Review: Troublesome Young Men

Olson, Lynne.  2007.  Troublesome Young Men: The Rebels Who Brought Churchill to Power and Helped Save England.  Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: New York. (Amazon Link).

Lynne Olson accomplished in 2007 something few authors of wide-readership history ever do: she entered a crowded field and provided a truly original contribution.  I believe I'm relatively widely read; in particular, I had already read a number of books about Winston Churchill and British history of the 1930s and 1940s.  Some of my other favorites:

• Five Days in London (John Lukacs)
• The Last Lion (William Manchester)
• Churchill (Martin Gilbert)
• The Gathering Storm (Winston Churchill --- and the other five books).

Olson's unique touch as an author is the ability to pry the camera away from a focus on the greatest of men and to find the other great characters of a heroic age.  Churchill once famously remarked: 'we all may be worms, but I do believe I am a glow-worm."  His "glow" proves so powerful - for he is indeed one of the most remarkable characters of all history - as to cast the other heroes into shadow in the view of most historians.  Before reading Troublesome Young Men I am sure I had encountered in books Ronald Cartland, Robert Boothby, Harold Macmillan (mostly whom I knew from his post-war career), and Leo Amery.  Their stories always appeared as a supplement to Churchill's: Churchill did this, Churchill did that, and everyone else more or less tagged along as he single-handedly defeated Hitler.  

Olson manages to create a much fuller picture.  She does this without taking away from Churchill's role in the story (this is not "revisionist" history in the sense that the reader walks away with the conclusion that Churchill was a dull fellow).  She just fills in the details with an eye for the compelling story that brings to life other characters in a memorable fashion.  She has a storyteller's knack for recognizing the poetic moment, the ironic twist, and the poignant scene.  She also has the historian's grasp of the value of original source material; part of her success is that she manages to bring to life these people through their own words.

I learned a lot from reading this book.

Olson picked a good cast.  The story of MP Ronald Cartland is very inspirational; the history opens with his remarks against Chamberlain (the leader of his own party) in the House of Commons:

"The right honorable gentleman is the head of a strong Government.  He has an immense vote and he knows that he can carry anything through the Lobby... How easy it would be for him, when the whole of democracy is trying to stand together to resist aggression, to say that he had tremendous faith in this democratic institution."  by now the jeering and catcalls from the Tory benches were so loud they nearly drowned out Cartland's words.  he paused, fighting to keep his emotions in check.  Then, raising his voice to be heard above the din, he declared: "We are in the situation that within a month we may be going to fight - and we may be going to die."

Behind him, Sir Patrick Hannon, the senior Tory MP from Birmingham and an ardent Chamberlain supporter, shouted, "No!"  A close friend of Cartland's great-uncle, the florid, white-haired Hannon had been a key player in the younger man's selection to stand for Parliament by the formidable political machine controlled by the Chamberlain family.  Cartland spun around to face his former mentor.  "It is all very well for the honorable gentleman to say 'No," he declared.  "There are thousands of young men at the moment in training... and the least that we can do here... is to show that we have immense faith in this democratic institution."  Turning back, Cartland stared at Chamberlain.  'It is much more important... to get the whole country behind you than to make jeering, pettifogging party speeches which divide the nation," he said.  "Why cannot the Prime Minister ask for real confidence in himself as Prime Minister and as leader of the country rather than as leader of a party?  I frankly say that I despair when I listen to speeches like that to which I have listened this afternoon."  With that comment, Cartland sat down.  A few moments later he left the chamber.

The place was in an uproar... (pp. 17-18). 

Cartland himself was a member of the army and, when war broke out, left to go fight in France.

Not all the characters are as Saintly as Ronald Cartland.  In fact, the charm for some of them is their humanity; at times, it was flawed people rising to the occasion who made the difference.  Olson manages to capture character so well; in the course of reading the book one becomes quite familiar with a large number of these remarkable people.

It is also worth noting that not all the remarkable people are men.  Among others, she notes the contributions of the Duchess of Atholl, one of the first female members of parliament.  Far from being a member of the suffragette movement, she was actually quite personally conservative and was in part selected because he would not "rock the boat."  Neville chamberlain pushed her forward into a junior minister's post.  Much to his surprise:

"For Kitty Atholl, Mein Kampf served as a call to battle.  No longer the docile backbencher who wanted to "smooth matters over," she became an outspoken foe of appeasement.  She again joined forces with Churchill, this time in his campaign to awaken Britain to the dangers posed by Hitler and the need for rearmament.  Like Churchill, she received confidential information from knowledgeable sources about the rapid pace and size of German rearmament, which she passed on to him and to officials in the Foreign Office.  But she parted company with Churchill and other anti-appeasement Tories in her fervent opposition to all facism, not just nazism." (pp. 164-5). 

