A Further Offering on Parental Advice

Now that Father's Day recedes safely in the rear view mirror, it's a good moment to remember one of the most extraordinary books I've ever encountered--the Handbook for William, subtitled "A Carolingian Woman's Counsel for Her Son," written by one "Dhuoda" in the middle of the century and ably translated from its original Latin by Carol Neel.

"Dhuoda" was the wife of Bernard, count of Septimania, whom Neel identifies as "one of the most prominent Frankish magnates of the generation after Charlemagne."  William, there elder son, was born in 826; a second son, unnamed, was born in 1841.  During most of the intervening years, Bernard was away from home--not, strictly speaking, on a frolic, but rather attempting to maintain or secure his position in the lethally unstable milieu of the children of the great emperor.  At last Bernard accepted the authority of Charles the Bald, Charlemagne, but (for Dhuoda, at least) at a terrible price: Bernard delivered William up to Charles as hostage against the possibility of betrayal.  The second son was taken also, although his story is less clear: Dhuoda refers to him in her manuscript as the one "whose name I still do not know."

Dhuoda prepared her manuscript, then, in a vain effort to provide guidance to these two absent children.  Her purpose is not earthly practical advise; rather, she seeks (in Neel's words) "to teach her children how they might flourish in God's eyes as well as men's."  She says:

Read the words I address to you, understand them and fulfill them in action.  And when your little brother, whose name I still do not know, has received the grace of baptism in Christ, do not hesitate to teach him, to educate him, to love him, and to call him to progress from good to better.  When the time has come that he has learned to speak and to read, show him this little volume gathered together into a handbook by me and written down in your name.  Urge him to read it, for he is your flesh and your brother.  I, your mother Dhuoda, urge you, as if I even now spoke to both of you, that you "hold up your heart" from time to time when you are oppressed by the troubles of this world, and "look upon him who reigns in heaven" and is called God.  May that all-powerful one whom I mention frequently even in my unworthiness make both of you, my sons--along with my lord and master Bernard, your father--happy and joyful in the present world.   May he make you successful in all your undertakings, and after the end of this life may he bring you rejoicing to heaven among the saints.  Amen.

Dhuoda apparently never saw either of her sons again,  and may have known nothing of their fate.  In the event, Bernard was executed by Charles the Bald and William died in trying to avenge his father's death.  The unnamed second son "probably was" (Neel's judgment) the child who becomes Bernard Plantevelue-Hairyfeet--and founds the duchy of Aquitaine.  His son, her (probable?) grandson became William the Pious, who endowed the great Benedictine abbey at Cluny.

Loose Change on the Old Skinflint

I've finished David Cannadine's doorstop biography of Andrew Mellon (cf. link) and I offer a few bits of loose-change derived from the evidence here at hand:

One, the tax evasion charge/trial was an outrage, a farce from start to finish.  On he evidence I'd say that Mellon was guilty, all right, but of an entirely different (and uncharged) crime: self-dealing.  Throughout his tenure he engaged in repeated, egregious and blatant entanglement of his own business with the public's.  And without the slightest hint of defensiveness or irony: one can only assume that he simply didn't see any distinction between the public's welfare and his own.  But the tax case--it reflects no glory on Attorney General Homer Cummings (who emerges as a pipsqueak) nor on prosecutor Robert Jackson--a guy who I have always wanted to like (he is perhaps the best stylist ever to have adorned the Supreme Court), but also a guy who keeps disappointing me with his naked, self-absorbed ambition.

Oh and an extra: whatever his virtues, Franklin D. Roosevelt could be a vindictive little prick.  Particularly, I suppose, about people whose money was newer than his own.

Two, the museum.  The National Gallery on the Mall.  It is indeed impressive, not merely how much money, but also much effort, Mellon poured into the project--much of it while he was under indictment or on trial.  And how careful he was to make sure it would not be merely a monument to himself.  And how much comic relief we can enjoy from the art dealer and impudent old scoundrel, Joseph Duveen.  Side note: I guess it is part of the folklore that Mellon gave the museum in an effort to buy off the government over taxes.  Cannadine makes a compelling case for the proposition that this is a canard: that Mellon was at work on the museum long before FDR ever came to power and that he persisted merely to finish what he had begun.
  
