The Written Word
for January 31, 2001

I bring to your attention today two books which I read while on vacation. There’s something about the sea breezes of the promenade deck of a ship that makes you want to read, It also makes you want to go to sleep. I did a lot of both while on the Ryndam’s maiden trip down the west coast of South America.

The first is T.R., by H.W. Brands, the massive biography of Theodore Roosevelt. T.R. was a much larger than life character who gained fame by standing down as Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1898 in order to be colonel of the Roughriders, a motley crew he led up San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American war. This vaulted him into the vice-presidency of the United States under McKinley and when McKinley was assassinated, into the presidency and what he called his "bully pulpit".

Roosevelt, while blustery and boastful, was brave beyond belief as the description of the battle for San Juan Hill relates – so brave that when he was shot in the chest during the 1912 presidential race he continued speaking for an hour before he went to hospital to have the bullet removed!

He was a Republican yet by standards of today he looked a lot more like a Democrat. He set aside huge areas in the west as national parks and took on big business, with their buccaneers like Carnegie, Morgan and Rockefeller, with great gusto. He was, of course, responsible for fomenting a revolution in Colombia thus getting Panama to break away as a separate country willing to make a deal with the United States to build the Panama Canal.

When TR had completed his second term – not quite accurate because McKinley served the first few months – he handpicked William Howard Taft as his successor and then four years later, annoyed at Taft, sought to get the Republican nomination for himself. He failed so promptly called a leadership convention of the Progressive Party, obtained its nomination, then by splitting the vote, made possible the election of Woodrow Wilson.

He was, of course, a distant cousin to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the uncle of FDR’s wife, Eleanor.

Clark Clifford is one of the most fascinating of late 20^th century political junkies and his autobiography, called Counsel to the President is written with well known diplomat Richard Holbrooke. Clifford, a Democrat, started his career advising Harry S Truman and the book is worth its price if only for the description of how Truman pulled off his tremendous upset of Thomas Dewey in 1948. Clifford’s odyssey takes him through the Kennedy presidency, with the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Cuba missile crisis through the stormy days of Lyndon Johnson to the disappointing Jimmy Carter’s term.

Clifford, one of the so-called "wise men", describes the war in Viet Nam with refreshing candor sparing neither Republican nor Democratic administrations. In fact, Clifford’s descriptions of the Viet Nam War and the Johnson "Great Society" era also in themselves make the book worthwhile.

Both books are long but both make you annoyed that it’s time to pack it in for the evening. Neither book is brand new and can be special ordered and in the case of the Clifford book, can be found at reduced prices. I highly recommend both.