First in Line

Posted on July 14, 2023 by smellincoffee

First in Line: Presidents, Vice Presidents, and the Pursuit of Power
© 2018 Kate Anderson Brower
327 pages

The office of vice president was, for most of the 19th century, a near-superfluous one — but in the mid-20th century, the men holding that office rapidly grew in relevance, both because of a growing habit of becoming president (through assassinations, resignation, or electoral succession) and because the ever-growing demands of the presidential office made it necessary for the president to have a working partner, not just someone to balance the electoral ticket and hang around if he should happen to die. First in Line examines the office and the men who have filled it in the last half-century, paying special attention to how the relationship between el presidente and his second have changed from president to president, and how men of ambition have coped with suddenly being reduced to the ‘guy in back’. Although many of the men profiled here are well known to the reader because they later succeeded to the office, others and their relationships with their bosses were surprises.

Harry Truman had been vice president for all of four months when he suddenly inherited one of the world’s hardest jobs, and learned (to his astonishment) of the things previously hidden from him, like the atom bomb. Vice presidents were ticket-fillers, non-entities: their only duty was to break ties in the Senate, and were otherwise barred from even speaking there. Occasionally one was called on to fulfill the primary duty of the office, assuming the presidency in the event of a death, but mostly they hung around like a bad cold and complained about the uselessness of their job. The vice presidency was where political dreams went to die. As DC’s self-appointed mission as Leader of the Free World expanded after World War 2, though, the executive branch swelled, and the potential for actively using the vice president grew with it. Despite this, presidents were slow to adapt: JFK and LBJ regarded one another contemptuously, conferring together only an hour or so a week at most, and LBJ echoed that treatment with his own vice president: he and Nixon both persisted in using the man to stand in for them at funerals and the like, but otherwise expected them to keep their mouths shut and stay out of the way. Carter was the first to see the potential for a working partnership, and effectively transformed the office, establishing a pattern for a more productive vice presidential job that steadily grew until the election of Trump, in which his vice president suddenly reverted to The Guy in Back. (For comparison: LBJ and JFK had an hour or so together alone a week: Biden and Obama had at least five, and Pence maybe talked to Trump on the phone.)

Although Bowers writes that a common trend among presidential-vice presidential relationships is that they deteriorate, her book doesn’t especially bear this out. Kennedy and Johnson never liked one another to begin with, and Nixon and Angew’s relationship was very short-lived. Carter & Mondale remained working partners, as did Reagan and Bush: the latter’s lack of a close personal friendship owed in part to the frostiness between their wives. Clinton & Gore were very buddy-buddy until Clinton’s whoremongering scandalized Gore’s wife, and Clinton’s outright lying to Gore about the affair severed the men’s own bond. If Bush wasn’t close to Cheney beyond their working relationship, who could blame him? No one wants birdshot in the face. Obama and Biden are an outright rejection of that ‘trend’, growing closer with every year, and especially after Biden’s son (Beau, not the degenerate Hunter) died. Bowers offers no shortage of surprises here: the fact that Reagan strongly wanted Ford to run as his vice president, with the men sharing some presidential responsibilities; that John Kerry wanted to tap John McCain as his second in 2004, a mixed-ticket novelty; and that Pence frequently reached out to Biden despite his boss’s overt antagonism toward Obama’s former veep. I was wholly unfamiliar with Pence before reading this, beyond viewing him as being included on the ticket to be the staid normie and win over the parts of the Republican base that viewed Trump as unpredictable at best and repellent at worse. He has a very healthy relationship with his wife, and (astonishingly) used to have a radio show. In addition to exploring relationship dynamics in full, Bowers also touches on other parts of the vice presidency, like the official residence of the old Naval Observatory house, which is universally regarded by vice presidents who have succeeded to the White House as a more comfortable residence, given its arcadian setting and fact that it’s not a museum open for public tours.

First in Line was a fun surprise for me: I don’t know that I would have read it had I not gotten into a sudden unexpected bug for presidential books, but I’m glad I took it on. Not only did it introduce me properly to some overshadowed figures in American history, but it increased my appreciation for men who could put egos aside to serve the common good. It’s also generally entertaining – -who knew Dick Cheney had a sense of humor?

Highlights:

Johnson made it clear that he considered Kennedy an entitled elitist who was too young and too inexperienced for the job. “Have you heard the news?” he asked a congressman. “Jack’s pediatricians have just given him a clean bill of health!”

In 2004, Democrat John Kerry’s first choice for his running mate was Republican senator John McCain of Arizona. The two knew each other from Vietnam and from their years in the Senate. “It was clear that it wouldn’t fly. McCain didn’t want to do it, it was clear that it would have been too controversial in other quarters,” according to a person familiar with Kerry’s decision-making. “But if you said where was his heart when this was moving along, I would say McCain.”

