltz in the distance. And I should make violent love to you behind a palm tree. You would then feel then you were getting your money’s worth.” REBECCA, Daphne du Maurier

(Some phrases…..change meaning after a century or so…)

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Magna Carta

Posted on April 20, 2026 by smellincoffee
I knew it was 1216! One after Magna Carta! As I could ever make such a mistake. Never!

In a sunny meadow in southern England stands a quiet monument commemorating a document signed there centuries ago: the Magna Carta. The monument is erected not by some English historical society, however, but by the American Bar Association. The Magna Carta, or Great Charter, has had a fascinating life, famed more in legacy than in its own day. Dan Jones’ Magna Carta is not simply a history of how the Great Charter came to be: his Realm Divided covered that fairly well. Instead, it is both a history of how the Charter came to be created and how it grew to be a legend in the annals of the Anglo-American world — regarded as the foundation of law beyond the king’s arbitrary authority. It’s a short book, with over half its physical body being composed of appendices. Interestingly, the story begins with John’s father Henry II, who created an increasingly efficient machine in the English state for conducting business and extracting money from the populace; this machine would be put to especially good use by Richard II, who I was surprised to learn spent vanishingly little time in England proper. John, too, would take advantage of it both for his own causes and when Richard was taken hostage and needed to pay off his European captors. A recurring theme here is the absolute faithlessness of monarchs to their people, family to family — John was trying to help the French undermine his brother, only to later be bitten by serpent he’d nursed when Phillip II seized all of the Angevin dynasty’s French holdings — and the barons and their king. One can understand the barons wanting to strike against the king, but soliciting the French who have already taken the barons’ “home” of Normandy? Frankly, if it weren’t for the very brief mention of Thomas Becket in this, there’d be no one to root for at all. The last twenty pages of the text concerns the ‘afterlife’ of Magna Carta: evidently in the 13th century it was continually modified and re-issued, and then fell into disuse, but then during the Enlightenment era when liberalism first became a political force, both Englishmen at home and in the American colonies seized on it as an ancestral inspiration for their own desire to reign in power via the law, and its reputation has been ballooning ever since.

This was in short a brief, but interesting little history.

Quotations

It is true that at times John was no less ruthless than his brother Richard, nor any less manipulative than his father, Henry. But if his relatives shared some of his worst traits, he shared almost none of their best. […] Ralph of Coggeshall lived through John’s reign and despaired of the king, pointing out his cruelty, his small-minded viciousness, his threatening manner and his childish habits of ridiculing his subjects and laughing at their misfortunes.

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Clouds of Glory

Posted on April 18, 2026 by smellincoffee

General Lee has long fascinated me as a man who did not believe in secession, but was compelled by his sense of honor and Fate to become an icon of the war which followed. He is, of course, an idol in the white South, a legend on par with George Washington. Although Lee, like Washington, sensed that he was being deified in his own lifetime — during the war, in fact — and purposely began trying to live up to being a secular saint — Clouds of Glory is a substantial biography that shows us the man he was before he belonged to the ages. While I expected to be in good hands with Michael Korda, I did not realize how quickly seven hundred pages could go by: my previous Korda works have been perfectly enjoyable, but much smaller. Clouds of Glory is not only eminently readable, but has a perfect mix of praise and criticism.

Although Lee hailed from a family with the bluest of blood in America, and his father was a hero of the Revolutionary War, he entered his adult life in very humble circumstances. His father’s signal accomplishments on the field of battle did not translate at all to business, and bad investments were made worse by profligate spending. When Robert was two years old, in fact, his father was put in debtors’ prison for bankruptcy. While we don’t truly know how much Robert knew about his father’s tendency to outspend his income, it’s worth noting that Lee was scrupulous about controlling his own spending and putting away money for tomorrow. He would seek his life’s work in the US Army, earning such high marks at West Point that he was shifted into the engineering corps — then an elite service, and one he’d prepared himself for by poring over math textbooks long before admission to the point. Lee did well in the Army, or at least as well as one could do in peacetime: one of his signal achievements was the saving of St. Louis’ river port, and during the Mexican war he would perform ably. His status as an engineer did not mean he worked in some office scribbling away at paperwork: instead, he risked life and limb scouting for the Army during Taylor and then Polk’s war. Korda notes that aggression and movement were already part of his military philosophy, perhaps the fruit of him avidly studying the life of Napoleon. (L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace!) It is in this early part of the book that readers are treated to an altogether different Lee than we expect — a handsome, confident engineer with a talent for painting and drawing, and a love of teasing and flirting with the ladies that he and his wife corresponded with.