And three, Scotch-Irish.  Cannadine makes much of Mellon's own Scotch-Irish roots and of (as Cannadine sees it) a pervasive Scotch-Irish cultural template in gilded-age Pittsburgh.  By which he seems to mean: hard work, thrift to the point of austerity and an implacable adherence to perceived principle.  In Mellon's case at least, one might add: contempt for the Irish Catholic underclass.

This is plausible enough, but there is a puzzle.  Seems to me that when we talk about Scotch-Irish we more often have in mind a different slice of America--the southeast, particularly the Appalachians--and a different vocational niche--politics.  We think of "Barbry Allen" and the Hatfield McCoy feud.    Or we think of Presidents like Jackson and Polk (I would add Lincoln but the facts of his ancestry have eluded historians so the attribution can be no more than a guess).

These seem to me to be rather different cultures, not so?  Is it the accident of geography, that the lucky ones wound up in the coal-and-iron country while their misfortunate brothers had to settle for the hoots and hollers?  Or is there a deeper geographical split that we can trace back to the old country?  I suppose what I should do (instead of nattering on) is to go back and retrieve my copy of David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed, which did so much to clarify the diverse roots of early American culture.  But it's not at hand: one problem of having (part of) your library made out of dead trees.

Or maybe I am just making too much of it.  Maybe you can't expect to kind a common thread in a culture that can claim Chester A. Arthur,  Elvis Presley and Zack Galifianakis (really--link).

The Other Andrew and the Subsidy Press

Courtesy of Audible Audiobooks, I'm imbibing David Cannadine's not-quite-massive biography of Andrew Mellon, Pittburgh's “other Andrew,” the man who dominates our mythology of the great depression the same way Alan Geenspan does of the little depression. The book is a worthy effort, not impaired by the fact that it's a commission job (as Cannadine explains in the intro). Cannadine is a pro and he brings his pro chops to this task, unfailingly clearsighted about a man whose utter lack of self-comprehension must place him in at least the quarter finals of the clueless hall of fame.

But while we're talking clueless, there are a few clues on offer as to the rue provenance of the book. One, girth: it's about eight percent shorter than David Nasaw's (excellent) biography of the "original Andrew"--i.e., Carnegie. Yet it is nowhere near as full of incident.  For a man who did, in fairness, quite a bit with his life, still Mellon really must have been one of the dullest men alive. A tipoff as to the biographer's attitude is that Cannadine begins with a mini-biography of Mellon's father who, though not as rich or powerful as Andrew, seems to make a more promising subject. A related giveaway is that Cannadine gets his chapter epigraphs not from his subject but from the father—a man who at least had the courtesy to leave behind a sort of autobiography something Andrew never did, and which it would be impossible to imagine him doing.

There are other mini-biographies, especially Andrew's brother, Dick (with whom, in fairness, he was psychologically joined at the hip—you really can't tell the story without the other). Also Andrew's children: cookie-cutter trust-fund babies if there ever were any, each a wide-eyed misfit in his (her) own way. Also—and from the writer's standpoint, this was a break—Andrew's wife: a vulgar, energetic and remorseless woman who clearly needed some of Andrew's money (as did her near-numberless family), but who seems also, poignantly, to have needed Andrew. And he her: it's People Magazine stuff but the fractious marriage and its afterlife is surely the most vivid and energetic part of the book. Still at the end, every marriage is a mystery to anyone who is not in it, and Cannadine is prudent enough not to venture insights that he surely couldn't sustain.

Oh, and as to subsidy—finally, the very fact of audio. You know, agreeable as this book is as a read, I can think of a thousand I'd rather have in my ear. Do we hear the scratch of the donor's pen on checkbook here as well?

Afterthought:  As an undocumented extra--reading Cannadine, I come away with the conviction that Mellon did not utter the remark for which he is so often quoted.  It was Herbert Hoover, describing (or perhaps "caricaturing") Mellon who said:

Mr. Mellon had only one formula: “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate.”

 Note that it is Hoover speaking here, not Mellon, and note further that Hoover and Mellon entertained a minimum high regard for each other (amazing how much Hoover was disliked by those who knew him best).   And read in context, it's pretty clear the whole portrait was intended as a lampoon.  I don't mean to suggest that Mellon tooled around Pittsburgh or Washington in  Pierce Arrow tossing dollar bills out of the window.  I think what I may be saying is tht if Mellon really said anything so pithy and astringent, it would have been the only time in his life that he actually did so.

