Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Team of Rivals has been much in the news lately, given that President Obama cited it as a favorite book and seems to have used it as a guide in assembling his own cabinet. I've not read anything by Doris Kearns Goodwin previously. She writes in a vivid, evocative and enjoyable style. The choice to use quotes from primary sources as if they were ongoing conversation brings a filmic liveliness to the proceedings. Lost in the skillful narrative, I frequently forgot that I was reading a deeply researched work of scholarship. Yet there, in the back, are reams of notes covering each quote and most of her assertions. The skill comes in using these snippets build momentum from sentence to sentence. Though scrupulous in quoting, the reading moves smoothly among diaries, letters, newspaper accounts and other primary sources. Exchanges I remembered as if they were taped conversations were, on further examination, quoted from all of the above sources. Goodwin's integration of these patchwork elements into a greater whole is the star element of the book.

As for the organization of the book, well, it's nothing if not ambitious. DKG offers a political biography of four men: Lincoln, Salmon P. Chase, William Seward and Edward Bates. The first part of the book covers their ascencions to the top of the nascent Republican party, culminating in the nomination fight of 1860. Indulging in a bit of dramatic license, Goodwin opens the book at that year's Republican convention, bringing the four principals on stage. Then, she backtracks through each of their lives, illuminating their paths to the momentous occasion. Though we know the outcome, the details don't fail to fascinate. Frankly, the first 278 pages of the book could have stood on their own.

Having set the stage, DKG moves into the meat of her thesis: that these different men from different backgrounds would, under the steady hand of the one elected to lead the group, be exactly what the country needed. Unfortunately, this is where she also falters. She starts strongly enough, bringing in a greater supporting cast, including Gideon Welles, Edwin Stanton and Monty Blair (and his contentious clan), among others. The early years of Lincoln's administration let us probe the cabinet in detail. We can see Seward's growing respect and friendship with the president and Chase's determined work at Treasury despite his grasping ambition for the Presidency. Bates wanes in effect as Stanton waxes, even through his tendency to be a strict schoolmaster at the Department of War. These early days of Lincoln's Presidency are covered in an almost day-to-day level of detail.

At some point, the author starts to lose focus. Events on the Washington social scene are given focus completely out of proportion to their importance. There are some diversions into the squabbles of the Blair family, which seems bound and determined to annoy everyone it crosses. These new elements cloud the story of the interactions between Lincoln and his cabinet. But the story itself loses some of its drama, as the cabinet, having struggled through the early years, now operates rather efficiently. Were it not for Chase's clumsy lunges towards the 1864 nomination, there would be no drama at all. Midway through the book, the reader is left confused, as the thesis has fizzled, and there's little to replace it. Not that there aren't goings-on of great import, but rather DKG gives them short shrift. The Gettysburg address gets a page. The New York draft riots about the same.

Whereas the front half of the book covered the rivalry among Lincoln and his cabinet-to-be, the back half covers Lincoln's skillful management of the same. Here's DKG ponders how Lincoln's traits made him the perfect manager of men. Yet a variety of the traits which make Lincoln special could be seen as positive or negative. Consider the trait most frequently praised: Lincoln's sense of timing. Over and over, Lincoln ignores those who push him to change, holding out until the opportune moment. But this is praise that could just as easily turn into condemnation. It's possible to say that there are times when Lincoln could have acted quickly, decisively and saved lives. Sacking McClellan comes to mind, as does firing Cameron from the Secretary of War position. On the other hand, the timing of the Emancipation Proclamation seems almost preternatural, with Lincoln's hand on the pulse of the country. Which ties into one of Lincoln's genuine traits: an uncanny and near-perfect ability to read public sentiment. Cynics could criticize Lincoln for blowing in the wind of opinion, but Goodwin exposes that the President often knew exactly what he wanted, and awaited only the best moment to strike.