I’m forty-three years old,” John F. Kennedy told his aide Ken O’Donnell, to calm his nerves after Kennedy named Lyndon Johnson as his running mate, “and I’m the healthiest candidate for president in the United States. You’ve traveled with me enough to know that I’m not going to die in office. So the vice presidency doesn’t mean anything.”

The Carters’ eight-year-old daughter, Amy, cried over her father’s decision not to name Glenn as his running mate. “I wanted an astronaut to be the Vice President,” she said.

As vice president, Cheney rather enjoyed his image as one of the most polarizing figures in recent American history. Cheney’s former chief policy adviser Neil Patel said that, during the second term, he bought Cheney a Darth Vader costume complete with the iconic mask, and he wore it into the Oval Office one day and posed for a picture with aides. After leaving the White House, Cheney drove a black pickup truck with a Darth Vader hitch cover.

Cheney’s dark image was a mutually beneficial part of their dynamic: Bush did not mind being underestimated.

Biden’s uncle Ed stuttered, too, but was never able to conquer it. He never married, never got a good job, and he drank a lot. Biden never wanted to end up like Uncle Ed, so he never had a drink and he never stopped working to get over his stutter, memorizing poems and practicing speeches endlessly.

Pence declared, “Servant leadership, not selfish ambition, must be the animating force of the career that lies before you.” He continued: “Don’t fear criticism. Have the humility to listen to it. Learn from it. And most importantly, push through it. Persistence is the key.”

Posted in history, Politics and Civic Interest | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

The Residence

Posted on July 13, 2023 by smellincoffee

The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House
© 2016 Kate Anderson Brower
336 pages

They say that no man is a hero to his valet, but perhaps no man is properly a villain, either. Richard Nixon, despised by the nation after the Watergate scandal, left a score of saddened butlers, florists, ushers, and the like after he resigned from the presidency. Perhaps the pundits and talking heads thought him a crook and a scoundrel, but to the men and women who keep the White House running, he was a kind, if formal. boss. The Residence takes us inside the White House, into the life of the home itself, where staffers continually attend to the need of the president, his family, and guests — preparing meals, arranging flowers, dusting chandeliers, buzzing about like a host of Jeeveses and providing such an array of services that outgoing presidents are left wondering if they can cope as adults anymore after so many years of having everything done for them. Although the White House staff are remarkably discreet, a few interviewed here do reveal interesting details about their former bosses decades after the facts, and Ms. Brower’s collected accounts offers different perspectives on the executives of the last century — humanizing villains, exposing the warts of heroes, and confirming that LBJ remains the most obnoxious man to ever sit in the chair.

A tourist to the White House standing on one of its lawns may regard it as a three-story structure, but it has six floors and two hidden mezzanine levels. It is a massive building, for years the nation’s largest residence and one requiring a staff of over a hundred to keep running smoothly. “Required” is perhaps not quite the right word, considering that some of the services offered by staff are over-the-top, bordering on ridiculous. Flowers in rooms are continually replaced even if no one is using the rooms; beds are changed after any use, even a 20-minute catnap; suit jackets disappear the second they’re taken off, whisked away to the dry cleaner. Was the president just taking it off to get comfortable for a few minutes? Doesn’t matter, he can wear another suit. There are even multiple chefs, one dedicated solely to pastries. Given that the White House has to entertain other muckety-mucks, all of whom are similarly indulgent, this is understandable to a certain degree. At least the president’s family has to pay for that food — a fact that apparently catches many by surprise. Although many services are provided at no charge, the executive is financially responsible for moving costs, food, and dry-cleaning — leading some presidents like Carter to plead with their chefs to be more economical, serving leftovers. (Chefs comply, to a degree, but if guests are involved not so much: the honor of the Residence demands only the best.) Perhaps that explains Trump’s serving of McDonalds! The workloads of some of the staff are absolutely nuts, with eighty-hour weeks not uncommon: one butler kept putting off getting a bypass because The President Needed Him, and died of a heart attack while on the job. There is such pride and prestige associated with working for the White House, though, that staff serve there for decades despite the stress and fact that many of them could earn more in the private sector. The election of Barack Obama made black staffmembers (who appear to be in the overwhelming majority, judging by the included photos) especially proud to serve.