As the Twig is Bent (Leader of the Free World Div.)

Doug Henwood points out that today is the centennial of the birth of Richard M. Nixon.  Meanwhile it happens that I am spending my off hours with David McCullough's doorstop biography of Harry S. Truman and the news prompts me to meditate on the early live of great men.

Do some comparisons: Nixon, Truman--also Eisenhower and Johnson, for what it was worth--grew up not quite dirt poor but on the raw downside edge of respectability, never more than one wrong guess away from squalor (the unknown young Truman evidently met the unknown Ike's brother while both were youngsters at work in Kansas City banks).  They all had their breaks: alive in the right country and the right century.  Each is in his own way showed a kind of determination, but not all the  same kind.   Nixon and Johnson lusted after power; it's not clear that  either Ike or Truman had the same goal--observe how easily at the end Truman and Ike said goodbye to power, in contrast with the other two.  

For present purposes, what catches my fancy is the matter of chemistry.  It's a commonplace how Nixon, rising from his hardscrabble youth, ever nourished a sense of grievance and unmollified hurt.  It might be worth noticing how Truman, with much the same background, appears to have grown to maturity the happiest of men.    He seems to be one of those babies who knew he was loved. He enjoyed pleasing people; he was a willing worker in all ways, a world to whom the world made sense.  Superficial observers may question appraisal; they may remember the 1948 give 'em hell campaign, or the man who wrote a rude letter to a critic of his daughter's music.    But even in conflict, he seems to be a man who is enjoying himself.  Contrast Nixon who never seems really to enjoy himself at all.  Afterthought: this may be the temperament that is equipped to order, not once but twice, the destruction of a Japanese city--and then go home to an untroubled night's sleep.

For extra credit: note that both Truman and Ike, seeking a ticket out of their constrained youth, sought an appointment to West Point.  We know what became of Ike; McCullough says it was his poor eyesight that caused the Academy to turn down Truman.  So, which one saw more combat service in World War I?

Afterthought:  H/T to David for pointing out that this is also the 150th anniversary of the London Underground.

Paparazzi Note: the Ickes Wedding

Quick now, who is secretary of interior?  Ah, got you there now, didn't I?  In the Roosevelt administration, you would have known: he  was Harold L. Ickes and he was one of the most powerful and visible members of the Roosevelt inner circle, responsible, inter alia, for a large chunk of the public works program that  played so central a role on the Roosevelt New Deal.

This post is nominally about Ickes but it's really about paparazzi.  Here's the deal: Ickes' wife was killed in an auto accident in 1935.  Three years later, he remarried. He was 64; his bride, 25. Certainly in a sheltered age, the disparity was more than enough to attract attention but Ickes did all he knew how to keep the matter private.  Jane went to Ireland to stay with an uncle.  Harold followed her separately, traveling under an assumed name.  They reunited and married in a Presbyterian church in Dublin before just three witnesses.  The officiating clergyman, Ickes recounts, "did not know whom he was marrying and continued in ignorance until the newspaper correspondents descended on him later that afternoon."   Ickes cabled a press officer back at Interior to announce the wedding. The press began a chase.  "When we got to Waterloo Station in London," Ickes recalls, "we were met by a small army of newspaper photographers and reporters."  But here is the fun part:

When they got through with us at Waterloo, we got into our cab an I told the driver to take us to Grosvenor House.  After going a few blocks our driver leaned back top tell us that we were being followed.  Shortly thereafter we drove into a quiet street, just off Hyde Park, and I told the driver to stop.  Getting out of the cab at the curb i found that six cars were following filled with photographers and reporters.  I signaled them to stop and alight.  Then I told them that we had tried to be as considerate as possible. We had permitted them to interview us and take all the pictures that they waned, but now we were entitled to our privacy.  I informed them that, if necessary, we would sit in the taxicab, at that particular spot, all night long.  Then they wanted to take one or two more shots and I told them I would permit this if they would make a gentleman's agreement that they would not follow us or bother us any further. This agreement they carried out so that we had no more trouble in London.

