Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom: 1940-1945

Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom: 1940-1945 by James MacGregor Burns

Imagine if you will – a giant chess board.  Only instead of it being square shaped with only two players, it’s a hexdecagon (a 16 sided shape).  There are about 16 different people all playing against one and other.  As one of the players, your strategy is to somehow not only be the victor of this colossal chess game, but also ensure some of the players other than yourself manage to beat some of your opponents while never getting the upper hand on you.  Many of your “allies” on this chessboard aren’t really your friends – you just need them to help you beat some of the participants that you really don’t like.  Get all that?

Essentially, this is what Franklin Roosevelt had to do for the United States of America before, and during, World War II.  All of the geopolitical implications of the major (and minor) players in this game are enough to make your head spin.  Yet FDR proves that he’s a master of this chess game.  He manages to play his chess pieces perfectly and although he might lose a piece or two during the match, he proves that he is a genius.

Let me now say that this is volume 2 of a 2 volume series by James MacGregor Burns.  Volume 1 details Roosevelt’s life from birth up until 1940.  I did not like volume 1.  In a word, I thought it was boring.  So I wasn’t that enthused to pick up this next installment.  Let’s just say that I was immensely overwhelmed as to how much I enjoyed this one as opposed to the first.  I’m thinking the subject matter had a lot to do with it.  Reading about the details of the ugliest war in our world’s history is much more interesting than reading 500 pages about The New Deal.   In many cases, you almost forget this is a book about Roosevelt, and instead think you’re actually reading a book about the war.  Yet Burns carefully crafts his telling of history to ensure that everything that happens is happening through Roosevelt’s eyes.

There’s a lot of buildup in the early part of the book to December 7^th, 1941.  The war actually explodes in Europe more than 2 years prior, and the “good guys” (mainly Winston Churchill – the brand new Prime Minister of England) is soliciting help from FDR anyway that he can.  FDR’s constituents, however, want no part of a European conflict.  Why should we get involved of something that’s “over there” when we have enough problems “over here”?  So Roosevelt has to walk a fine line.  Sadly, he and most other intelligent figures in the government know that America will eventually have to be involved in this ugly conflict.  It’s just a matter of when.  Without going into too much detail, relationships with Japan are not good, and you can actually feel the buildup of tension.  Once Pearl Harbor is attacked, no one is really surprised.  There’s almost a sense of “relief” (dare I use that word) that the waiting is over.

So Roosevelt’s job is to motivate his countrymen towards a sense of inevitable duty, and as history as shown us, he does a remarkable job.  We’re not given too many glimpses into the everyday cries of sacrifice and patriotism.  Instead the author focuses on the masterful global wide chess game.  FDR seems to always be thinking of the future, always visualizing the chess board two or three moves in the time to come.  He knows what will happen, and his energy therefore is devoted to what his next moves are to be.  Once the war starts, Roosevelt knows that there will be setbacks.  Yet once we arrive at about 1943, the consensus amongst the major powers is that the allies will, without a doubt, actually win the war.  It’s just a matter of when.

A lot of negotiating and bickering goes on between Roosevelt, Churchill and Joseph Stalin.  These three men want very different things, have different priorities, different objectives and seem to be at odds with each other quite a lot.  It’s a bit interesting seeing FDR’s relationship with Stalin, particularly.  Nowhere in these pages is the man portrayed as the evil butcher that we know he was.  He never comes across as a soft, cuddly teddy bear, but he’s always portrayed here as “one of the good guys”.  Perhaps this is because Roosevelt had to treat him with kid gloves since our ultimate goal was to destroy Adolf Hitler.  In other words, the only reason Russia was our ally in World War II was because Nazi-ism was a greater evil than communism.

The book isn’t entirely about the War.  There are plenty of issues happening within the continent, yet FDR still manages to handle all of it wonderfully.  Still, with all of the problems at home, the war is the main thing on everyone’s mind, and just about everything that is done in the U.S. is geared towards winning the conflict and bringing the boys back home as soon as possible.  Yet there is still a lot of bickering within the halls of congress about just about anything, so things obviously weren’t that much better than they are today.

1944 arrives.  D-Day is a success and there are talks of “ending the war by Christmas”, yet within all of this drama, it’s time for another presidential election.  According to Roosevelt, he doesn’t really “want” a fourth term, but people are obdurate in their feelings and desires.  So he runs again and wins.  Oddly, before the election, FDR starts to have serious health issues.  He pushes them down as best he can, and makes a huge effort to appear presidential, yet those closest to him are worried.  Many times, you have to wonder if his illness may have hampered some of the ongoing relationships with Churchill and Stalin, yet the author maintains that Roosevelt handles things just fine – he just has to treble his efforts to overcome these issues.  I couldn’t help wondering that if the internet or cable television had been around, if FDR would have been re-elected.  Yet since most people couldn’t “see” him frequently, his illness was more gossip than fact among most.