Sometimes, DKG's attempts to read Lincoln degenerates into unfounded psychoanalysis. She does this clumsily, usually pulling the reader right out of the narrative.

Acutely aware of his own emotional needs, Lincoln had chosen ... to review the troops, for his conversations with Grant and his interactions with the soldiers sustained and inspired him during the troubling days ahead.

There's no footnote associated with this, not a scrap of evidence. In fact, the next portion of the paragraph wanders into a bizarre cul-de-sac discussion of "emotional intelligence" and defining what it means to have hope. Thankfully, these moments are the rarest of occasional tangles in the skein DKG weaves.

Clearly, there's much to praise and much to criticize in Lincoln. Did he drive the nation to war or was he the savior of the Union? Was he a racist or a closet radical abolitionist? Does his suspension of habeas corpus tip his dictatorial ambitions? Or was he simply fighting a difficult battle on difficult terms? Goodwin opts almost exclusively for praise over criticism. There are times where her narrative veers from history into hagiography. For instance: Lincoln's words on race are well-known. While he ended slavery, he was not a man who believed in the equality of white and black; which is fine, as he's a product of his era. But DKG spends an early chunk of pages bending over backwards to prove that Lincoln's not a racist. The point is more effectively proven by Lincoln's early and frequent opposition to the spread of slavery, by the Emancipation Proclamation, and by Lincoln's warm relationship with Frederick Douglass, who spoke warmly and gratefully of how Lincoln treated him as an equal. The story of Lincoln is better served by an honest appraisal. While there's no need to tear the man down, he's got a holiday and the closest thing the country has to a national temple. He can handle some criticism.

In spite of the occasional detour into hagiography or the role of armchair therapist, this is a well-written book. The flaws are few and far between, and the crackling storytelling makes them easy to forget. I'm eager to read more history, down the line, if for no other reason to see if those authors can do as well as Goodwin has with Team of Rivals.

Review: Parliament of Whores, by P. J. O'Rourke

It's all Rolling Stone's fault. I was a sophomore in high school, and RS issued one of its more famous covers: Janet Jackson, topless, with her breasts covered by an unknown person. (The coverer on the cover was later revealed to be Jackson's then-secret husband, René Elizondo, Jr.) Where did I see that issue? The chaplain's office, natch. Of course I picked it up and started leafing through the pages. This was the first periodical I remember reading that used the word "fuck". Excellent. Arriving home, I announced to my parents that I needed a subscription to Rolling Stone, immediately. My parents consented, I'm not sure why. Soon, every two weeks, I'd get another issue of pro-dope, pro-sex, anti-Bush (the first one) crusty-rock-critic propaganda, and it was good. One of the oddest things about Rolling Stone was that, buried in most issues, between William Grieder's latest well-researched polemic and the record reviews, you could find a piece by PJ O'Rourke.

Though I didn't know it at the time, PJ's a conservative. Not quite dyed-in-the-wool, and certainly not one who drinks the Republican Kool-Aid ("To mistrust science and deny the validity of the scientific method is to resign your job as a human"), but definitely a small-government, people-are-poor-because-it's-their-fault-conservative. At the time, I didn't pay much attention to the ideology of any particular author. If their stuff was good enough for RS, it was good enough for me. And PJ's stuff was funny. Really, really funny. "Republicans are the party that says that government doesn't work, and then get elected and prove it." "Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." Even when he said things that were patently ridiculous, he said them with style and wit. If Irish Diplomacy is telling a man to go to hell such that he looks forward to the journey, O'Rourke's writing so wonderfully delineated your foibles that you wished you had more for him to insult.