From The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes, vol. 2, page 404, entry of June 26, 1938.  Ickes died in 1952.  Jane lived on and supervised the publication of the diaries thereafter; vol. 2 appeared in 1952.  Ickes bore--and seemed to enjoy--the reputation of being a curmudgeon, but the marriage seems to have been happy.  As to the press, does anyone--can anyone--make any such agreement today?  The thought of the secretary and his new bride sitting all night in a cab off Hyde Park is enough to make the mind reel. 

Oh, and the current secretary:  Ken Salazar, formerly a Democratic senator from Colorado, a job in which he was probably a lot  more visible.  Okay, maybe you did know,  but in his time, a lot more people would have been able to identify Ickes.

Lovers, Haters and Biography

Slate has a cute piece up on the question of how many biographers have fallen for their subject.  Answer: some.  Maybe not many.  Who the hell knows?  Unaddressed is the related question: how many grow to hate their subject as they get to know him (or her--see infra).

Getting hard data here might be even harder because the author might have all kinds of reasons not to want to admit that he had made a critical error in choosing his subject.   But famous among law professors (at least of a certain age) is at least one remarkable instance: the case of the late Supreme Court justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.  His first biographer abandoned the project unfinished "discouraged by what seemed to him the bleakness of Holmes' character."  His second, the legendary Grant Gilmore, grew so hostile to his subject tht he finished nothing at all.   Later biographers, while not so dramatic, appear not to love their particular subject much better.  Holmes appears in retrospect, so this account goes, to have enjoyed a Petraeus-level PR operation during his lifetime which may have laid the groundwork for disappointment later (documentation for this paragraph is here).

I can think of another case which may be relevant although I am not entirely sure of the facts so I need to tread cautiously.  At any rate, I know a well-regarded feminist scholar who set out to write a biography of a pioneer in the campaign for women's independence.  Early on she discovered to her horror that her subject was also a flaming racist.  I know very little of her thinking beyond this point but I know that completion of the project took another 20 years.  One might well say--hey, finding that your subject has feet of clay is not a problem, it just makes the project all that much more interesting.  Well one might, but perhaps not so easy if you are the one.

The only other case that comes immediately to mind is the biography Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel, by the incomparable historian of the postbellum south, C. Vann Woodward.  The way I remember if from the 60s, Woodward began his book by saying he had grown to dislike Watson more as his writing went on.   I just now went and looked at the online Google sample; I don't find quite those words but I do find a fascinating preface on how to deal with the life of a man who is in some (but not all)) ways quite loathsome.  
 
Afterthought: of course there is a whole shelf of biographies where the author seems willing just to tell the story as best he can, without (apparently) worrying about how much he cares about the subject.  I don't think anybody ever thought that Ian Kershaw (for example) ever saw much good in Hitler.  But he seemed to delight in the opportunity to tell the story fully, carefully, and  and with as much accuracy as he could control
 

Education: Whatever Works

I've finished up my Ike biography (though perhaps not finished writing about it).  I've moved on to Walter Borneman's The Admirals--a group bio of Leahy,* King, Halsey and Nimitz who stood at the forefront of the Navy in World War II.  The fascinating parallel is not just the war stuff (actually, I  haven't got to the war part of Borneman yet), but the stuff about all these guys before they were famous--"Ike before Ike" and so forth.  And the inevitable question: for any of the five could we have known on graduation day that they were bound for greatness?  And the related question: what (if anything) about their experience and education prepared them for what they became?

As to "could we have known," one kind of answer is easy:  "of course not,"   because we didn't know that there would be a global war at just the time they were positioned for high command.  But this is a cop-out.  Remember the precise question, and beware the problem of 20-20 hindsight.  Had we been present as they walked down the aisle, would we have said "he's the one!"--?   I grant that I can't give a conclusive answer but I doubt it.  By Borneman's account (with Smith's), only one of the five seems to have been impelled by naked ambition from the beginning.  That would be King who never shied from telling people that he intended to make it to the top and that he deserved to be there.  Yet that kind of ambition can damage a career just as often as it pushes one forward, and in King's case, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find there were people who would have taken the chance to derail him if it came their way.

Another of the four Navy men--Leahy, the oldest, though apparently less brazen about it than King, does seem to have shown remarkable foresight in picking his protectors.  He signed up early in the club of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then Undersecretary (but de facto boss) of the Navy, and formed a bond that lasted through FDR's time in the White House.  But did Leahy know in the 20s that he had backed the right horse (maybe a better metaphor would be "yacht").  The question answers itself.  Picking Roosevelt as protector may show nothing more than good luck.