Although Lee grew up accustomed to slavery as part of life in Virginia, his father’s financial difficulties meant that slaves were not a large part of Lee’s life, aside from a couple of house servants who are mentioned.Korda writes that Lee did not like slavery, and hoped like Washington and Jefferson before him that it would disappear — though he had no idea how that might be effected without creating other problems. Once his father-in-law died and Lee suddenly found himself being responsible for hundreds of slaves and several estates in disrepair, his attitude toward slavery and slaves grew even dimmer. Lee didn’t have to worry about the pains of estate management for very long, as he soon had bigger problems. Sectional dispute in the States had been brewing for years, and finally came to a head when the abolitionist Republican party came into power thanks to the inability of the Democratic party to find a candidate who could represent both its northern and southern members. South Carolina finally did what it had been threatening to do for forty years, and seceded, followed by a few other Deep South states. While Lee did not believe in secession, he could not countenance his government making war against his country — of Lincoln calling for troops to invade the South by way of Virginia. Resigning his commission when Virginia seceded in response to Lincoln’s call for troops, he declared he would not raise his sword again except in defense of Virginia. Considering that Virginia was to be the primary battleground of the War — the place whose homes were burned, whose crops were wasted, whose cattle were destroyed, etc — he would soon be quite busy.

The bulk of this work (60%) follows Lee during the war, as he first served Jefferson Davis as an advisor and pseudo-secretary of war, then later found himself commanding the whole of the Army of Northern Virginia and involved in most of the war’s most recognized battles. The problem facing Lee and Davis was of defending a State that offered five broad avenues for invasion, and Lee’s talents and experience as an engineer came in handy throughout the conflict– though arguably, and tragically, after Gettysburg they served only to delay the inevitable and prolong the bloodshed and suffering. As Lee settled into command, he was blessed with some very capable men, several of whom he shared close bonds with: Stonewall Jackson, for instance, seemed to know exactly what he wanted and would engage in his own bouts of daring to accomplish the mission. Unfortunately, the easy understanding between the two men appears to have spoiled Lee some: when he engaged in his first large-scale battle after Jackson’s death, the general found himself struggling to communicate his strategy effectively to his corps commanders. It didn’t help that at least two of them (Hill and Longstreet) were reluctant to fight around Gettysburg, especially seeing as the cavalry under J.E.B. Stuart were off joy-riding instead of giving Lee some idea of where the Yankees were. That Gettysburg went as well as it did for the Confederacy (prior to the attack on the Angle) is a testament to the fighting men themselves, as the Confederate army stumbled into the Union army piecemeal.Korda believes that the defeat at Gettysburg, and particular Lee’s calm demeanor afterwards, accepting responsibility for the defeat and comforting the soldiers streaming back from the bloody ridge, played a large part in turning Lee into an icon of grace and leadership under fire. Even in defeat, he somehow inspired loyalty and affection. Unfortunately for him, even when Confederate hopes were riding high in 1862 and early 1863, the Confederate army simply didn’t have enough men to capitalize on its victories against the Union army. It could break lines and send them running, but the Union could always retreat, regroup, refill its ranks with new conscripts, and come again — whereas the Confederates were often so hard-up for supplies they depended on victories just to refill ammunition from Union stores.

