Puttering in the Study

Roosevelt's Navy: The Education of a Warrior President, 1882-1920 - James Tertis de Kay

This was a magnificent little book.  It focuses on Roosevelt's tenure as Assistant Secretary of the Navy from 1913 to 1919, ending with his nomination to the vice presidency in 1920.  It notes that from his earliest days in college he wanted to emulate the career path of his distant cousin Theodore Roosevelt, from Assistant Secretary of the Navy, to Governor of New York, to the White House, and follows his development as a young man and a young politician in Albany to Washington, where he saw firsthand the work necessary to prepare and lead a nation at war.

I have read numerous biographies of FDR, but none that expressly focused on the education he was receiving in playing a significant role in Pres. Woodrow Wilson's administration.  FDR's office was next to his chief, Sec. of the Navy Josephus Daniels and only a short walk across the street from the West Wing of the White House, where cousin Theodore had moved the president's administrative offices only a few years earlier. 

In fact the exterior of the West Wing shown in this picture I had taken on what is still called the Navy Steps is (despite extensive renovations during FDR's tenure) is still that that was there when FDR worked in Room 278 of what was called the State, War & Navy building (ignore the parapet FDR added - he was hoping Congress would) under Daniels.

The book is a very insightful analysis of FDR's decisionmaking process - good and bad - as a young politician, but its strength is pointing out the experiences he had that helped foreshadow what he would do as president when faced with similar challenges to those he saw Wilson face in 1914-1919. Of course at the time FDR was looking backwards towards his Uncle Ted's tenure in the office and how he could use the office to similarly promote his subsequent political career.  But what he took from the experience of watching Wilson would in the end play a much larger role in FDR's management of World War II and the creation of a postwar international organization.

One point I'd never seen mentioned before was when Roosevelt was confronted with the absolute need to arm merchant vessels in face of Germany's decision to begin unrestricted submarine warfare.  His problem was that the ships could not purchase the necessary ordnance, and the Navy could not provide it to them.  FDR's solution was to have the Navy "lend" the necessary ordnance to the civilian vessels.  Although Daniels and Wilson eventually decided against even this halfway measure (I think - on rereading I am not certain what happened to the proposal) it may have been in Roosevelt's mind over 20 years later when he came up with Lend-Lease.

Any treatment of FDR in 1916-1918 must include a treatment of his relationship with Lucy Mercer, but the book's is remarkably slender.  It spends less than four pages on the issue, but only because there is so little to draw conclusions from.  And because it bears little relationship to the larger issues the book is concerned with.  In the end, Roosevelt - confronted by his wife and his mother - reluctantly made the decision that stopped the relationship before it hampered his political career.  That he restarted it 25 years later is a subject for another book.

Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War - Paul Kennedy

This was my second read of this interesting little book.

Kennedy studies five problems that the Allies faced in World War II, from how to get convoys safely across the Atlantic, to winning command of the air, stopping a blitzkrieg, seizing and enemy-held shore, and defeating the "tyranny of distance".  He explains the role that engineers played in solving each of the problems. It's a good story - as usual it suffers when I am simultaneously reading other more global accounts of the war which slice the issue differently.  I think a reader who was not reading something else on the same subject at the same time would probably enjoy this more than I did.  As it was, I was reading parts of the same story in at least two and at times three books at the same time, which I am learning is not conducive to an enjoyable experience with the book

Accidental Presidents: Eight Men Who Changed America Paperback – Jared Cohen

I knew I'd be interested in the topic, but not "this" interested.  33 years ago my professional report (LBJ lingo for master's thesis) was on the American vice president, with a preceding paper on the "accidental presidencies."

Admittedly I focused on the 20th century accidental presidents, but even so, Cohen's book brimmed with things that I did not know.  I knew nothing about the very interesting presidential accessions in the 19th century, and given that they occurred approximately 20 years apart for 120 years it was interesting to see how the same figures actually played a part in more than one transition.

Terrific book on the White House in the 19th century, and on the many stories surrounding the 20th century presidential deaths and offices well.  I learned a lot about the Harding to Coolidge transition that I did not know, as well as some excellent commentary on what Lyndon Johnson didn't do right in the author's view.  But, again, the best part of the book was in the highly entertaining accounts of the transitions and personalities in the 19th century.  I will never look at John Tyler, Zachary Taylor, James Garfield or Chester Arthur the same again.

Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible And Why / Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don't Know About Them) - Bart Ehrman

One of my favorite Teaching Company videos is Dr. Bart Ehrman’s on the New Testament, where he goes into what I now understand is the historical–critical analysis of the books of the New Testament. The lectures provide a fascinating insight into the books, along with background into when they were created, what they mean, and how they were changed throughout history.