The other two Navy men--Nimitz and Halsey--seem less focused on the very top rung.  Or at any rate, more happy with their day to day work: both men just seemed to enjoy being sailors.  Of the four, so far I find Nimitz more likeable--Nimitz who, after all, once plunged into the ocean to rescue an enlisted man.  Great for PR, I must say: maybe Paul Ryan should push somebody into Lake Michigan, so he can pull him out.  Or maybe Mitt Romney can push Pau--but I digress.

Perhaps what they do have in common is a quality somewhat more abstract: a capacity for learning from experience, a knack for taking something out of the job every day, of building  book of skills and intuitions that will serve them in their different ways when, as and if.

Back to the particular matter of schooling.  Evidently Annapolis was pretty much of an intellectual backwater in those days.  In pure academics, King did well; the others less so.  But in retrospect it is hard to see how the classroom experience --or deficiency thereof--had much to do with their careers one way or another.  Aside from the Borneman bio, another thing I stumbled on today was a post from the personal blog of James Kwak, he better known as co-proprietor of  Baseline Scenario.  Regular blog-shoppers will know that Kwak graduated last year from Yale Law School-in his 40s--after a career (or careers) of stunning variety   Here's a bit he wrote back as he entered his final semester at YLS:

In the long run, what I’ve learned is that being good at school is not that important in the real world. In the business world, for example, academic and intellectual skills are far less important than the ability to pick up a phone, call someone you hardly know who doesn’t owe you anything, and get him to do something for you — and that’s something they don’t teach in any school. In the academic world, even, the skills you need to take classes are far less important than the ability to identify promising research areas and convince other people (particularly funders) that they are promising areas of research. And of course, in life as a whole, being able to get along with other people and enjoy your time with your family and friends is more important than just about anything. But that’s made law school even more enjoyable in some ways, because it’s this little cocoon where I can forget how complicated life can be outside the classroom.

*Leahy or Leahey?  The preferred spelling seems to be "Leahy," but "Leahey" is widely reported, including at least once on the book's Amazon page.  And yes, Nimitz.

Liveblogging Smith on Ike: The Bomb

How far can we blame General/President Eisenhower for the Cold War and its umbrella of nuclear terror?  In his biography of Ike, Jean Edward Smith lays out a case that the answer is "not very much."  It's well-argued but not quite persuasive enough.

Of course Ike wasn't present at the creation: by all accounts he never learned bout the bomb until the genie was already out of the bottle. And by general agreement, he counseled Truman against using it on Japan.  Moreover as Smith makes clear, Ike strongly opposed using it in the "small wars"--Korea and Viet Nam.  In both cases, he had to sit on the heads of his own generals to get his way.  And the one thing everybody knows about Ike is that he left the Presidential stage with a valediction inveighing against the military-industrial complex.

Yet it was Ike who presided over (if he did not exactly create) the doctrine of of "mutually assured destruction"--the policy that kept a generation of school children hunkering down under their desks whie their parents dug fallout shelters.  My mother, only somewhat in jest, said she was going found a construction company called Grandma's Linger-a-Little-Longer.

It's probably Secretary of State John Foster Dulles who gets primary credit for the rhetorical incendiarism of MAD.  In other cases, Ike stifled Dulles, just as he often stifled the generals, but not here.  Why not?

If I read Smith right, the answer is three fold.  Ike felt, as I understand the argument, (1) that nukes were cheaper than ground war; (2) reduction in conventional weapons would actually reduce the scourge of ground wars; and (3) the very threat of mass destruction would be enough to keep it at bay.

O boyo boyo boy.  But before you fulminate with excess against Ike's policy, keep in mind the stark fact that it worked: we got through the Cold War precisely without the kind of holocaust that MAD was supposed to scare us out of (FWIW, I don't think this discussion as anything to do with proliferation, rogue nukes, or the other problems of the 21st Century--they were bound to happen anyway).

