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Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America 1789-1989 (Paperback)
by Michael R. Beschloss
| Category:
American presidency, American history, Leadership, History |
| Market price: ¥ 168.00
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| MSL Pointer Review:
Taking a sweeping view of America as seen through the eyes of the presidents who have presided during our tougest challengesA wonderful excercise in history and required reading for anyone who wishes to lead a family, an organization, or a country. |
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Author: Michael R. Beschloss
Publisher: Simon & Schuster; Reprint edition
Pub. in: February, 2008
ISBN: 0743257448
Pages: 448
Measurements: 9.4 x 5.9 x 1.1 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA01374
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0743257442
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- Awards & Credential -
The New York Times bestseller by one of America's finest presidential scholars today. |
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- MSL Picks -
The idea behind Presidential Courage is to examine presidents in our history who took a courageous stand or stuck by an unpopular policy and were ultimately judged correct. Here's a quick summary of the Presidents and the issues:
Washington - for putting up with the Jay Treaty and not going to war with
Britain.
J. Adams - for not making war on France.
Jackson - for crushing the Bank of the United States.
Lincoln - for preserving the Union and simultaneously abolishing slavery.
T. Roosevelt - for trust busting.
F.D.Roosevelt - for preparing the nation for war while awaiting peace.
Truman - for recognizing Israel.
Kennedy - for finally embracing civil rights.
Reagan - for relentlessly combatting Communism.
The book's thesis is well conceived and for the most part is well executed. The anecdotes and quotations are apt and not widely circulated. The post-WWII presidents are particularly fresh and originally presented. However, some of the themes that Beschloss chooses to illustrate strike me as being post facto fiddled into prominence. Alot of surveys of the Truman Presidency don't even mention his recognition of Israel. HST drew more intense opposition on many other issues.(Maybe it's included because of Truman's personal battle with the issue.) A good case is made for JFK changing his heart as to civil rights, but would he have written a law? That was left to LBJ. We will always wonder how effective Kennedy would have been on civil rights. Yes, Jackson did destroy the Bank and corruption, but that also destroyed sound fiscal policy. Jackson missed a great opportunity to reform the Bank, harness it to benefit his little people and change America's business history.
The crucial issues encountered by Lincoln, Adams and Reagan are framed exactly right and are butressed by compelling evidence.
On balance, this is a good popular history. The author is especially evenhanded. Although this is about men who performed a heroic act, he does not portray them as "heroes". He delights in mixing their feats with foibles, resulting in very believable tales.
(From quoting a guest reviewer)
Target readers:
If you are interested in American History and want to learn about some of lesser known but courageous decisions of some of our past Presidents, this book will be worth your time. It would be a good book for a book club or a discussion group.
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From Publisher
Presidential Courage is a brilliantly readable and inspiring saga about crucial times in American history when a courageous President dramatically changed our future. Like Beschloss's previous book, The Conquerors, it was a New York Times bestseller for months.
With surprising new sources and a dazzling command of history and human character, Beschloss brings to life those flawed, complex men -- and their wives, families, friends and foes. Never have we had a more intimate, behind-the-scenes view of Presidents coping with the supreme dilemmas of their lives. For Americans who must choose Presidents and assess them once they are elected, Presidential Courage sets a lasting standard by showing us the best in Presidential leadership.
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Chapter One
A Speedy Death to General Washington!
In August 1795, at Mount Vernon, drenched by what he called a "violent Rain," George Washington nervously paced down a garden path, elegantly covered by crushed oyster shells.
He was desperate to return to the national capital of Philadelphia, but the biblical torrents had washed out roads and bridges. Adding to his frustration, his mail had been cut off.
Back inside, as the rains pelted his red shingle roof, spinning the dove-of-peace weathervane, the President bent over his candlelit desk, dipped a quill in black ink and tensely scratched out letter after letter. He was feeling "serious anxiety" in a time of "trouble and perplexities."
For twenty years, since the start of the Revolution, he had taken as his due the bands playing "The Hero Comes!" and the lightstruck Americans cheering "the man who unites all hearts." His anointment as President by the Electoral College in 1788 and 1792 had been unanimous.
But now the national adoration for Washington was fading. Americans had learned that a secret treaty negotiated by his envoy John Jay made demands that many found humiliating. One member of Congress said the fury against "that damned treaty" was moving "like an electric velocity to every state in the Union."
As the public tempest had swelled, some wanted Washington impeached. Cartoons showed the President being marched to a guillotine. Even in the President's beloved Virginia, Revolutionary veterans raised glasses and cried, "A speedy Death to General Washington!"
