UWP Lecturers FW: How to Read Like a President

Tue Nov 4 07:16:17 PST 2008

Right, Devon!

Thanks,

Cher
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Devon W. Hackelton" <dhackelton at csupomona.edu>
To: "John Briggs" <John.Briggs at ucr.edu>; <gsa-english at lists.ucr.edu>; 
<englecturers at lists.ucr.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, November 04, 2008 6:49 AM
Subject: Re: UWP Lecturers FW: How to Read Like a President

Dear all:

I read with great interest Jon Meacham's essay.  Unfortunately, he didn't 
ask Palin what she read, but my guess is Go, Dog Go (she used it to come up 
with the chant "drill, baby drill") and 'Twas the Night Before Christmas 
which taught her the power of a wink and a nod...

Good luck voting today. Check out this Simpson's clip before you sidle up to 
that electronic voting machine.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aBaX9GPSaQ

Of course, I mailed in my ballot, so it can be lost without me having to 
worry about it.

Devon

-----Original Message-----
From: englecturers-bounces at lists.ucr.edu on behalf of John Briggs
Sent: Mon 11/3/2008 12:19 PM
To: gsa-english at lists.ucr.edu; englecturers at lists.ucr.edu
Subject: UWP Lecturers FW: How to Read Like a President

Forwarded by John Briggs:

-----Original Message-----
From: alscfriends at googlegroups.com [mailto:alscfriends at googlegroups.com] On
Behalf Of Jack Kolb
Sent: Saturday, November 01, 2008 7:19 PM
To: skeptic at lists.johnshopkins.edu
Subject: How to Read Like a President

November 2, 2008
Essay
How to Read Like a President
By JON MEACHAM

Andrew Jackson was, to put it kindly, no scholar.
When Harvard voted to give him an honorary degree
in 1833, a Massachusetts newspaper wrote that he
deserved an "A.S.S." along with his "L.L.D." From
afar, the man Jackson had defeated for the White
House, John Quincy Adams, was horrified his alma
mater was recognizing a barbarian who could barely spell his own name.

As usual, though, the press and Jackson's enemies
did not have the man exactly right. I just
finished five years of work on Jackson and his
White House years, and I found that the
reconstruction of his literary interests, from
youth to old age, illuminated much about the
arrangement of his intellectual furniture. His
heroic sense of possibility? He loved Jane
Porter's novel "The Scottish Chiefs." His
thunderous rhetorical habit of posing a question
and then answering it? He grew up memorizing the
Westminster Shorter Catechism of the Presbyterian
Church. His provincial obsession with manners,
bearing and etiquette? He was a fan of Lord
Chesterfield's letters. His reflexive
characterization of enemies like Henry Clay as
"Judases" and his dependence on imagery from the
Old Testament? He cherished the Bible and his
late wife's copy of Isaac Watts's translation of
the Psalms. His shrewd political sense? He was an
unlikely admirer of the French philosopher
Fénelon's "Telemachus," a kind of Machiavellian guide to ruling wisely.

You can tell a lot about a president - or a
presidential candidate - by what he reads, or
says he reads. We know the iconic examples:
George Washington and his rules of civility,
Thomas Jefferson and the thinkers of the French
and Scottish Enlightenments, Lincoln and the
Bible and Shakespeare. Though a generation apart,
Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt both loved Alfred
Thayer Mahan's "Influence of Sea Power Upon
History" and savored the imperial poems of
Kipling. Together such works created a kind of
Anglo-American ethos in their minds - an ethos
Franklin Roosevelt would make concrete during
World War II, when he and Winston Churchill
quoted Edward Lear's nonsense rhymes to each
other as they fought Hitler and Japan.

Harry Truman was obsessed with Andrew Jackson,
and one can trace the origins of Truman's
plain-spoken populism to Jackson's ideology and
style of a century before. (Truman read so many
books about Old Hickory that his haberdashery
partner, Eddie Jacobson, later said the failure
of their business was due in part to the fact
that Truman was always off in a corner with his
nose in a Jackson biography.) John F. Kennedy
favored David Cecil's life of Melbourne, a cool
statesman, and his fondness for Ian Fleming's
James Bond novels mirrored the New Frontier's
self-image of dashing idealism masquerading as cynicism.

Ronald Reagan used books to escape from the fears
and uncertainties of his alcoholic father's
household, holing up in an elderly neighbor's
house on endless afternoons and losing himself in
the fantastical novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs -
including one in which a special space shield
protects Earth from invading Martians, a template
that would recur in Reagan's life, first in a
Brass Bancroft movie and later with the Strategic Defense Initiative.