It worked:  my mother again: well, that's more good luck than good planning.  It might well be, and thank heavens we don't have any kind of a double-blind study designed to see how it might have gone in an alternative universe (does Harry Turtledove go into this possibility?  I don't know).  So, the fact is it worked.  But I'm still not quite persuaded that this ends the analysis.  For even if we sidestepped the unspeakable, still the fact is that MAD led is straightway into the  colossally dangerous, destabilizing and mainly  expensive arms race that MAD put in place.  In  short, precisely the sort of thing Ike inveighed against when he spoke about the military-industrial complex.

Liveblogging Smith on Ike: Cannons to Right of Them, Cannons to Left of Them

I had a chance to audioread another chunk of Jean Edward Smith's Eisenhower last night.  We've moved now from 1942 to early 1944 by which time Ike is back in London getting ready for the main event.  In the standard reading, this is a narrative of slow, steady progress: North Africa, then Sicily, then Italy, then...Yet my dominant thought is: what a mass of cockups, or near cockups.  Migawd, the number of things that went wrong, or could have gone wrong.   

Start with the real heart-stopper:  D-day itself, and the plan therefor.  The focus for the moment is not Ike himself but his boss and protector, the incorruptible and saintly George C. Marshall.  Now I have long counted myself a big Marshall fan and remain so but here's the thing: Marshall was one--perhaps chief--of the party who wanted it to happen in 1942.    C'mon, hurry up, no time-wasting, Hitler is the main event, let's go for him.

And what a catastrophic blunder this would have been.  By just about all the evidence, we weren't remotely ready to take on Hitler at that point, and couldn't possibly have been so by summer.  And ironically it was Churchill--Churchill, the great romantic, the risk-taker--who put the kibosh on the plan.  Churchill remembered Dunkirk; he remembered Dieppe; ironically perhaps most of all he remembered Gallipoli, one of the darkest stains on his on career, and he (at least) understood just how dangerous a coastal invasion might be.  Had Marshall prevailed--well, let's just say we would have had a very different war.

As I say the focus here was not Ike per se, but the decision had huge consequences for Ike's career/  Thing is, grant that there would be no European invasion--still, Roosevelt felt strongly that he had to do something, to reassure the voters; he couldn't just let the Army sit on its duff for a couple of years.   And so we find ourselves in one of the most irrelevant campaigns ever fought: the whole North Africa business, which was a surreal sort of sideshow from the very beginning.   "Sideshow," in the sense, for starters, that Hitler should never have let himself get sucked into it: North Africa had exactly nothing to do with his grand strategy; all it did was suck away precious resources.   "Sideshow" also in the sense that the Allies felt no military necessity to win it: the dominant purpose was to reassure the public.    Grant that it did make life inconvenient for Hitler; still I suspect that would have seemed like a pretty insipid reason to the boots on the ground.

North Africa was, of course, Ike's first real command, and here we come to a greater irony (Smith calls it "luck").  Specifically: by only a mid exaggeration, you could say that Ike won the North African command precisely because Marshall didn't expect the campaign to happen: since it was paper only, why worry about who is in charge.

Which beings us to the next question: how'd he do?  The charitable answer would have to be:  about as well as Obama did in the first Romney debate.  Ike, the consummate staff man, seemed to have all the problems you would expect for a newbie learning how to lead an Army in the field.  The landing was a mess (a committee job, it appears); the Allies misjudged the Germans at every turn;  we remember now (if at all) for one of the great field disasters of the war: the Battle of Kasserine Pass, in Tunisia.  Per Smith, the  Allies prevailed in North Africa by their one inarguable trump card: overwhelming material advantage.  They could (and did) throw money, men and materiel into the field in dimensions that the Germans couldn't begin to match.

On to Sicily.  The landing here goes better and the battle went, on the whole, pretty well.  Smith doesn't address the question of how much Ike was culpable for the fact that Patton went off on a frolic of his own rather than standing tough at the side of Montgomery in front of Mount Etna.  But he does point to one glaring deficiency: how completely the Allies dropped the ball in letting Kesselring escape scot-free onto the mainland with his entire force--men and equipment--intact.  We remember Ike as the great planner but this seems to be a planning error of the first order.

And then Italy.  I think just about everyone agrees now that the Italian campaign is an embarrassment in American military history: poor in planning, lackluster in execution.  Taking Italy (which might have been a bad idea in the first place) surely proved more costly than planners had predicted--in resources, but also in time.  And at the end--no, midway, long before the end--Ike moves on to the much more awesome responsibiilty as director of the Normandy invasion.