Ms. Brower’s book addresses a variety of aspects about interactions between its staff, the president, and his family. We get to know the executives and their wives as bosses, not national leaders, and some of them were pills to work for. Jackie Kennedy & Nancy Reagan were especially demanding, though Mrs. Reagan’s husband was far easier to get along with. President Reagan was downright chummy with the staff, so eager to get in long conversations that those with a job they needed to get done in a hurry might politely avoid him just so they could get about their business. The worst boss award has to go to LBJ, who was not only a constant abusive bully, using his height and other anatomical bits to intimidate staffers (and guests), but had a bizarre obsession with the shower, which he used over $10,000 worth of military funds to alter to his demands — creating a unit that sprayed with more force than a firehose, at scalding temperatures, with separate nozzles pointed at various parts of his under-the-belt anatomy. Working in the White House has the odd quirk of the job potentially radically changing every four years: no sooner has one family’s dining tastes and personality quirks been learned and absorbed than comes a new set of bosses, with wildly different attitudes and needs. The Kennedys and Clintons favored fine dining and haute cuisine: Johnson and Bush preferred simple Texan fare like chili and Tex-Mex. (Well, Hillary preferred haute cuisine: Bill snuck junk food whenever he could get away with it.) Going by this account, George H.W. Bush and his wife were by far the most generally popular — loved, even, and so mourned by the staff at their departure that Hillary axed one of them on suspicion that they were calling Barbara to leak information about the Clintons. (In reality, Mrs. Bush was calling one of her staffers-turned-friends for help using her new computer.) The elder Bushes hit the sweet spot of respect and conviviality — not too familiar, not too formal, and they and their son established such friendships with staff that even after retirement, George W. sometimes went fishing with old favorites. Speaking of kids, Brower has a separate chapter on growing up in the White House, which is easier for small kids who know nothing else (like the young Kennedy) and much harder for those like the Bush girls who have experienced some degree of normality. (As ‘normal’ as you can get when granddad was president and dad was governor & owner of an MLB team, anyway.)

This was an all-around fun book to read, offering surprises and confirmations at the same time. I’d heard JFK was a womanizer, for instance, but didn’t realize that he had such a reputation for womanizing and adultery that the staff learned to avoid the second floor altogether in Jackie’s absences, given the high chances of seeing naked secretaries dashing around. (Also off limits: the pool, where he could be found sitting naked with similarly clad lasses.) I was surprised that Nixon was so much more well regarded by the household staff than the West Wing staff, though I’ve never really delved into his presidency beyond his economic mischief and foreign policy. Ms. Brower confirms an odd allegation I’d encountered about Eleanor Roosevelt, who did indeed fire all white domestic staff members and replaced them with blacks, on the grounds that staff worked better when they were all of the same ethnic group. Madame Segregation, that’s our Mrs. Roosevelt. Although reading about the extraordinary expenditures that go into White House operations made me grumble and harrumph (especially the constant redecorating at taxpayer expense) I couldn’t help but be charmed by the human image of the executive families — of Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton doing their best to give their girls normal lives, of presidents confiding in valets during elevator rides when the burdens of the world and their family were crushing them — and enjoyed this thoroughly.

If you are tiring of this week’s spontaneous theme, I regret to inform you that it shall continue. You’ll get a reprieve when Space Camp kicks off, though.

Posted in history, Politics and Civic Interest, Reviews | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Team of Five

Posted on July 12, 2023 by smellincoffee

Team of Five: The Presidents Club in the Age of Trump
© 2020 Kate Anderson Brower
320 pages

Nancy Gibbs’ and Michael Duffy’s The Presidents Club offered a history of how American presidents have rallied together after their respective terms in office to support the sitting executive, offering him counsel or direct service as needed. Team of Five looks at their association and the lives of former presidents more broadly, and at the same time points to how differently then-president Trump related to the Club. To put it bluntly, they don’t relate. While other rivalries have been transmuted into intimate friendship by the singular burden of the office, Trump’s relations with his predecessors remain as antagonistic as they were prior to his running against the establishment, and he appears to be largely unaffected by his time in office. The heart of this book is the relationships between the other presidents, and frankly it’s enough to warm even my cold, cranky anti-government heart.

Like many potential readers of this book, I have a love-hate relationship with the presidents: my own politics lead me to despise pretty much everything that’s happened in DC since the election of Theodore Roosevelt, but I have read biographies of most modern presidents and can separate my feelings for the men from the office’s abuses, realizing that the Beast on the Potomac destroys and perverts even the best of intentions: witness Bush’s compassionate conservatism giving way to a post 9/11 police state, and Obama’s attacks against the terror war resulting in him maintaining and expanding DC’s interventions abroad. This book focuses far more on the human side of these men — the toll the enormous responsibility takes on them and their families, and their need for one another despite one wearing a blue tie and the other wearing a red, as well as the ways they’ve found to stay active (or avoid politics) after retirement. Power is a hell of a drug, and many former presidents, especially those who are deemed ‘failures’, have yearned to stay relevant in the years after they leave office: Hoover, Nixon, and Carter are especially salient examples. Especially striking are the near-familial bonds formed by the first families after leaving office: I was surprised to learn of George H.W. Bush and Clinton’s near father-son bond, and charmed by accounts of the close relationship between George W. Bush and Michelle Obama – -as well as the embrace of those families’ daughters.