The current nominees for president also offer
revealing choices when asked which books have
been most important to them. John McCain has long
spoken of his affection for, and identification
with, Robert Jordan, the protagonist of Ernest
Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls." After I
interviewed McCain this past summer - a
conversation in which we discussed Jordan at some
length - I reread the conclusion of the novel.
The lingering image of the final scene is not one
of death but of Jordan, the college professor who
has come to Spain to fight the fascists, wounded
yet still alive, taking aim at the enemy, his
heart still beating against the forest floor.
Hemingway does not kill Jordan but leaves him
there, engaged to the end in the battles of his time.

McCain sees himself in the same way: as a warrior
who never gives in, and never gives up, no matter
how hopeless the cause. "Oh, I reread it all the
time," McCain told me. "Robert Jordan is what I
always thought a man ought to be." Jordan's
essential creed is encapsulated in a sentence
that gave McCain the title of one of the books he
has written with his aide Mark Salter: "The world
is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I
hate very much to leave it." It's not hard to see
how the line would resonate with a romantic fatalist like McCain.

In captivity, McCain used to act out scenes from
books and movies to keep his mind sharp. In
addition to Hemingway, he loves the stories of W.
Somerset Maugham, "The Great Gatsby," "All Quiet
on the Western Front" and James Fenimore Cooper's
Leatherstocking Tales, especially "The Last of
the Mohicans" (he remembers the N. C. Wyeth
illustrations). He likes William Faulkner in, as
he told me, "small doses," especially "The Bear"
and "Turnabout." McCain speaks of nonfiction less
often but told me he has read - twice - Gibbon's
"Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire."

Most interesting, though, was McCain's reaction
when I suggested that his father, a career naval
officer who rose to be commander in chief of the
Pacific forces during the Vietnam War, was rather
like Victor (Pug) Henry, the hero of Herman
Wouk's "Winds of War" and "War and Remembrance."
Exactly, McCain said: his father was exactly like
Pug Henry. Later, I reread the last pages of "The
Winds of War." In them, Henry watches his son set
sail from Pearl Harbor aboard the U.S.S.
Enterprise: "He could almost picture God the
Father looking down with sad wonder at this
mischief. In a world so rich and lovely, could
his children find nothing better to do than to
dig iron from the ground and work it into vast
grotesque engines for blowing each other up? Yet
this madness was the way of the world."

McCain and Obama are so different in so many
ways, but they do share one thing: a kind of
tragic sensibility. Judging from the books they
cite as most important, they embrace hope but
recognize the reality that life is unlikely to
conform to our wishes. They mention Shakespeare's
tragedies, "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and David
Halberstam's "Best and the Brightest." Like
Robert Jordan, they want to make things better
and are willing to put themselves in the arena,
but they know that nothing is perfectible and
that progress is provisional. Things fall apart;
plans fail; planes are shot out of the sky. Their
attraction to Hemingway suggests a willingness to
acknowledge unpleasant facts not always found in
those who enter elective politics.

When I asked him by e-mail to send a list of
books and writers that were most significant to
him, Obama offered American standards: The
Federalist, Jefferson, Emerson, Lincoln, Twain,
W. E. B. Du Bois's "Souls of Black Folk," King's
"Letter From Birmingham Jail," James Baldwin, and
Toni Morrison's "Song of Solomon." Among writers
from abroad, he singles out Graham Greene ("The
Power and the Glory" and "The Quiet American"),
Doris Lessing ("The Golden Notebook"), Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn's "Cancer Ward" and Gandhi's
autobiography. In theology and philosophy Obama
mentioned Nietzsche, Niebuhr and Tillich -
writers consistent with his acknowledgment that
while life is bleak, it is not hopeless.

Obama, unsurprisingly, appears to be more drawn
to stories sympathetic to the working classes
than is McCain. Obama cites John Steinbeck's "In
Dubious Battle," about a labor dispute; Robert
Caro's "Power Broker," about Robert Moses; and
Studs Terkel's "Working." But he also includes
Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" and "Theory of Moral Sentiments" on his
list.

Both candidates are fond of Robert Penn Warren's
"All the King's Men," a novel about a corrupt
Southern governor modeled on Huey Long, though he
is also a kind of Jacksonian figure. The last
line of the novel reads, "Soon now we shall go
out of the house and go into the convulsion of
the world, out of history into history and the
awful responsibility of Time." Either John McCain
or Barack Obama is about to make that same
journey. "I was born for the storm," Andrew
Jackson once said, "and a calm does not suit me."
Born for it or not, the 44th president, whoever he is, is in for rough
weather.

Jon Meacham, the editor of Newsweek, is the
author of the forthcoming "American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White
House."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/books/review/Meacham-t.html?8bu&emc=bub2

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