With the national surge of anger toward Washington, some Americans complained that he was living as luxuriously as George III, the monarch they had fought a revolution to escape. Using old forgeries, several columnists insisted that Washington had been secretly bribed during the war by British agents.
Still others charged that the President stole military credit from soldiers who had bled and died: "With what justice do you monopolize the glories of the American Revolution?"
Reeling from the blows, the sixty-three-year-old Washington wrote that the "infamous scribblers" were calling him "a common pickpocket" in "such exaggerated and indecent terms as could scarcely be applied to a Nero."
One still-friendly gazette moaned, "Washington has been classed with tyrants, and calumniated as the enemy of his country. Weep for the national character of America, for, in ingratitude to her Washington, it is sullied and debased throughout the globe!"
President Washington had brought the national furor upon himself by trying to avert a new war with Great Britain that threatened to strangle his infant nation in its cradle.
In the spring of 1794, the British were arming Indians and spurring them to attack Americans trying to settle the new frontier lands that would one day include Ohio and Michigan. London was reneging on its pledge, made in the peace treaty ending the Revolutionary War, to vacate royal forts in the trans-Appalachian West -- Oswego, Niagara, Detroit, Michilimackinac.
Since Britain was at war with France, British captains seized U.S. ships trading with the French West Indies. Renouncing the agreed-upon border between the U.S. and Canada, Britain's governor in Quebec predicted a new Anglo-American war "within a year."
Former Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, who hated England and adored France, demanded retaliation against the British. But Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton warned the President not to plunge into a war that America could not win.
The religious Martha Washington could not abide Hamilton's Byzantine intrigues or his infidelities to his wife, Elizabeth. When Martha adopted a tomcat, she named it "Hamilton."
But for the President, who knew his own shortcomings, Hamilton was an endless fount of provocative ideas, tactics and language.
During his first term, Washington had told Hamilton and Jefferson that their gladiatorial clashes over foreign policy, economics and personalities were "tearing our vitals" and had to stop.
Instead, Jefferson quit in 1793 and organized an opposition. The new political chasm between Federalists and Jefferson's Republicans killed Washington's old dream of eternal national unity with no need for political parties.
Retaining the President's ear, Hamilton urged him to send an "envoy extraordinary" to London. A new Anglo-American treaty could secure U.S. trade on the Atlantic and the Great Lakes, giving their country time to build its economy and defenses and settle its frontier. Then if America one day had to fight off Britain, it would be far better prepared.
Washington agreed, but he knew Hamilton must not be the envoy. That would inflame the Jeffersonians. Instead, at Hamilton's suggestion, he chose the aristocratic Chief Justice, John Jay of New York.
Privately Jay warned his wife that America might well have to battle England. But in May 1794, before sailing from lower Manhattan to London, he promised a cheering crowd he would do "everything" to "secure the blessings of peace." Soon after Jay's departure, the British reclaimed and fortified one of their old posts on American territory near Detroit.
Having jeopardized his prestige to talk with Britain, Washington was furious. He wrote Jay it was "the most open and daring act of British agents in America." Every "well informed" American knew that the British were instigating "all the difficulties that we encounter with the Indians...the murders of helpless women and innocent children."
He noted that some wished him to turn the other cheek: "I answer NO!...It will be impossible to keep this country in a state of amity with G. Britain long if the Posts are not surrendered."
Jay got the British to forgo such aggravations while they bargained. He assured Washington that Britain felt it was having a "family quarrel" with America, "and that it is Time it should be made up."
Jay reported that, excepting the King, the British respected no one more than George Washington. With such "perfect and universal Confidence" in Washington's "personal character," they had taken Jay's presence in London "as a strong Proof of your Desire to preserve Peace."
By the start of 1795, Washington heard rumors that Jay had managed to broker a treaty, but the expected dispatch case never arrived.
As it turned out, after making a deal in November, Jay had sent the President two copies of the treaty documents by a British ship that was seized by the French on the Atlantic. British sailors had thrown the papers overboard to keep them from French hands.
That spring, another ship brought duplicates to Norfolk, Virginia. By stagecoach and horseback, a mud-caked, frostbitten messenger rushed them to Philadelphia, where Washington received them at the President's House at 190 High Street.
In 1790, when Washington and his government moved from New York City to the temporary capital of Philadelphia, there was no official mansion for the President.