If you are looking for a book to kindle some meager flame of belief in the Public Thing, the republic, Team of Five definitely will help, especially when they express the hope that the solidarity of the former presidents will help the government weather the storm of the current occupant. Interestingly, the only former president Trump ever communicates with is President Carter, who himself is something of a dark horse among the presidents’ club, known for going off on his own and sometimes disrupting the policy aims of the current administration. Trump isn’t the first president to ignore his predecessors (Roosevelt and Eisenhower were similarly contented to go it alone), or even be outwardly antagonistic towards them (Roosevelt, again), but whereas they were only ignoring one man, Trump ignored the experience of decades. Granted, that was his whole appeal in tweeting against the machine. Likewise, if you’re looking for a reason to further scowl, then reading of the enormous fortunes these families make (while, in the case of Clinton & Obama, endlessly lecturing us peasants about income inequality) in combination with their status as the biggest welfare recipients of DC outside Israel & Saudi Arabia , there’s no shortage of privilege to get outraged about. I’ve long thought that Carter and Ford were two of the most decent men to serve in the oval office, and learning that most of Carter’s income goes straight into a charitable foundation (instead of paying for multiple mansions & private island vacations like some) made me think all the better of him.

The Five was a most interesting book, more generally interesting than the presidential-ops oriented Presidents Club. It’s left me in the curious state of disliking these people more for what they say and yet being more tolerable of them as people.

Highlights:

In March 2011, Carter, Clinton, and George W. Bush went to the Kennedy Center to honor Bush, who was then eighty-six years old. The event raised money for his Points of Light initiative encouraging volunteerism. “I literally came to love this man,” Clinton said unabashedly from the podium. Backstage, Laura Bush asked twenty-seven members of the Bush family to gather together and pose for a photograph. “Bill, Bill! Brother from another mother! Get in here!” hollered Neil Bush, one of George and Barbara’s sons. Clinton smiled and got in the family portrait. “The family’s black sheep,” Clinton said. “Every family’s got one.”

At 2:30,[on 9/11/] Bush finally reached his mother. His parents had been traveling to Minneapolis, but the Secret Service had moved them to a motel in Wisconsin. “Where are you?” he asked her. “At a motel in Brookfield, Wisconsin,” she told him. “What in the world are you doing there?” he asked her. “Son,” she said, “you grounded our plane.”

George W. said the most surprising moment during the early days of his presidency came directly after the inaugural parade, when it sank in that he was indeed president. “I decided to go into the Oval Office to see what it felt like,” he recalled. “Unbeknownst to me [chief of staff] Andy Card had called upstairs in the residence and asked Dad to come in so I was sitting in the Oval Office at the desk there kind of just taking it all in, and in walks my dad, and I said, ‘Welcome, Mr. President,’ and he said, ‘Thank you, Mr. President.’” Barbara Bush was decidedly less sentimental. “Get your feet off the Jeffersonian table,” she told him.

Bush’s respect and admiration for Obama was returned. Obama did not call his fellow Democrat Bill Clinton often when he was president; so much had changed in the world since Clinton was in the Oval Office. He spoke more often with Bush. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 had changed the presidency, and it was Bush and now Obama who had to deal with the fallout.

Eisenhower, more than many presidents because of his high rank in the military, was used to being surrounded by aides who did everything for him, down to making simple phone calls. On his first night out of office, he decided to experiment and call his son John. He had grown accustomed to picking up the phone and having a White House operator answer and quickly connect him to anyone, anywhere in the world. When he picked up the phone and heard a dial tone, he was livid. When an aide showed him how the phone worked, he exclaimed, “Oh, so that’s how you do it!” He never did get the hang of driving and kept an Army sergeant on staff to drive him around town.

In the past fifteen years, Bill and Hillary have delivered more than seven hundred speeches, averaging about $210,000 per speech. And they wasted no time: just days after leaving the White House, the president was paid $125,000 for a speech at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, in New York, according to financial records. He accepted fifty-nine paid speaking offers in 2001 alone, including $550,000 for a three-day trip to Sweden, Austria, and Poland. Between 2001 and 2012, Clinton made $104.9 million in speaking fees, according to an analysis by the Washington Post. His astronomical speaking fees led to criticism that he was selling American power and influence to foreign interests, especially when Hillary was secretary of state, which coincided with a surge in his speaking fees. He was paid $500,000 or more each for thirteen speeches delivered around the world, and eleven of those occurred when Hillary was secretary of state, including one in Hong Kong for $750,000 and another in Nigeria for $700,000.

When Carter criticized Rafshoon for a suggestion he made, Rafshoon replied, “—- you, Jimmy.” The room went quiet for a moment. Strauss eventually said, “Don’t you mean ‘—- you, Mr. President?’” Everyone erupted in laughter, including Carter, and the meeting continued. It is impossible to imagine an adviser saying that to Clinton, Bush, Obama, or, especially, Trump.