So as the war starts to wind down in 1945, sadly, so does Roosevelt.  He passes away in April, without getting to see final victory in Europe a few short weeks later, and victory over Japan a few months after.  This was really the only minor gripe about the book.  The author just “ends” the story when Roosevelt dies.  I would have enjoyed a postscript that would give a summary of how and when the war ended (it was very different in Europe than it was in Asia), as well as an overview of the state of the world following the end, yet we don’t get that here.  I was actually very surprised. Still, though, this was a great read and well deserved of the Pulitzer that it received.  

After I read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book on Lincoln and his advisors (“Team of Rivals”), I made the comment that I felt that God had placed one of the best presidents of the United States directly into the time when we needed one the most.  After reading this book, I’d like to believe that The Almighty did the United States one more favor eighty years later.  

A truly great man.

Cold Fall

Cold Fall by John Gardner

Cold Fall marked the end of the John Gardner authored James Bond books when it came out around 1997.  After finishing this tale, I’m convinced that Gardner was aware it would be his last, and labored through with the sole intention of finishing up the book as quickly as he could.

This book has some interesting ideas, but never seems to really ever let much of a plot develop.  It doesn’t help when the “story” takes a five year break in the middle of the book.  The only reason that I can think the author does this is so he can make this a continuation (somewhat) from his last novel (Seafire), but he needed too big of a background to set it up properly.  So the second half of this novel takes place at the conclusion of his last book.

Not that any of this really matters.  The “continuation” I speak of revolves around his love interest from the last novel.  The Bond Girl ends up pretty mangled in the last effort, and since Bond really “cares for this one”, we can’t really just let her fade off into the post-Bond Girl sunset.  Speaking of Bond Girls, I think there’s a total of three former ones that show up in this story.  I’m not entirely sure about that – as the books don’t stay in my memory as prevalently as the movies do.  Plus, add one or two more consequential ladies to the story, and you have a lot of women running through the story with names like “Flicka” and “Sukie”.

The plot revolves around a terrorist group called C.O.L.D., which stands for Children of the Last Days.  They’re one of those morally righteous groups that think the only way the earth can get any better is to bring mass destruction everywhere so society can essentially start over.

This book also is supposedly the last to feature the original M.  M is getting old.  He was pretty ill in the last book, and now the powers that be are pushing him towards retirement.  There are hints of the new M.  It’s a (gasp) female M.  This is probably because this book came out right around the time the Pierce Brosnan movies started when Mme. Judi Dench reprised the role.

Had this book been fleshed out a bit more, it might have been more enduring.  It’s very short in length, yet as I’ve mentioned, it seems like this is what the author was trying to do.  When we finally get to that obligatory point in the Bond story where the villain is describing his plot to overthrow the world, the reader can’t help but notice that the book only has ten more pages of content.  It can’t be that big of a deal if Bond only gets ten pages to save the universe.  On a related note to James Bond villains everywhere: Don’t ever consciously keep James Bond in the room with all of the bad guys when you describing your fiendish plot.  You see, this gives 007 an advantage as he’s trying to save the world since he’ll now know exactly what he needs to do.

Gardner had a pretty good run.  Some of his books were really good, some of them were really not good, most were in between.  This one could have been better had he put a bit more care into it.

Simple Genius

Simple Genius by David Baldacci

I’ve read some really great books by David Baldacci, and I’ve also read some really bad ones.  This one seems to fall right in the middle.  This is one of his “King and Maxwell” novels.  Sean King and Michelle Maxwell are a crime solving duo.  They’re both single, “very good looking”, yet their relationship is purely platonic.  We see that a lot, don’t we?  I didn’t realize it, but the first Baldacci novel I ever read (Hour Game) featured this dynamic duo as well.  I seemed to recall liking that book a lot better.

The main plot involves our heroes’ trying to solve a murder mystery at top secret plant close to our nation’s capitol called Babbage Town, where scientists are trying to come up with advanced “number codes” that will help put a nation’s technology years, if not decades, ahead of anyone else.  There’s also a nearby clandestine CIA facility right across the river to Babbage Town, and one day a code-breaking scientist is found dead on the CIA property.  Well, as you can imagine, there are lot of shady government characters around these events, and when King and Maxwell start poking around, things only get worse.  Had more focus been placed on this Babbage Town place, and what and why the scientists were doing and what they were hoping to accomplish, I think I would have enjoyed this book a lot better.  It seems like this book could have rivaled a Michael Crichton novel in terms of technological complexities.  Sadly, though, Baldacci tends to go into too many different directions, with too many silly characters that tend to only dilute the entire experience.

