By JON MEACHAM
Published: October 31, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/books/review/Meacham-t.html?8bu&emc=bub2
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 auto biography. 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.”
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 auto biography. 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.”
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