Carter’s post-presidency costs taxpayers less than half of those of the other living former presidents. According to the General Services Administration, the total annual bill for Carter is $456,000 a year, including his office, staff, and pension. George H. W. Bush’s office, pension, and expenses used to cost taxpayers $952,000 a year, and every other living former president—Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama—costs more than a million. Obama’s 8,198-square-foot office in Washington, D.C., alone costs taxpayers $536,000 a year. Clinton’s office costs $518,000, George W. Bush’s is $497,000, and George H. W. Bush’s was $286,000.

Before he needed a wheelchair, Bush walked up and down the hallways of the West Wing that he knew so well, and teased Obama’s aides, many of whom were in their twenties and thirties and were little kids when he was president: “Have you ever gone skydiving? Well, what are you waiting for?” He exuded graciousness and old-world manners, and because of his large, close family, he seemed to convey the message that politics is something that is a part of one’s life, but it should not define one’s life.

When Obama learned of Bush’s death, he told George W. Bush that he would of course attend the funeral but that Michelle would be on her book tour in Europe and would be unable to make it. The former first lady then decided to cancel her stops in Paris and Berlin. “It’s important to me to join the Bush family in celebrating President George H. W. Bush’s exemplary life,” she said.

Posted in Politics and Civic Interest, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Wednesday blogging prompt: “fashion sense”

Posted on July 12, 2023 by smellincoffee

Today’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is to ‘describe our fashion sense’. I’m tempted to say that I don’t have any, but I suppose I do dress in a deliberate matter, with an eye for simplicity, minimalism, and adaptability. I have a fixed number of pants, underwear, and t-shirts, for instance: my three dress shirts can be worn with either my black or tan khakis, and all of my socks are black. My non-work shirts are all in the same style, and I have three in short sleeve and three in long-sleeve, all in the same colors: red, blue, and green. I replace them as needed and it’s amusing to me to see me apparently wearing the same shirt for ten years if I look back at facebook photos. Part of my approach to a simple and interchangable wardrobe was based on this article from the Art of Manliness. I don’t wear shirts with logos or printed content, except as undershirts, and even those are rare. Not much changes in the winter: I have one everyday coat that serves me equally well during the first chill of autumn and the freezes of January, and a black peacoat that I wear for church & any formal events. As far as shoes, I have a pair of dark brown Oxfords I wear for work and church; a pair of tennis shoes for exercise; a pair of Merrill hiking boots that double as my bad-weather foot gear; and a pair of sandals. I sometimes think about getting a pair of work boots, but four pairs of shoes already feels like too much. In short, if you’re ever at a book-bloggers conference and want to find me, just look for the dude who looks like a trucker — or Luke Combs.

Posted in General | Tagged | 10 Comments

Top Ten Random Titles

Posted on July 11, 2023 by smellincoffee

Today’s TT is a freebie, and I can’t think of anything so I’m going to go with….ten random books. I asked Bing to supply a random number, which proved to be #73, so I’m going to go with the 73rd book I read each year between 2012 and 2022. But first, Teaser Tuesday, from Team of Five: The Presidents Club in the Age of Trump:

But life after the White House felt like it was “moving in slow motion,” [Obama] confessed. When his literary agent told him that his publisher wanted to meet with him “right away” about his memoir, he suggested a time the next day. “Oh, no,” the agent replied. “It’s going to take two weeks to set it up.” In the White House, the stakes were incomprehensibly high and urgent. “I had to explain to him,” Obama said, “where I’m coming from, ‘right away’ means if we don’t do something in half an hour, somebody dies.”

And now, for completely random titles!

2012:
Founding Brothers: the Revolutionary Generation, Joseph Lewis

2013
 The Choice: A Parable of Free Trade and Protectionism, Russell D. Roberts

2014:
The Great War at Sea, A.A. Hoehling

2015:
Last Call: the Rise and Fall of Prohibition in America,  Daniel Okrent

2016:
 The Persians: Ancient, Mediaeval, and Modern Iran, Homa Katouzian

2017:
Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World’s First Digital Weapon, Kim Zetter

2018:
Daemon, Daniel Suarez. A non-history title! This remains one of the best SF/technical thrillers I’ve read, about an AI launching a program to rebuild the world according to its makers’ intentions, using video games to recruit human agents.

2019:
Altered Carbon, Richard Morgan

2020:
 To Wake the Giant: A Novel of Pearl Harbor, Jeff Shaara

2021:
 Steal this Book, Abbie Hoffman

2022:
Star Trek: Collateral Damage, David Mack

Posted in General | Tagged , | 10 Comments

Redcoats , los presidentes, and medieval making-merry

Posted on July 10, 2023 by smellincoffee

Alllrighty, short rounds time, featuring: British Soldiers, American War; The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women; and The President’s Club: Inside the World’s Most Secret Fraternity.