Thus the great man paid three thousand dollars a year to rent the four-story red-brick house owned by Robert Morris, financier of the Revolution and Senator from Pennsylvania.* Morris graciously moved next door to accommodate his old friend.
Washington found it "the best Single house in the City" but still "inadequate" for him. For instance, there were "good stables, but for twelve horses only."
During renovations, which Washington financed, a house painter allegedly attacked one of the President's housemaids, who shrieked. Face daubed with shaving cream, the half-dressed Washington was said to have kicked the painter down the stairs, crying, "I will have no woman insulted in my house!"
The President's servants included eight black slaves selected from the almost three hundred who lived at Mount Vernon. Knowing that Pennsylvania law freed any slave residing there for six months or more, Washington and Martha made sure that each of their slaves was quietly sent home to Virginia every five months or so.
"I wish to have it accomplished under pretext that I may deceive both them and the Public," the General wrote a trusted aide, insisting that the ruse "be known to none but yourself and Mrs. Washington."
Upstairs at his mansion, Washington frowned at Jay's "Treaty of Amity, Commerce and Navigation." He knew that if he approved it, Americans would excoriate him for truckling to their old oppressor across the sea.
Most inflammatory was Article Twelve: America could trade with the West Indies, but not with large vessels. Nor could the U.S. export any products natural to those islands.
Jay's deal would also cosset the lucrative British fur trade in the American Northwest. The U.S. would pledge never to seize British assets in America, surrendering an important potential weapon for America's defense.
The treaty would also allow the British to keep on halting U.S. exports to France -- and to escape paying reparations for American slaves they had carried off during the Revolutionary War.
To keep public indignation from building against the treaty before he sent it to the Senate, Washington ordered Secretary of State Edmund Randolph to keep its contents "rigidly" secret "from every person on earth" -- even the rest of his Cabinet.
Unlike his successors, Washington took literally the Constitution's demand that a President ask the Senate's "advice and consent" on treaties. He would not finally decide whether to approve Jay's Treaty until the Senate voted.
Vice President John Adams feared the pact would be political trouble. "A Battle Royal I expect at its Ratification, and snarling enough afterwards," he wrote his wife, Abigail. "I am very much afraid of this Treaty!...Be very carefull, my dearest Friend, of what you say....The Times are perilous."
On Monday morning, June 8, 1795, two dozen U.S. Senators in powdered wigs and ruffled shirts sat down in Philadelphia's Congress Hall for a special closed-door session on Jay's Treaty.
Washington had insisted that the men in the emerald green Senate chamber discuss the treaty in absolute secrecy.
The Aurora, published in Philadelphia by Benjamin Franklin Bache, the Fr...
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Publishers Weekly (MSL quote), USA
<2008-05-08 00:00>
Don't be afraid!" was George Washington's near-to-last utterance, to the worried doctor at his bedside. The essential founding father's counsel is understood by well-known historian Beschloss (The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany) to set an example for future presidents. Beschloss outlines how several occupants of the Oval Office—including Jackson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, FDR, Truman, Kennedy and Reagan-combined courage with wisdom to change the future of the country, notwithstanding the slings and arrows they earned. Despite its unpopularity at the time, for instance, Reagan's "strong beliefs combined with his optimism" led him to pursue the policy to abolish nuclear weapons, which helped bring down the Soviet empire peacefully. None of the author's heroes were saints, but rather flawed men sustained by friends, families, conviction and religious faith. With contenders for 2008 already lining up, this well-timed book might, the author hopes, persuade some to take the kinds of "wise political risks that Presidents once did."Perhaps. But knowledgeable readers should look elsewhere for genuine historical insight. The author's broad brushstrokes necessarily restrict him to painting nuanced individuals and complex times in only basic primary colors, and there is little that has not been said before—in some cases, many times. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. |
The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com, USA
<2008-05-08 00:00>
It has become a cliché to point out that while academic historians write dense, imponderable tomes to get tenure, popular historians satisfy the public hunger with powerfully written and engaging narratives. This cliché could be disproved in two ways: Academics could write terrific histories, and popular historians could write dreadful ones.
Michael Beschloss picks the second option. Presidential Courage is boring, repetitive and badly written. It tells us nothing we did not know before. And it substitutes melodrama for the actualities of history.