Troublesome Young Men is a remarkable history.  It is the sort of book that can be read by someone who has already read everything and still provide new insights while, at the same time, it is accessible enough to be read by someone mostly new to the subject.  I highly recommend it.

--- Stag Staff

PS.  She's also written another book, Citizens of London.  I've read both and liked both.  She got an interivew on The Daily Show (link here) for Citizens of London. 

Update on May 9, 2012 at 9:39 AM by Stag Staff

Morning Churchill, to get you through the day:

     On Sunday morning, August 10, Mr. Roosevelt came aboard H.M.S. Prince of Wales and, with his Staff officers and several hundred representatives of all ranks of the United States Navy and Marines, attended Divine Service on the quarterdeck.  This service was felt by us all to be a deeply moving expression of the unity of faith of our two peoples, and none who took part in it will forget the spectacle presented that sunlit morning on the crowded quarterdeck - the symbolism of the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes draped side by side on the pulpit; the American and British chaplains sharing in the reading of the prayers; the highest naval, military, and air officers of Britain and the United States grouped in one body behind the President and me; the close-packed ranks of British and American sailors, completely intermingled, sharing the same books and joining fervently together in the prayers and hymns familiar to both.
     I chose the hymns myself - "For Those in Peril on the Sea" and "Onward, Christian Soldiers".  We ended with "O God, Our Help in Ages Past", which Macualay reminds us the Ironsides had chanted as they bore John Hampden's body to the grave.  Every word seemed to stir the heart.  It was a great hour to live.  Nearly half those who sang were soon to die.

---- Winston Churchill, on the subject of his first visit to President Roosevelt, 1941.  The H.M.S. Prince of Wales, along with the H.M.S. Repulse,  was sunk by torpedoes from Japanese airplanes within the first few weeks of the outbreak of war with Japan.  See The Grand Alliance, pp. 384.

Review: A Distant Mirror

Tuchman, Barbara.  1978.  A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century.  Ballantine Books (Random House), New York.

Barbara Tuchman has to be one of my all-time favorite authors.  In A Distant Mirror she effectively describes a society descending into chaos of war and plague.  She makes the point that an older age was no time for people of little courage:

"Horrid wounds were part of the calling.  In one combat Don Pero Nino was struck by an arrow that 'knit together his gorget and his neck,' but he fought on against the enemy on the bridge.  'Several lance stumps were still in his shield and it was that which hindered him most.'  A bolt from a crossbow 'pierced his nostrils most painfully whereat he was dazed, but his daze lasted but a little time.'  He pressed forward, receiving many sword blows on head and shoulders which 'sometimes hit the bolt embedded in his nose making him suffer great pain.'  When weariness on both sides brought the battle to an end, Pero Nino's shield 'was tattered and all in pieces; his sword blade was broken in several places by lance-heads of which some had entered the flesh and drawn blood, although the coat was of great strength.'  Prowess was not easily bought." (pp. 63-64). 

In her introduction, she noted that the project originated in a desire to know what happened to society in the wake of the Black Death of 1348-50.  She went on to report "The answer proved elusive because the 14th century suffered so many 'strange and great perils and adversities' (in the words of a contemporary) that its disorders cannot be traced to any one cause; they were the hoofprints of more than the four horsemen of St. John's vision, which had now become seven - plague, war, taxes, brigandage, bad government, insurrection, and schism in the Church.  All but plague itself arose from conditions that existed prior to the Black Death and continued after the period of plague was over."

What is truly remarkable about A Distant Mirror is how the behavior of the people that populate the tale looks like the behavior of modern people in many respects, although there are obviously differences.  The human errors - or, in some sense worse, the human playing of equilibrium strategies in games where equilibriums are nasty outcomes (Prisoner's Dilemma type) - are quite familiar.

Nevertheless, Tuchman also keeps a good deal of perspective on the era.  She notes that "a greater hazard, built into the very nature of recorded history, is overload of the negative: the disproportionate survival of the bad side - of evil, misery, contention, and harm.  In history this is exactly the same as in the daily newspaper.  The normal does not make news... No Pope ever issued a Bull to approve of something." 

She writes with a certain light touch (more apparent in her book The Zimmerman Telegram and less evident in The Guns of August - both also outstanding works) that humanizes the era without turning it into a Monty Python sketch.  She has a keen sense of irony, which I would argue is required for a historian.  For those who think older history is boring she is a tremendous counterexample; if you were to only read one book about this period, A Distant Mirror is certainly that book.