First up, British Soldiers, American War. This is an interesting volume in which the memoirs of British soldiers who participated in the American War of Independence (and by “participated in”, I mean ”were the baddies”) are presented, each prefaced by the author to give some context as to what aspect of British soldiers’ lives a particular memoir illuminates. As mentioned in my review of Holmes’ Redocat, I first knew the described uniform as that of the enemy: my first encounter with historical fiction, in fact, was a revolutionary war story in which the main character was being menaced by two British soldiers looking for the MC’s father, who was involved with the rebellion. The image painted in my mind’s eye at that young age, of two armed men in brilliant red standing out amid the grey-black trees and blinding white snow, has remained with me 30+ years. Here the men tell their own stories, and easily the most important fact driven home is that these men were all volunteers. On the whole, they were not criminals or conscripts, but ordinary men of varying classes who saw in His Majesty’s Army a stable income and a path to adventure, loot, and possibly even glory. Some were restless, but if they looked for a curative for that in army life, at least one was met with death instead: his penchant for wandering away from the army and them coming back when he felt like it was rewarded with a court martial and firing squad. Surprisingly, many of them included here settled in America after independence.

Related:
Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket, Richard Holmes
The Making of the British Army, Allan Mallison

I’ve never tried to return a Kindle title before. I picked this one up because it was cheap ($3), addressed medieval society (a perennial favorite of mine), and promised to be amusing. It helped enormously that the author opened the book by attacking Victorian arrogance about the medieval era, making me think she was capable of appreciating the epoch on its own level, since she recognized the Victorian’s own failure to do so. Ms. Gilbert does try to be amusing, but my tolerance for her snark quickly nosedived after I realized how trite and superficial her grasp on medieval society was. About a third of the way in, covering the days on which sex was officially discouraged by medieval society, she notes that Wednesdays and Fridays were ‘arbitrarily’ included for ‘no apparent reason’.

If an author is going to write a book on an aspect of medieval society, they’d better have at least a tenuous grasp on medieval society in general, which would include its manifestly Christian nature. The Church was integrated into medieval society at every level. Wednesdays and Fridays were fasting days set apart to remember the betrayal and crucifixion of Jesus, respectively, and fasts would have included abstention. Ms. Gilbert’s superficial grasp on her subject reduces this merely to a collection humorous anecdotes and folklore about sex in medieval Europe, one that was saved from one of my very-rare one-star ratings on goodreads by merit of its medieval illustrations.

Related but Manifestly Superior :
Marriage and Family in the Middle Ages, Frances and Joseph Gies. I mention the Gies at every ocassion because their works are not only enormously attractive, but rescued me from my own ‘chronological snobbery’, as Lewis put it. Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel was especially helpful in that regard, smashing the Victorian lie that the medieval era was a prolonged period of stagnation. Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages has sections on sex specifically.

And lastly, The Presidents’ Club. If I had known what this book was about, I would have read it much earlier. I had the (wrong) impression that it was about American presidents in general, analyzing what it took to succeed in the fight for the One Oval Office , etc. It isn’t. Instead, it’s about how the men who become president take on a unique burden that only they can understand, and that the bond they have in protecting The Office and (usually) supporting its current occupant regardless of personal politics. The Presidents’ Club owes its life largely to Harry Truman, who took office following the abrupt death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and who drew on Herbert Hoover for support. Roosevelt himself had never bothered consulting Hoover, the patrician finding poor Herb far more useful as a perennial scapegoat. Truman and Hoover became fast friends, but Truman’s hopes of maintaining the same relationship with Eisenhower were soured by Eisenhower’s failure to defend their mutual colleague George Marshall against McCarthyism, and not until JFK was assassinated in Dallas did the two rekindle their close bond from the war years. At its height, the Club had six members, a feat aided by the quick turnover of the sixties and seventies. The President’s Club does not attempt to be a history of each man’s presidency, but rather the key moments in which presidents came together to aid one another — JFK seeking advice from Eisenhower after the Bay of Pigs, LBJ drawing on Truman and Eisenhower to inform his Vietnam policy, etc. Some presidents were used to go on ‘missions’ for the sitting occupant, and the men also provided moral support to the current occupant who had an otherwise intensely lonely position. The book has a salient bias against Nixon and Reagan (who “conspire” with one another, not “consult” as anyone else does), but isn’t too obnoxious — and the section on Watergate demonstrates that Nixon bugging his rivals was not his novel crime, but something done routinely by LBJ, etc. Although I consider myself fairly well-versed in presidential history, Gibbs’ and Duffy’s work offers a lot of behind-the-scenes content that makes certain things I knew about already more understandable, like the troubled relationship between Truman and Ike. Because of its timeframe, it also offers a look into how the political parties changed with their bases. I was amused to learn that Nixon was something of a presidential geek, studying the speeches and lives of past presidents obsessively before he ever took office. One wonders what this book would be like written today, given Trump’s professed antagonism toward the DC power-elite, and their disdain for him. There’s a book called Team of Five: The Presidents Club in the Age of Trump, but it’s not by the same authors. I’ll have a look regardless!