Example: at the beginning of the book,  we meet the female half of the team, Michelle.  She’s very pissed off for some reason, walks into a bar in the worst part of town, and picks a fight with the biggest guy she can find.  Even though she’s tough enough to beat him up pretty bad, she’s the one that ends up in the hospital.  Why does she do this?  Well, apparently she has “issues with her past” so Sean checks her in to a mental hospital so she can work through her problems.  Let’s just say that had this whole episode been left out (it’s a big, big diversion from the story), the overall book would have fared much better.  Her whole mental hospital excursion almost warrants its own story in an entirely different book (and it really wouldn’t have been a very good one).

Then, there’s this problem in that none of the characters are ever really forced to think particularly hard.  It’s almost as if anytime one of the characters needs something, Baldacci just rubs a literary magic genie to bring his creations exactly what they need, exactly when they need it.  To try to illustrate this, imagine, if you will, two people that are stranded in the Sahara dessert about to die from heat and thirst, and then suddenly, a refrigerator appears in the dunes stocked full of ice cold beverages.  Unbelievable?  Absolutely.  We see a lot of things like that within these pages.  There are far too many times where Baldacci manages to conveniently pull a literary needle out of haystack to help his characters, or dramatically alter the direction of the story.  There was simply too much unbelievability.

Still, I managed to keep turning the pages, and the backgrounds and atmosphere was enough to keep my somewhat entertained.  Still, hoping for a better one next time.

Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, 1973-1990

Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, 1973 - 1990 by Stephen Ambrose

After I finished volume 1 of this trilogy, I actually grew to admire and like Richard Nixon.  At the end of volume 2, my admiration turned to bitterness and anger towards the man.  Now that I’ve finished the entire series, I simply feel sorry for the man.  Oh, what a great man and president he could have been!  A man who was incredibly intelligent - possibly the smartest man to ever occupy the Oval Office - was sorely lacking in the likability department, which caused many to dislike him, which caused Nixon to bite back at his critics while, at many times, breaking the law.

This third volume picks up right as he is inaugurated for his second term as president.  The fact that such a hated man easily swept his Democratic rival in the 1972 president election tells you just how divided our country was at the time.  So his second term doesn’t begin any easier and, with the election now “out of the way”, the media focuses (it seems) solely on Watergate.  Watergate, Watergate, Watergate.

75% of this book takes place from January 1973 through August 9th, 1974, the day Nixon was finally forced to resign the Office of the President of the United States.  So, yes, we read an awful lot about Watergate.  Depending on how familiar you are with this egregious time in the country’s history, may help or hinder your enjoyment of the book.  There’s a lot of detail here, and a lot of names.  The main players in the tragedy get a lot of stage time here.  Names such as Bob Haldeman, John Dean, John Mitchell and Howard Hunt have plenty of page space devoted to them. You’ll also be widely exposed to many of the minor players as well such as Donald Segretti, Dwight Chapin, Fred LaRue and Hugh Sloan.  So if you’re not that familiar with many of those individuals, having Wikipedia nearby might be handy.

Even if you think you’ve “heard it all” as it relates to Watergate, it’s refreshing here since the focus is always on Nixon the person, as well as Nixon the president.  You feel all of the turmoil, confusion and struggles that he, and his family, were going through.  This isn’t a book about Watergate, though, yet like his Presidency, anything else that is discussed seems a bit of a distraction.  No matter how much Nixon would try to steer the focus of the country to matters such as detente with Russia, inflation, and solving the country’s energy crisis, all anyone wanted to talk about was the tapes, and why we weren’t allowed to hear them if they supposedly would clear the president.

So we relive the nightmare here.  The resignation of his top aides, the John Dean testimony, the Alexander Butterfield revelation, the Saturday Night Massacre, the release of the “transcripts”, and so on, and so on, and so on.

Like the children’s book about Alexander, who had a no good, horrible, rotten day (or something like that), absolutely nothing seems to go right for Nixon during this ordeal.  It’s almost lost to history the fact that ten months prior to Nixon’s registration, his Vice President, Spiro Agnew, was forced to resign his office due to prior wrongdoings as Governor of Maryland.  Gerald Ford is nominated as successor, and the thought by many is that it’s only a matter of time before Ford is the new Commander in Chief.

So August 1974 arrives, and Nixon finally resigns since it’s “best for the country”.  He then begins his road to recovery which almost serves as a coda to this story as opposed to a major part of the book.  It’s very tough on Nixon and family in the immediate years after his involuntary exodus, but he slowly starts to recover and slowly starts to reappear in some of the most imperceptible places.  Well, time heals all wounds, and whereas Nixon is never completely forgiven, nor forgotten, he starts to gain more respect in his latter years, penning several books about the state of affairs in the political world, and becoming an advisor, to some extent, to future presidents.