 Whew.   It's a wonder we won at all, seeing as how our leader was a man who couldn't tie our shoes in the morning.  Oh, no, of course not.   Do I cook the books?  Oh yes, of course.  At the end of the day I still think--and so does Smith--that Ike was an extraordinary leader of near-indispensable abilities, just the right man for a job that few if any others could have carried off.  And even if you accept my catalog of misbegotten enterprise, you can put a positive spin on it: Ike's errors in North Africa (at least), with more charity also in Sicily and Italy, can count as rookie errors: one reason the Normandy campaign went so well is precisely because of the things that had gone wrong earlier, and because of Ike's capacity to learn from them (Genghis Khan once accidentally drowned his own army--didn't make that mistake again).

My larger point, though, is twofold.  One: you make decisions, you make mistakes.  No one's career is blemish-free, and the more decisions you make, the more mistakes.   The trick is to learn from them.  Ike probably never heard of Samuel Beckett, but we can read Ike as a textbook instance of Beckett's counsel to "try again, fail better." And two: there is absolutely nothing like good luck.  Patton remarked on Ike's luck with admiration and a touch of rueful envy.  Napoleon said luck was his first requisite in a general.   Victories like the Allies' in Europe necessarily (inevitably?) take on an air of inevitability on the rear view mirror.  But here as in so many cases, it is probably worthwhile to remember Wellington's verdict on his victory at Waterloo: a damn near run thing.

Ike before Ike

  I'm not one of those who drives an automobile for the fun of it, but I can testify I came close to enjoying my late six hour round trip  to Reno thanks to the voice in my ear that kept consoling me with (the first part of) Jean Edward Smith's  biography of Eisenhower--specifically the first part, about his childhood and his long years as an underlaborer in the peacetime Army (I left off just at the point where General Marshall, as chief of staff, plucks him out of the Louisiana war games and brings him to Washington to put him to work on trying to salvage something out of the Philippine debacle).

I had all I could do to keep from saying "plucks him out of obscurity," which is pretty much the way I have always heard it: Eisenhower was nobody until Marshall said let there be Ike and there was Ike. But Smith makes clear that this is a gross distortion. Yes, it was Marshall who finally brought him into the charmed circle. But Ike had spent most of the interwar years making himself the indispensable staff man, the guy who could take a problem off the boss' desk and make it disappear--sometimes, before the boss even knew it was there. Along the way he assembled an array of powerful, and sometimes wise, mentors who educated him and counseled him and moved him along in his career. Indeed the odd part may be that one person who had not functioned as a mentor was Marshall himself. By the time of their fateful encounter Marshall obviously knew about Ike but almost entirely by reputation: their direct interaction had been fragmentary and fleeting.

There's a dark underside to this triumphal narrative which Smith sets for with equal clarity. That is: migawd what a hidebound, reactionary, racist bureaucratic jungle the between-the-wars army was. Setting aside the bureaucratic time servers, it's amazing that so many truly talented people stayed on board at all. Yes, there was a depression going on but I don't think that's sufficient to make the point. Eisenhower had options--bona fide job offers--and he stayed, so it appears, because he had a genuine sense of himself in his career.

Genuine, maybe, but Smith makes clear that Eisenhower like the best of them had to become a master of bureaucratic slash-and-grab. Eisenhower does seem to have one genuine appreciation and admiration from people who could do harm or good. But he also seems to have understood that he needed this kind of protection if he was going to get ahead. Indeed one of the most fascinating episodes in the whole chronicle is Smith's account of how Ike got crosswise with an inspector general who wanted to ruin Ike's career over what seems to have been a $235 misunderstanding--and how Ike did all he knew how to bring down superior firepower to save himself. More amusing, if not more benign, is the account of how the great MacArthur himself got exiled to the Philippines because he had nicked off the wealthy widow whom Pershing had counted has his own (hey, there's a Wiki, it's got to be true).

[Perspective point: I've long wished Ike had had a better take on civil rights.  Yes, he is the guy who pushed through the first modern civil rights  act, and sent the troops into Little Rock.  Yet there is a sense that when it came to race, Ike never quite got it: his concerns had far more to do with good public order than they did with racial justice per se (in this perspective, he sounds an awful lot like William T. Sherman).  Still, reading Smith, I  can see that considering the company he kept, Ike's attitudes can be regarded as damn near enlightened.)