Posted in history, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Emergency Alert

Posted on July 6, 2023 by smellincoffee

Earlier today a disaster befell the citizens of Bedroom, when half of Mount Doom suddenly collapsed in a landslide covering not only parts of Bed, but part of the floor as well. Search parties were sent out and confirmed that no one died in the disaster. The mayor of House appeared tonight before the concerned citizenry and assured them that all citizens of Bedroom were accounted for and that the situation was well under control. “We keep the people of Bedroom in our thoughts and prayers, etc etc, and assure them that this situation will be addressed.” Mount Doom has been noticeably shrinking in recent months, and the recent landslide is thought to owe to resulting instability. The mayor assured everyone that the Mount will be dealt with as soon as possible. “No citizens of Bed Room deserve to live in the shadow of this constantly looming disaster,” said he.

That’s the news for tonight. Goodnight, and have a pleasant tomorrow.

Posted in General | 9 Comments

A Brief History of Motion

Posted on July 5, 2023 by smellincoffee

Tom, Tom, Tom. You know drinking and driving is a bad idea, but what did you do? You followed A History of the World through Six Glasses with this A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel to the Automobile. Granted, we did have An Edible History of Humanity between the drinks and driving, so it could be worse. A Brief History of Motion may not be as generally attractive to a mass audience given the subject (everyone drinks and eats, but not everyone is necessarily into coaches and cars), but it’s as fun and informative as I’ve come to expect from Standage. He begins with the wheel and the evolution of carts and coaches, then shifts into modernity with bikes, trains, and automobiles. As expected from a writer of social history, Standage focuses on the social and cultural aspects of these forms of transport. In the Roman world, for instance, we learn that men regarded wagons and coaches as a very womanly way to get about, and preferred riding horseback — a conceit that continued until coaches continuing development made them valuable as status symbols. The bicycle and automobile chapters are far more expansive, as Standage points out the ways bicycles altered courtship rituals, and how cars up-ended not only American business, but American society as a whole. General Motors business model (creating multiple brands to appeal to different layers of the market) became normative, and motoring culture created multiple new businesses around it, from fast food to shopping malls. (Jim Kunstler and Jane Holtz Kay have covered the same, though with considerably more hostility) Although I’ve read a lot about transportation over the years, Standage delivered more than a few surprises — like his argument that Hitler’s promotion of the car industry in Germany attributed more to it bouncing out of the depression than the war. He also takes down a few misunderstandings along the way, like the old canard that GM and a few car parts companies conspired to buy out street car lines and immediately close them. I believed that one myself until reading a few books on streetcars (Fares, Please! and Romance of the Rails) that made me realize streetcar lines were folding like Germany in 1945 by the time GM’s buyout if one company happened.) Standage wraps up the book with a look at carsharing apps and the like that may move us closer to a future where people don’t have to be burdened with the financial costs of a car just to participate in society, while compromising with the fact that we’re more or less stuck with all this car infrastructure for the time being, instead of getting to live in proper towns where people can get around on foot, bicycle, bus, etc. This is one I’m happy to recommend: it’s the book Are We There Yet? wanted to be but didn’t come close to being.

Highlights:

For the Romans, right-side driving also had positive religious connotations. They likened life to a forked path where the virtuous choice was always on the right, and when entering temples and other buildings, they tried to ensure that their right foot was the first to cross the threshold. This is why sinister (the Latin word for “left”) also came to mean “evil” or “unlucky.”

Facing the threat of the expanding Ottoman Empire, Hungarian commanders adopted a new tactic: arranging wagons on the battlefield in a ring and chaining them together to form a wagon fort, a mobile defensive fortification that could resist cavalry charges. The wagons, equipped with gunports, also acted as protected platforms from which men could fire a small cannon or an early form of gun called an arquebus. This cutting-edge combination of wagons and gunpowder weapons made armored knights on horseback look suddenly old-fashioned. And that may explain why men across Europe decided that riding in fancy wagons was not so embarrassing after all—provided they were referred to as coaches, a name borrowed from the country where this new idea had emerged.