I’m very familiar, of course, with the war in the Eastern theater, so I read this primarily for deeper insight into Lee’s early life. Even so, it is impossible to not admire him and his behavior as the war progressed — a man who refused invitations to dine and sleep in civilians’ homes more often than not, who preferred to remain with his soldiers even when they were bivouacking very near Lee’s family. There is first and foremost a great sense of humility in the man: when he ordered a Confederate uniform for himself, he chose a simple one that was appended with the highest rank he’d earned in the Union army — that of colonel. Like Washington, he earned fame and glory by eschewing it, by withdrawing from acclaim and devoting himself to quiet service and grace under fire. Unlike other generals who lived through the war — Longstreet and Grant, say — he did not write his memoirs, instead spending his postwar years as the president of a university until his passing. What I liked about this, though, is that Korda was unafraid to criticize his subject — particularly Lee’s shying away from personal conflict, which caused issues in and outside of war.

This was an excellent biography, one that gave me a deeper appreciation of ol’ “Marse Robert”, and humanized him beautifully as a man and father who was beset by conflicting values and loyalties, and worked his way through them as best he could. It is difficult for the modern mind to really get into the boots of those in the 19th century whose values are different than our own — people who were morally compromised by the system they were born into, but who nonetheless took things like honor and duty more seriously than we can imagine. I think Korda is able to communicate much of that, and he keeps his focus on the man rather than letting his life be overwhelmed by the war which nonetheless defined him.

Quotations

“I enjoyed the mountains as I rode along. The views are magnificent — the valleys so beautiful, the scenery so peaceful. What a glorious world Almighty God has given us. How thankless and ungrateful we are, and how we labor to mar his gifts.”

The bond of trust between Lee and Jackson, forged at a distance, was to become one of the most important weapons in the arsenal of the Confederacy. “If Lee was the Jove of the war, Stonewall Jackson was his thunderbolt. For the execution of the hazardous plans of Lee, just such a lieutenant was indispensable.”

McClellan’s problem was not that he lacked courage or skill; it was that he excelled at building up an army that was neat, tidy, disciplined, and equipped in every detail, and having done so he could not bear to see it destroyed.

Lee’s imperturbability was one of the Army of Northern Virginia’s most important weapons — his appearance polite and visibly unafraid, near the firing line, encouraged his soldiers, and no doubt shamed many soldier who did fear into courageous behavior. He did not have Napoleon’s flair for the dramatic gesture; instead, it was Lee’s impassivity that impressed the etroops: his calm courage and his confidence in victory.

Stuart saw no activity on the part of McClellan, nor indeed did the White House, to the growing irritation the President. Lincoln had taken to referring to the Army of the Potomac unflatteringly as “McClellan’s bodyguard”.

At almost that moment the sun came out, “as if the ready war god rang up the curtain on the scene set for slaughter, and against the vast backdrop of the gun-studded hills of Stafford, the whole stage was disclosed, from the upper fringe of Fredericksburg’s streets to the distant gray meadows in front of Hamilton’s Crossing.” There was something deeply theatrical about that moment. It was not surprising. Again and again the Civil War produced scenes of grandeur that imprinted themselves on the minds of countless men on both sides of the conflict.

To Lee, and to every senior Confederate officer present, it was a moment of awe — this, after all, was their army, the army that they attended West Point to serve in, and whose uniform they had worn in Mexico or on the frontier, lined up in perfect formation with a precision that would have satisfied the most demanding of drill sergeants, and about to march straight toward them over open ground, in the face of 306 Confederate cannons, which had been carefully sited, dug in, and ranged to receive them. It can only have been with mixed emotions that Lee watched them dress their lines for an attack he knew must fail.

In retrospect, the defeats of Gettysburg and Vicksburg seem to mark the point at which the defeat of the Confederacy became only a matter of time, although there would be almost as many casualties on both sides in the two years after Gettysburg as in the three years preceding it, and vastly more civilian deaths.

Southerners had made him into a symbol for which they were fighting, and they recognized his constant, calm acceptance of God’s will. A nation besieged needs a powerful national myth to keep it fighting, and Lee became, however unwittingly, the personification of that myth. Jefferson Davis might have his people’s respect, but Lee held their trust and affection — he was, and would remain, what they wanted to see in themselves.