As Smith notes, many--not least his British competitors--reminded Ike that he got into his position of command without ever having led troops in battle. Yes indeed, but he does apear to have accumulated exactly the sort of skills he needed to perpare and organize a war for the battlers to fight. Indeed in a tantalizing aside, Smith points out tht Ike's very paucity of field experience might have been an advantage: he, unlike so many of his compatriates, was not mesmerized by the model of trench warfare and was willing to devise plans--and take risks--of which the old trench warriors appeared incapable.

When the Going was Good

Edith Wharton's classical adventure:

A cruise through the Aegean was scheduled for the end of March [1926], something Edith had been dreaming about for a long time.  Her previous Aegean trip ... in 1885, had been, she said, "the crowning wonder of my life and yet how ignorant I was."  Recalling the expense of the adventure, she calculated that a cruise of half the length would now cost one-third more, about twenty-eight thousand dollars, and of this shed was prepared to put up more than half.


She had chartered the Osprey, a 360 ton steam yacht from England, carrying five "master cabins" and two cabins for servants. ...


The cruise lasted for ten idyllic weeks--an experience, Edith told [art critic Bernard] Berenson, that belonged "to a quite other-dimensional world."  The Osprey passed through the Strait of Messina and crossed the Ionian Sea to Cephalonia and Zacynthus.  There were late evenings on deck under the stars, afternoons of sun and sea spray, explorations of island coasts, and bumpy drives through the hills.  The yacht turned northward and sailed along the Gulf of Cornith.  At Delphi they lunched on a ham-and-veal pie prepared by their accomplished cook, consuming it under trees of hoar olives, just below the Castalian Spring.  From Itea they could see snow far away on the slopes of Mount Parnassus.  Years later Edith would vividly recall gazing up at that spectacle and saying to herself, "Old girl, this is one of the pinnacles."

--RWB Lewis, Edith Wharton 469 (1993).

A Curriculum for Dictators

Nicopolis the wise courtesan advises the young Sulla on his path to top in republican Rome:

You have the years in which to prepare yourself for the responsibilities of a public career. You will need them: every day should teach you something new. Do not be impatient; do not worry because you have too little money. Money can always be found for the right person: but the right person is harder to find. ...

If you realize you know nothing, this is a beginning. Remember when you move in this odd society of ours that the consul's wife can often help you more than the consul. Remember that it is with men of your own generation, not those in power today, with whom you must finally come to terms. Remember above all that in the life you have chosen there is little room for sentiment. .... 'Let them hate me as long as they fear me.' If you succeed, my dear, you will be hated. Never forget that. You will break men as you break laws, and with as little compunction. Do you still want to go on?

--Peter Green, The Sword of Pleasure 44-5 (1961)

The title alone is enough to tell you that this historical novel has a bit of the air of potboiler about it. It is saved, but barely, not by its structure or its dialog but by Green's superb imaginative feel for the near-chaos and raw energy of the republican world--a world in which Sulla ordered proscriptions that led to the death of more than 9,000 of his fellow Romans.

..Sylla immediately without making any of the magistrates privy, caused four score men's names to be set up upon posts, whom he would put to death. Every man being offended withal, the next day following he set up two hundred and twenty men's names more, and likewise the third day as many more Hereupon making an oration to the people, he told them openly that he had appointed all them to die that he could call to remembrance, howebeit that hereafter he would appoint them that should die by days as he did call to mind.

Whosoever saved an outlaw in his own house, for reward of his kindness he himself was condemned to die, not excepting them that had received their brothers, their sons, their fathers, nopr mothers. And the reward of every homicide and murder that killed one of the outlaws was two talents, though it were a slave that had killed his master, or the son that had slain his father. But the most wicked and unjust act of all was that he deprived the sons, and sons' sons of them whom he had killed, of all credit and good name, and besides that, had taken all their goods as confiscate. And this was not only done in Rome, but also in all the cities of Italy throughout, and there was no temple of any god whatsoever, no altar in anybody's house, no liberty of hospital, nor father's house, that was not imbrued with blood and horrible murder.

--Plutarch, "Life of Sylla"
in The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans 732-809, 792-3
(Sir Thomas North trans.,The Heritage Press 1941)