Here are books I recommend political junkies read while vacationing:
“The World That Wasn’t: Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century” by Ben Steil.
At the 1944 Democratic Convention that renominated Franklin Roosevelt for a fourth term, party bosses had the good sense to convince the ailing president to dump his vice president, Henry Wallace, in favor of Sen. Harry Truman.
Steil, in his meticulously researched work, argues it was a good decision because Wallace was a dupe of Stalin and was surrounded by Soviet agents and assets.
As vice president, Wallace “toured a Potemkin Siberia, guided by undercover Soviet security and intelligence officials who hid labor camps and concealed prisoners. He then wrote a book together with an American NKGB source hailing the region’s renaissance under Bolshevik leadership…Running for president in 1948, he colluded with Stalin to undermine his government’s foreign policy, allowing the dictator to edit his most important election speech.”
Hats off to old-time political bosses.
“Ascent To Power: How Truman Emerged from Roosevelt’s Shadow and Remade the World” by David L. Roll.
Roll, the author of the best one-volume biography of General George C. Marshall, vividly describes why FDR made the right choice of Truman at the 1944 convention.
After serving only 82 days as VP, Truman inherited the office of president totally unprepared by his predecessor. Roll’s work, which covers the years 1944 to 1948, describes Truman’s struggles to emerge as a president in his own right.
“Yet, from a relatively unknown Missouri senator to the most powerful man on Earth,” Roll concludes, Truman’s legacy transcends his “come-from-behind campaign in the fall of 1948, his courageous civil rights advocacy, and his role in liberating millions from militarist governments and brutal occupations, [his] decisions during these pivotal years changed the course of the world in ways so significant we live with them today.”
“True Believer: Hubert Humphrey’s Quest for a More Just America” by James Traub.
This is a fine, readable biography of a truly decent man, and one of the last genuine 20th century liberals.
“For Humphrey, as for such writers and thinkers as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Reinhold Niebuhr, and Lionel Trilling, liberalism meant faith in the individual, openness to debate, optimism about man’s prospects….” Humphrey also understood that to govern one had to seek consensus by compromising.
In the 1960s, Humphrey was a victim of the budding New Left’s radical orthodoxy that now dominates the Democratic Party.
“Mansfield and Dirksen: Bipartisan Giants of the Senate” by Marc C. Johnson.
Yes, there was indeed a time in our own recent history when members of both political parties believed it their duty to govern. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, senators rose above ideological and geographical differences and reached bipartisan consensus on the pressing issues of the day.
The story of that era is described in historian Mark Johnson’s excellent new book.
During the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, the flamboyant Republican leader, Sen. Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois, and the mild-mannered Democratic Majority Leader, Sen. Michael Mansfield of Montana, worked together to pass legislation including civil and voting rights laws and Medicaid.
Dirksen was no pushover. In negotiations, he made it clear what it would take his GOP caucus to sign on to bills. Mansfield, knowing that to pass landmark legislation he needed overwhelming GOP support, often ceded to Dirksen’s needs and publicly gave him credit.
If Republicans should win control of Congress this fall, I recommend they read Johnson’s book to learn how to govern.
“Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History” by Nellie Bowles.
Bowles, a journalist at The New Press, is a committed Progressive. But during COVID-19, when the Black Lives Matter movement blossomed on the political landscape, she began to sense a significant change on the left. Old-time liberals were being washed away by the New Progressives whose politics were “built on the idea that people are profoundly good, denatured only by capitalism, by colonialism, and whiteness and heteronormativity.” The New Progressives, she concluded, “were leading a political movement that went mad.”
Readers will find Bowles work, which is a collection of dispatches on the ideological excesses of the New Progressives, painful, comical, and insightful.
Happy summer reading.