Although Lee seldom touched wine or liquor, he was not immune to the intoxication of battle: “His face was aflame and his eyes were on the enemy in front.” The spectacle of the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia eagerly spurring Traveller ahead of a brigade of Texans toward a Union infantry line now only 150 yards distant apparently attracted the attention of soberer spirits among those infantrymen who suddenly recognized him, and they shouted, “Go back, General Lee, go back!” Beneath the calm exterior, he hid the spirit of a beserker; the blood of Light-House Harry Lee ran in his veins.

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My Cousin Rachel

Posted on April 16, 2026 by smellincoffee

Phillip and Ambrose had a good thing going: Phillip was largely raised by his older cousin, a man with twenty years on him and a tremendous unease around women that he passed on to his ward. They lived in Ambrose’ country estate in Cornwall, staffed only by men, and Ambrose took a particular delight in inviting guests to put their boots up on the table if they’d like: there were no wives or maids to fuss here! Then Ambrose, wintering in Italy, wrote with news: he’d met an Englishwoman in Florence from their own country, and she shared his passion for gardens! — and, they were to be married. The old bachelor had at last struck his colors. As a year without Ambrose passes, Phillip begins worrying about the future of their bachelor’s mess, but then receives a series of increasingly disturbing letters that force him to travel to Italy himself. There he learns, to his dismay, that Ambrose is dead — but Phillip suspects that something rotten has been going on in the state of Florence. He returns home, despondent and suspicious, but then is surprised to learn that his cousin’s widow is coming to see him. With suspicion in his heart, he waits for her like a hunter in a blind — but it is he who is struck, by Cupid.

My Cousin Rachel drew me in almost immediately with its air of malice and mystery, flecked with humor: I don’t think I’ve ever read a classic that captivated me so quickly. In this, du Maurier accomplishes doing to the reader what Phillip’s cousin Rachel did to Ambrose — and then to him. Her depiction of their banter and growing affection struck me as perfect, a happy drifting into a serious bond — and yet this is not merrie tale of love and happiness wrested from death. It’s extremely Gothic in terms of setting and the air of menace, mystery, and wonder that hangs over the text regardless of setting. In fact, I don’t know that I’ve ever read anything that hit that quality more, despite reading classic gothic tales like Frankenstein and Greg Iles’ southern gothic novels. One character uses the word enchantment, and it’s extremely apt — his cousin Rachel simply has that effect, but enchantments can go either way, as C.S. Lewis reminded us. Part of the fun of reading this is the delicious tension in the mystery, and the reader’s growing conviction that something is awry, but the inability to get off the primrose path.

This was delicious, and I plan on returning to du Maurier again with Rebecca as soon as I’ve gotten a term paper out of the way.

Quotations

The point is, life has to be endured, and lived. But how to live it is the problem.

There is no going back in life. There is no return. No second chance. I cannot call back the spoken word or the accomplished deed, sitting here, alive and in my own home, anymore than poor Tom Jenkyn could, swinging in his chains.

“I never thought,” said my godfather slowly, “to see you grow so hard. What has happened to you?”
“Nothing has happened to me,” I said, “save that, like a young warhorse, I smell blood. Have you forgotten my father was a soldier?”

A halo can be a lovely thing, providing you can take it off, now and again, and become human.

“Really, cousin Rachel, you might protect me. Why not tell these gossips I’m a recluse and spend all my spare time scribbling Latin verses? That might shake them.”
“Nothing will shake them,” she answered. “The thought that a good-looking young bachelor should like solitude and verse would make you sound all the more romantic. These things whet appetite.”

“If it’s warmth and comfort that a man wants, and something beautiful to look upon, he can get all that from his own house, if he loves it well.” To my astonishment she laughed so much at my remark that Tamlyn and the gardeners, working at the far end of the plantation, raised their heads to look at us.
“One day,” she said to me, “when you fall in love, I shall remind you of those words. Warmth and comfort from stone walls, at twenty-four. Oh, Philip!” And the bubble of laughter came from her again.