These two books cover the same ground. The first focuses on what we know of the history of changes and alterations to the texts going back to our earliest copies, which are still removed by hundreds of years from the very first versions. The second focuses more on the differences between the texts, with Ehrman insisting that we consider what each author has to say standing alone, and recognizing that they might well be contradicting each other, and why that might be the case.

The claim that every word of the Bible is correct as it sits today is not one that I was brought up with, but Ehrman presents the case – which is well recognized in most Christian seminary and theological institutions today – that that claim simply is not sustainable, and that whether approaching the texts from an analytical or a devotional perspective, a reader benefits from understanding how the texts started and how they were changed – sometimes unintentionally and sometimes quite deliberately throughout history.

I thoroughly enjoy and think I benefit from understanding the different viewpoints of the different authors, and why they might disagree on certain points. It is also helpful to know that many of the beliefs that I hold were not in fact part of Jesus’ teachings during his lifetime, and instead reflect decisions in the early years of the church regarding doctrines that Jesus did not express opinions on. Or - and this is one of Ehrman’s points - we don’t know whether he did or not since we have no way of knowing everything that he taught, and in many cases whether what we are told he said is correct.

Now there are ways of sussing out what’s more likely true than not true that are very helpful - for example no new religion in its right mind would make up a boast that its leader who was executed as a common criminal. Or have a leader be baptized by an inferior, or grow up in a one-horse town like Nazareth. But this is what makes these things likely to have actually occurred. On the other hand, additions or changes to writings are less likely to be correct in general. So much of the books deal with these sorts of questions - what can we say about what Jesus actually said and did given the contradictions and changes.

But these are my favorite kinds of books. I learned a lot, and gained a better understanding of an area I want to know more about.

Alexander Hamilton - Ron Chernow

What is there left to say about this book? Not only did it fill an important gap in the popular biography of an important Founding Father – it inspired a groundbreaking Broadway musical that will inspire generations to come with the story of an extraordinary individual and the founding of our nation.
There was the odd sensation seeing the origin of song lyrics from the musical throughout. “Not Throwing Away My Shot” seems to actually have been inspired by the clear historical record that Hamilton told people he “was” in fact “throwing away his shot” in the duel with Burr. Burr actually did say that “the world was wide enough for Hamilton and me.” There was the heartbreak in the final portrait of a middle-aged Hamilton after his son Philip was killed in a duel.  I never knew he had made it to middle age, candidly, or that the light in his eyes had seemed to have gone out.
But there was substance I had not seen as well. No one comes out terribly well here, and the worst decisions were Hamilton’s, from the ill-advised publication of the Reynolds and Adams pamphlets to the panicked calls for the New York Legislature to find a way to set aside statewide electoral results in 1800, since they would in effect guarantee the Federalists’ loss to Jefferson’s emerging Democratic-Republicans later in the year. And ending, of course, in his failure to find a way to avoid the duel that would leave his family in poverty.
A terrific book, all in all. And it’s remarkable how well the musical tells the same story.

Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power - Jon Meacham

I am pretty sure this book has been on my Kindle for over ten years. It is an exhaustive biography of Jefferson, but focused on his career as a political leader. That is not to me the most interesting aspect of the man, and doesn’t fully explore all the things that made him both a genius and a highly controversial figure. But it did provide a mountain of interesting detail about his activities and conduct - even if it didn’t fully reflect his multiple interests in real time. You have to know more about him to know that he perennially had numerous ongoing projects which reflected his wide range of interests, and that is an aspect of his life I am always interested in.
But one thing Meacham does convey is a better understanding of Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings and his children by her. He nails Jefferson’s notations in his daily accounts as to his location and the birth of all of the children of slaves on his estate to confirm that only he - and not some other male member of his family - fathered all of her chilfren. The book also gets across how Jefferson lived on a daily basis with slaves who were not just 7/8th white and his children, but who had three of the same four grandparents as his two daughters - since Sally and Jefferson’s deceased wife were half-sisters. It’s hard to understand what that life was like - Meacham makes that a little easier to understand.

Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages - Dan Jones

This is my first Dan Jones book, and I really enjoyed it. It is a very readable account of the thousand years of history between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the discovery of the New World. He frequently ties aspects of the Middle Ages both backwards into the Roman empire that preceded it, and forward into the present day, showing how medieval developments continue to play an important role in our modern world.

One brief example – he notes the enormous significance of both the development of the printing press and of the Protestant Reformation, but ties the two together in an unexpected way. In fact, it was the development of movable type and the printing press that made possible the sheer scale of the sale of indulgences which in turn led to the Reformation. I had never heard that before. But the book is full of interesting observations like this.

Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities - Bettany Hughes

I really enjoyed this book.  It was a complete history of the city from its origins to the modern day.  It says a lot about the different empires that used it as a base, as well as the states that didn't - but still affected it greatly.

Rereads: "Dune", "Declare", "Battle of Britain" and "Overlord" on Audible

I have recently noticed a tendency to reread books that I think I might enjoy - and more often, to start listening to them as audiobooks.  

Most recently, I decided to reread Frank Herbert's Dune in advance of the new film.  I knew I had not read it since the mid-'90s, and that reading had not been especially successful, I remembered. 

The new reading was a disaster.  I was completely unable to read the book without seeing the visuals of the 1984 David Lynch film which, although I love it, was definitely getting in the way of experiencing the novel.  I also could see the tendency to want to skip over narration to get to dialogue, and suspected I was missing important parts of the book as a result.  I could already tell that I was not able to absorb anything of the characters in the book that was not from the movie.

To try to get around this, I downloaded the audiobook and began listening to that.  I can't say that I liked the audiobook per se – dialogue was mostly narrated, but occasionally characters would come in and be voiced separately, and to my taste poorly - but what it did was eliminate any carryover from the earlier film and allow me to focus on what the book and the characters were actually saying.  It's like watching a play – the actor can be doing an inferior job, but it's still Shakespeare.  I did end up reading the last few chapters in the hardback version, but by that time the characters were almost completely divorced from the movie's incarnations.  And I was getting impatient.

While I was reading Dune, I also remembered that I really didn't think I had adequately understood Tim Powers' Declare the first time I read it, and had probably skipped over important parts looking for scenes that had more action or supernatural involvement.  So I got the book for that and listened to it over the next several weeks.  Again, I think I got a much better understanding of the book, as I was forced to listen to everything in it, and not skip over parts that seemed duller.  At least now I know that I actually listened to everything in the book, and didn't skip over any important parts.

The next book, James Holland's Battle of Britain I started in hardback with the copy that Mr. Holland inscribed for me at the World War II conference in 2019.  I had just finished building a new tool Airfix 1/72 Hawker Hurricane and was starting on a new-tool Spitfire and wanted to reread a good book on the subject.  Within a couple of chapters I realized that I was not able to read as much as I wanted in the limited time that I have to read in the study in the evening, and instead got the audiobook and listened to most of the book that way.  The individual accounts got a little tiring after a while, but it ended up being an efficient way of getting the book read.  The hardest part was that a substantial part of the book deals with the battle of France, and it is almost midway through before you get to Fighter Command engaging the Luftwaffe over Britain beginning in the late summer of 1940.  Which began to conflict with the next book I listened to ...

Finally, several years ago I listened to Max Hastings' Overlord because I wanted to read something about the actual D-Day landings.  This is not the best book for that – it focuses on the battle for Normandy instead, and is similarly full of individual accounts that are not exactly what I was looking for – but Hastings does eventually provide commentary and analysis on the major questions surrounding the campaign. 

Central here is British general Sir Bernard Montgomery.  It is pretty well agreed that Montgomery made major mistakes in how he characterized and promised his forces' activities from D-Day to the end of the campaign, but Hastings takes the position that there was in the end nothing lost as a result, because neither Montgomery nor Bradley could actually have done anything earlier than they did that would have generated a faster, or better result.  Hastings is adamant that no advance against the German forces could take place until they had been written down by weeks of attrition.  If you agree with this viewpoint – and it seems sound to me – then much of that heat directed at Montgomery is warranted, but in the end irrelevant.  (Something you can't say about the German leaders and generals' action, I note).  He overpromised and did not manage expectations regarding what he was actually going to be able to do, but in the end it is difficult to see how that had a negative effect on the final outcome.  Hastings even goes so far as to decline to call the failure to close the Falaise pocket an error that had any effect because he believes that even if the forces allotted had closed the pocket, the desperate German forces would have blown through them anyway.

That's what I was in the end looking for.  What were the actions taken, are they subject to criticism, and what effect would different actions have had.

 

Inside the Seraglio: Private Lives of the Sultans in Istanbul – John Freely

This book describes the private lives of the sultans in and around Istanbul during the Ottoman Empire's occupation of the former Constantinople (1453-1922).

I was fascinated by our visit to Topkapi Palace several years ago, and this book puts a lot of color into the now empty chambers that were once occupied by the sultan and his servants and harem.  I still cannot keep the various occupants of the Ottoman throne separate, and in many ways this book doesn't help much because it provides only generic illustrations of some of them – and they were typically depicted similarly by artists. 

But I now know some of the different characters and stories, and have a better understanding of the motivations and tendencies of the various players surrounding the Ottoman throne.