Parliament of Whores was the first O'Rourke book I read. It aims to eviscerate the American government, proving how wasteful and useless it (by and large) is. He's not particularly subtle, either, as chapter titles reveal: "Our Government: What the Fuck Do They Do All Day and Why Does It Cost So Goddamned Much Money?" Based on an assemblage of various columns he wrote for various publications (Rolling Stone, but also Automobile and National Review). My understanding is that one of the great privileges of upper-level journalism is that one can repurpose one's output every now and again into a book, thus creating a new stream of income from an old stream of outflow. Similar to the way cows repurpose grain into fertilizer. O'Rourke has wrapped each article in a bit of connective tissue, and occasionally edited the material to refer to earlier works in the book. For the most part, this works, though some pieces are rather shoehorned in. This can be forgiven, as the squarest peg, an analysis of so-called "Sudden Acceleration Incidents" by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which is the microcosm representing the federal bureaucracy, is one of the funniest pieces in the book.

O'Rourke isn't to be taken seriously. He's as his best at screeds and witticism. Actual facts are a bit thin on the ground, and generally, ah, repurposed to the author's dubious ends. The section where he cuts 25% from the federal goverment had me in stitches, though if I took any of it seriously, I'd be horrified.

I cut the entire international affairs "budget function," as they call it, except for food aid, refugee assistance and conduct of foreign affairs (because the State Department gives us a way to ship Ivy League nitwits overseas).

I got rid of all transportation spending. Let 'em walk.

If I outlaw rent control and discriminatory zoning and give landlords the right to evict criminals and deadbeats, I should be able to cut housing assistance in half.

The book was written (assembled?) in 1992, and covers pieces going back as far as 1988 (covering the inauguration of Papa Bush). There are some amusing bits of outdatedness, though, certainly, they're not O'Rourke's fault. Early in Bush 41's term, PJ predicted there was no way we wouldn't re-up the president in 1992. This was before no new taxes. In the aforementioned budget section, he cuts Air Force missile procurement in half because there's no one to point the missiles at. The most startling bit was early on, where PJ is outlining the purpose of the book.

[W]henever we regular citizens try to read a book on government or... listen to anything anybody who's in the government is saying, we feel like high school students who've fallen two weeks behind in their algebra class. Then, we grow drowsy and torpid and the next thing you know we are snoring like a gas-powered weed whacker. This could be intentional. Our goverment could be attempting to establish a Dictatorship of Boredom in this country. The last person left awake gets to spend all the tax money.

It's so incredibly pre-Internet that it stopped me in my tracks. It's almost cute. Now, we've just finished an administration that did its best to hide the workings of government from the people, and are ushering in another which promised to snow the people under with press releases, e-mails, youtube videos and any other possible way to connect with you and your wallet. What once might have evolved into a Dictatorship of Boredom has come to be a Clusterfuck of the Paranoid. The government doesn't trust the people and the people don't trust the government. And the only thing that's changed in the seventeen years since O'Rourke published his words is that there's more information available to the citizenry than ever before.

One other thing has changed: our ever-growing ideological polarization. O'Rourke wasn't just the first conservative author I read, he was probably the last (certainly, one of the few). I can stomach Paul Johnson, for instance, but most of the conservative commentary that falls in the humor section is either simply vicious or published in The Weekly Standard without even the courtesy of a wink. Things have gotten bad enough that people are reaching back in time to put down people purely because of their ideological bent. Reading a few of the comments at Amazon.com for Parliament of Whores, I was especially intrigued by those who gave this book one or two stars. Generally, their disgust with the book centered on the author's conservative proclivities. These reviews reminded me of a time a couple of years ago, when my Dad noticed a copy of one of O'Rourke's books on my shelf. "I never knew" said my father, "that he's one of the lunatics." Asking my father to explain, he said simply "He's a Republican." it saddened me, because, though I haven't read O'Rourke that much lately, he's not Rush and he's not Coulter. He's funnier, smarter and wittier than the both of them plus Al Franken and Janeane Garafalo. He doesn't spend a lot of time on ad hominem attacks, and sort of apologizes when he does. He's wicked, but he's also civil. I don't agree with all his politics, but I do agree with a lot of his assessments of the profligacy and impotence of government. And he's one of the best writers of humor I've ever read.