Perhaps the thing that will always doom Nixon is that he never apologized for his wrongdoings.  He never admitted he was wrong, and never took any responsibility for, not only theWatergate burglary, but for the massive coverup that was clearly one of the worst constitutional crises of our country.  Had he done this, history would be kinder.  But Nixon was never an apologizer.  Men from his background and his time in history simply didn’t do such things.  As coarse as that sounds, it does seem that most people, upon reflection, realized this about the man, and moved on. 

A sad story of history, but one that really shouldn’t surprise any. During the Watergate crisis,  Nixon himself countlessly wonders why he was being picked on for doing what “every other world leader” always did.  Even the foreign superpowers at the time can’t fathom why Americans cared about such a trivial thing  (China wonders why Nixon simply didn’t take out his detractors and line them up and shoot them).  But I’ve always believed that this is what makes America great, and just because “everyone else does it” doesn’t make it right.

Stephen Ambrose mentions in the forward to this book that he “loved writing this book”.  I wish Mr. Ambrose were still alive so I could tell him how much I loved reading it. 

Lost City

Lost City by Clive Cussler with Paul Kemprecos

For those who have never read a Clive Cussler book, his novels are a heckuva lot of fun.  Cussler started writing novels in the early 1970s using the same central cast of characters for all of his books.  His main protagonist was Dirk Pitt, A handsome, dark-haired, green-eyed swashbuckler who was a member of the fictitious National Underwater Marine Agency (NUMA).  Dirk and his cronies always found themselves in a midst of some oceanic crisis - some natural, most manmade, some a combination of both.  The baddies in these books are always really bad, and Cussler always included a lot of gruesome details in what these meanies were trying to do to bring the world to its knees.  But these villains never heard of Dirk Pitt.  Pitt always saves the day, with his rugged good looks, ability to kick the bad guys’ ass, a wealth of smarts, and usually a beautiful girl or two in his arms that he would always save from some peril within the last few chapters of these stories.  Think of an American James Bond surrounded by a lot of water.

For whatever reason, starting around the early 1990’s, Cussler introduced another warrior as a central character in many of his books named Kurt Austin.  Kurt is basically exactly the same character as Dirk Pitt.  The only difference that I can tell is that Austin has “Platinum blonde hair and Coral Blue eyes” as opposed to Dirk’s black hair and green eyes.   These characters don’t live in parallel universes either.  Like Dirk Pitt, Kurt Austin works for NUMA, and their paths may cross occasionally in some of the books.  I’m not sure why Cussler decided to start doing this.  Maybe Dirk Pitt was having too many adventures?  Possibly, as Cussler still continued to churn out Dirk Pitt stories at a frantic pace as well during all this time.

So this particular story is a Kurt Austin adventure (many Kurt Austin books, including this one, are co-penned with Paul Kemprecos), but I honestly can’t see any difference between one of these books and a Dirk Pitt novel.  Like Pitt, Austin has a similar “supporting cast” of brains and brawn that help him through his adventures.

Adventures?  You better believe it.  In this particular book, there are several different plot lines  going through the story, and Cussler ties them up nicely at the end, as he usually does.  For what it’s worth, the plot revolves around Dirk…..I mean Kurt, finding himself up against a strange, autocratic family that have made their money creating and selling the latest weapons of technology over the past several centuries, going back as early as the spear.  There’s another story here about some poisonous oceanic plant called Gorgonweed, that is multiplying at a lightning pace, and if Dirk…..I mean Kurt and company don’t move quick, it’s likely to turn the entire oceans to a murky sludge.  The plot is mostly irrelevant, however.  Again, it’s the thrill of the ride the entices you in one of these yarns.

Again, there’s usually something like this in every Cussler novel.  The one drawback to these escapades is that these adventures seem to always take place in or around some sort large body of water, since this is where our hero's spend the majority of their time in their jobs.  So sometimes the catastrophes can wear thin and get a bit redundant.  For example, when we’re introduced to an oceanic laboratory that somehow exists about 80 feet under a glacier (yes, you read that right), and we’re then led through the erie, damp, dark, claustrophobic hallways near the beginning of the story….well, you know something’s gonna happen soon, and it ain’t gonna be good.

Also, in order to really enjoy a lot of Cussler novels (especially this one), you really need to suspend your disbelief and throw out every notion of reality.  These books are flat out imaginative, wild and are an incredible stretch of the imagination.  I find that I have to usually “pause” a bit between these books.  They can be a bit too far fetched and repetitive at times, but I would definitely recommend  most of Cussler’s books for all.  Including this one.  I’m glad Kurt and company save the planet one more time.