This half-hour commuting distance may sound arbitrary, but an analysis of urban layouts by Cesare Marchetti, an Italian physicist, suggests that one hour is, on average, how long people are willing to spend traveling to and from work each day and has been for centuries. (Some people’s commutes are much shorter or longer; this is an average across a whole city’s population.) Marchetti suggested that this time limit defined the size of cities. No ancient walled cities, he found, had a diameter greater than three miles, so assuming a speed of 3 mph, walking to the center from the edge of such a city, or back again, took no more than half an hour. Faster means of transport, starting with horsecars, let cities expand as this half-hour average travel budget allowed people to go farther. Marchetti’s analysis found that the city of Berlin increased in size precisely in accordance with improvements to the speed of transport. Before 1800 its radius was about 1.5 miles, and as faster means of transport were introduced, starting with horsecars and streetcars, its radius expanded in direct proportion to their speed.

Next up: it’s a race between sexy medieval ladies and the moral imagination in film and literature.

Posted in history, Reviews | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Teaser Tuesday: Move over, Gagarin

Posted on July 4, 2023 by smellincoffee

When he got the call, Kittinger knew he had enough oxygen to stay up a little longer, and he wasn’t keen to end the mission just yet. Now at ninety-six thousand feet, he had a view of the Earth that few people had ever seen, its curvature clear against a dark sky. And unlike the rocket plane pilots flying high in the skies over Edwards Air Force Base, he had the luxury of sitting and letting the view wash over him in the silence afforded by his balloon’s lack of propulsion system. The sky took on a hue he had never seen from the Earth. It occurred to him in that moment that he was the first man to spend any length of time in the near-space environment, that he was, in a way, the first man in space.

Breaking the Chains of Gravity: The Story of Spaceflight Before NASA
Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Naked at Lunch

Posted on July 1, 2023 by smellincoffee

Naked at Lunch: Adventures of a Reluctant Nudist
© 2015 Mark Haskell Smith
288 pages

Beware all enterprises which require new clothes, Henry David Thoreau opined. Say what you will about naturism, or nudism – it’s the only hobby I can think of that doesn’t require buying anything, and especially not new clothes. Naked at Lunch is author Mark Haskell’s exploration of nudist society in the United States and Europe, beginning with a history thereof before he begins trying it for himself, from isolated nudist camps to whole communities on the Iberian peninsula where people are free to bare all. I’m personally fascinated by various cultures’ attitudes to clothing, so I found this most interesting despite the author having an obnoxious attitude towards anyone who is opposed to public nudity.  

Smith assures us from the beginning that he’s not a real nudist, thank you. Sure, he sleeps au natural and, in warm months, is happy to wander about the house without any clothing – but that’s just being naked. Nudism is, Smith and those he interviews here, best understood as a social activity: it’s being naked around other people in a nonsexual way, doing ordinary things like swimming, watching shows, and yoga. When Smith decides to take his first foray into the world of naturism, it’s a nerve-wracking experience. He doesn’t help things by covering himself with so much sunscreen that when he ventures out near the pool, he positively glows, radiating like a prophet of old, sent forth to preach the gospel that clothes are a lie. Soon, however, he’s wandering around a Spanish town surrounded by naked people, and even hiking in the buff (albiet with shoes). He limits himself to the western world in both his past research and his present excursions, and reveals that nudist movements began in the west almost as a reaction to the rise of industrialism and consumerism: a rebellion of the natural against the artificial, and wedded to other health movements of the time, especially in Germany – where naturism was so popular that even Hitler’s government created a sanctioned organization, albiet one that restricted nudism to rural areas, and excluded communists and Jews. A commonality in nudist movements past and present is that the organizations always emphasize their nonsexual nature, and Smith discovers that when he spends time around naked people, the nakedness loses its sexual charge. 

While I was aware of nude beaches and resorts, I had no idea how popular they were, especially in Europe, and enjoyed experiencing them vicariously through Smith – most of the time. I noticed that he transformed from being someone profoundly uncomfortable being naked in front of others into someone who mocked others for that discomfort later in the book — as he does when his naked hiking group encounters a group of minors associated with a religious school hiking in the wilderness, and their teacher hurriedly has them look away, and can’t even stir himself to be offended when he sees a couple engaged in intercourse on a balcony while touring a city with a nude quarter. (When he mentions this to a nudist group, they scowl and mutter in French that that isn’t nudism.) The author doesn’t bother digging into arguments for or against public nudity: he simply proclaims that people’s bodies are their own, man, and like you can’t just tell someone else they have to wear clothes, because that’s just not cool, dude. Smith comes off as increasingly lazy and obnoxious as the book progresses.  

I enjoyed this book well enough, but disliked the author increasingly more as it went on, despite being sympathetic to the subject of the book: I’m rather enamored of the human form and don’t find nudity offensive or shameful in itself, but dislike those who abuse it to be provocative or offensive — as Smith sometimes encounters here, and dismisses with a “Boys will be boys” attitude.

Posted in Reviews, Society and Culture | Tagged , | 5 Comments