The thesis of Beschloss's book is that presidents sometimes act courageously. Like one of his heroes, John F. Kennedy, Beschloss defines courage as the willingness to do the right thing rather than the popular thing. The rest of the book is devoted to offering examples of this not very stunning insight. Included are George Washington's support of the unpopular Jay Treaty, John Adams's willingness to break with extreme Federalists, Andrew Jackson's successful struggle with Nicholas Biddle and the Second National Bank, Lincoln's issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, Teddy Roosevelt's trust busting, FDR's leadership during America's entry into World War II, Harry Truman's support for a Jewish state, John F. Kennedy's fight for civil rights, and Ronald Reagan's decision to ignore the hard-line anti-communists in his party to find common ground with Mikhail Gorbachev.
To tell his tale, Beschloss writes chapters that rarely exceed 10 pages. He is fond of paragraphs that contain only one sentence. With the possible exception of John Adams, none of the presidents he chooses is controversial or surprising. And what he says about each has been said many times before: Andrew Jackson was a man to whom honor was important, Teddy Roosevelt overcame his poor physical health, and Ronald Reagan liked to talk about his movie roles. It is as if Beschloss never wants to tax the minds of his readers. He taxes their attention span instead, for it is easier to read longer narratives filled with fascinating twists and turns than to work one's way through Beschloss's choppy, disconnected stories.
Once one of these stories has been told, moreover, one gets the point of them all. Where does courage come from? Let's try God. So despite the fact that America's presidents vary greatly in their faith commitments, Beschloss's presidents invariably turn to religion for reassurance. Jackson "drew strength from his religious belief and Bible reading." Lincoln was able to face possible political defeat because he "drew in part on his religious faith." Harry Truman "tried to be a serious Christian." Ronald Reagan "was in fact a determined Christian." Life rarely follows a script. Beschloss's lives of the presidents always do.
One of America's greatest historians, academic and popular at the same time, was Richard Hofstadter, and he turned to historical figures to teach his readers about the ironic and the unexpected. But Beschloss is not only predictable in the presidents he chooses, he is also completely conventional in choosing the acts of courage that define them.
Harry Truman offers one example. Truman defended the Jewish right to a homeland, even though he was warned by Secretary of State George Marshall about the potential strategic importance of the Arabs. As much as I am glad that Truman gave his support to Israel, how courageous was his action? It helped him raise money for his 1948 campaign, and he thought it might help him win New York, which in the event he did not. Given what we now know, it would have been more courageous if Truman had taken Marshall's advice more seriously. Greater balance in American foreign policy then might have led to greater security in the Middle East now.
Then there is the Ronald Reagan question. Reagan was once dismissed as an ignoramus, but now a significant number of historians have come to accept his greatness. No challenge to that conventional wisdom can be found here. Beschloss puts Reagan in his pantheon because he showed the courage to deal with the Russians. But Reagan's insistence on America's innocence prepared the way for the wild-eyed neo-conservative fantasy that became America's humiliation in Iraq. A more courageous president might have tried to teach his people about the complexities of the world. Whatever else he did, Reagan never did that.
Beschloss concludes his book by saying that some of his courageous presidents learned the art of leadership by reading about the past. Let us hope that no future presidents turn to this book in search of insights about how to lead. For if they did, they would learn more about how presidents can be turned into myths than about the actual decisions they had to make.
Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
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Bookmarks Magazine (MSL quote), USA
<2008-05-08 00:00>
Over the past two decades, Michael Beschloss has become one of our most popular and prolific historians, recognizable from his many television appearances and bankable in the mold of David McCullough, Stephen Ambrose, Douglas Brinkley, and Doris Kearns Goodwin. Previous books include Taking Charge (1997), an examination of LBJ's White House tapes, and The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany (2002). Critics are not as kind to Presidential Courage as to the author's previous efforts, commenting frequently on a rushed, uneven, and unnecessarily episodic prose style (what Mary Beth Norton deems "the written equivalent of sound bites"). Beschloss's thesis-that presidents are sometimes required to make unpopular decisions-forces on these profiles a sameness that, despite the author's research, reputation, and obvious passion for the subject, undermines the book's effectiveness.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. |
AudioFile (MSL quote), USA
<2008-05-08 00:00>
Historian Michael Beschloss offers vignettes on the courage of various American presidents from Washington to Reagan. Some of the stories are well known to educated citizens; some are not. Andrew Jackson, for example, hounded the Bank of the United States out of business (well known) while under immense pressure from the business establishment (nicely detailed here). Beschloss is careful and well paced in his role as narrator, rarely showing emotion and pronouncing every name and foreign phrase with precision. His baritone, a little sonorous, carries the stories along comfortably. He avoids the trap of dramatizing these glimpses into the past--it just wouldnt work with a book such as this. Overall, he does a decent job. D.R.W. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine |
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