When the men brought the new lead piping to be placed against the walls, to serve as guttering from the roof to the ground, and the bucket heads were in position, I had a strange feeling of pride as I looked up at the little plaque beneath them stamped with my initials P. A and the date beneath, and lower down the lion that was my mother’s crest. It was as though I gave something of myself into the future.

Not Really a Spoiler, But Too Close for Comfort “I can’t go on hating a woman who doesn’t exist.”
“But I do exist.”
“You are not the woman I hated.

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WWW Wednesday + Odd Hobbies

Posted on April 15, 2026 by smellincoffee

Today’s prompt from Long and Short reviews is….odd hobbies! I think the best I can think of is my penchant for memorizing poetry and Anglo-American folk songs. Other hobbies like photography, hiking, PC modding, gaming, etc. are fairly pedestrian. I almost got into Civil War reenacting (camping out with history buffs who know how to use a Dutch oven? Sweet!), but then I remembered that I live in Alabama and I’m often miserable wearing cotton — nevermind wool uniforms and brogans that don’t breathe. It’s also an expensive hobby: imagine paying $1500 for a musket that you only shoot blanks in.

WWW Wednesday

WHAT have you finished reading recently? Backstage at the Lincoln Assassination. I’d begun reading it a few months back, but delayed finishing it so my post would go up on April 14 for historically salient reasons.

WHAT are you reading now? Halfway into Clouds of Glory a biography of Robert E. Lee, a few chapters into Rebecca.

WHAT are you reading next? I began looking at My Cousin Rachel by du Maurier and am now halfway through it, so….that. After that, Dan Jones’ book on the Magna Carta, since I already have it, but I’m also thinking of finishing Wayne Grant’s Richard the Lionheart-era Roland Inness series.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Backstage at the Lincoln Assassination!

Posted on April 14, 2026 by smellincoffee

This will be an unprecedented post, as I’m combining a TT and a review of the book from whence it came.

On the stage of Ford’s Theatre, Harry Hawk, facing upstage and bent over in mock civility, rotated his comic face to the audience and started his retort: “Don’t know the manners of good society, eh? Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal—”

Before he could finish, John Wilkes Booth with outstretched arm squeezed the trigger and their world turned upside down. BACKSTAGE AT THE LINCOLN ASSASSINATION

On April 14th, 1865, not even a week after General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of North Virginia to General U.S. Grant, President Abraham Lincoln was murdered while attending a play at the Ford Theater in Washington, D.C. Backstage is an unusual history of the event, because it centers itself on the Theater itself and its cast and crew. The author opens with a look at the Ford Theater, and theater in general in the 1860s: I was surprised to learn how South-biased theater companies often were, but the author attributes this to the fact that southern men of means were often the theater’s leading patrons. John Wilkes Booth, who had ardent southern sympathies, was thereby not out of place when he talked politics — even in a Washington theater. He was well known as a former colleague to many of the members of the Ford Theater company, though before the assassination he’d declared he was giving up acting to pursue oil. The book captures the moments of the assassination very well, particularly the confusion — the darkness of the theater, the strange noise, Booth suddenly appearing on the stage from one of the upper boxes, and then disappearing amid confusion and then screaming. After setting the stage by introducing us to the cast and crew in the days leading up to the assassination, Bogar then follows the aftermath. Irrational mobs being what they were, some Washingtonians wanted to burn the theater on the very night Lincoln was shot. Bogar tracks the strange priorities of Seward, harassing stage-hands who Booth barely knew while ignoring his former colleagues with whom he’d spent years talking. Because of the nature of the crime, those who were arrested and accused with some connection to the plot were very poorly used: their homes ransacked, their possessions stolen, their persons consigned to solitary cells for weeks on end. The Ford Theater, too, was poorly used by the Union soldiers who seized it: the taint attached to Ford’s name undermined his future in dominating the theater scene, though he did receive a small consolation in being paid for the property by the US government. This was interesting little history, not merely for the backstage look but the look at 19th century theater in general.

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