--- Stag Staff

Review: Charlie Wilson's War

Crile, George.  2003.  Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of How the Wildest Man in Congress and a Rogue CIA Agent Changed the History of Our Times.  Grove Press, New York. 

     The New York Times reports today that, because of the reactions to the Koran burning incident and the recent murder of 16 Afghans by an American soldier, the Obama Administration is considering a faster pullout from Afghanistan.  (See Cooper, Helene and Eric Schmitt. 2012.  "US Officials Debate Speeding Afghan Pullout."  New York Times online, March 13.)  It is now nearly indisputable, though, that the American presence will come to an end sooner or later.  After ten years of war in Afghanistan, there is a broad sense in America these days that the world is ordered in a particular way, with a certain set of "facts":

• Americans are divided between warlike Republicans and pacific Democrats,
• Muslims hate "us" ("They hate our freedoms -- our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other." - George W. Bush),
• Israel cannot work with Muslim countries,
• and there is no hope for building a peaceful society in Afghanistan because Americans and Afghans are just too different.

And so on.  Since 2001, we have more or less lived in that world - some of us believing in it more than others, certainly, but those ideas have framed the public discourse. 

     That's part of the reason why Charlie Wilson's War is worth reading.  It is a story of unlikely alliances, made to appear even more implausible by the history that has passed on since then.  It is a story that challenges your assumptions about how the world "must be;" indeed, it serves as an outstanding reminder that human beings are far too complex to be neatly ordered at all.  It's a story of aligned American and Afghan interests in a struggle of religious peoples (from Texas and Afghanistan) against the heathen Soviets.  It's a story of cooperation between Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, the United States, and Israel.  It's a story of cooperation between a Democratic Congressman and Republicans.  It's a story where Afghan holy warriors would drop by a Congressman's Washington office to say 'hello' and 'thanks.'  In light of all that has happened in the last ten years --- this is a really eye-opening tale of "what might have been" magnifying the tragedy of "what is."

     It also happens to be a really enjoyable book.  "It needs to be underscored that this is a true story.  It's purely by conincidence that," the author writes, "as in any good spy novel, we happen to come upon the leading man in the beginning of this account surrounded by beautiful women" (pp. 7).  Charlie Wilson was not your ordinary Congressman.  In one of my favorite passages from the book, the author describes his Washington Condo:

"It was almost a caricature of what Hugh Hefner might have designed as the ultimate bachelor's lair.  Manly hedonism was the theme, down to the last detail: mirrored walls, an emperor's size bed outfitted with plush down pillows and a royal blue comforter, an entertainment center featuring a giant television andd stereo, and a gleaming tanning bed to maintain his year-round tan.  Finally, the congressman's most distinctive innovation: the Jacuzzi, not hidden away in the bathroom but so deliberately situated in the center of the bedroom that it forced the unsuspecting eye to draw all the worst possible conclusions about the man who slept in this room.  Particularly when visitors came close and discovered silver handcuffs dangling elegantly from a hook within easy reach of the tub.  The site of these instruments of hedonism invariable left his colleagues and distinguished guests speechless." (pp. 22)

     The irony that someone with this apartment would be the ally of the people who "hate our freedoms" is not the only interesting tension in the book.  The author goes on to describe how Charlie Wilson himself was filled with contradictions:

"It would be an exaggeration to suggest that this was all a false front.  Charlie Wilson, after all, is a bone fide hedonist.  But he is also guilty of concealing his other identity.  It's only when he's alone and everyone else is sleeping that the other Charlie Wilson surfaces.  It's a nightly affair.  Usually at about three or four a.m. he finds himself awake and turns to his library, with its thick volumes of military history.  He's not like other insomniacs, who simply try to get back to sleep.  He reads like a scholar steeped in his field but also like a man in search of something personal, poring through accounts of the struggles of the world and the men who counted..." (pp. 22)

    I won't give too much away - you should read the book for yourself.  I will merely mention that there is something for everyone here: unbelievable characters, heroes and villians, unlikely alliances, ridiculous situations, comedy, tragedy, and moments of reflection.  Very few of the people are unambigiously good or unambigiously bad; I think the author did an outstanding job of capturing the complexities of human nature.  It's an interesting tale in foreign relations and secret wars, an insight into the fall of the Soviet Union, and exposition of how Congress really works, and a period piece of an America that is rapidly disappearing in the rear-view mirror. 

    There is a movie with Tom Hanks as Charlie Wilson... but it doesn't do the book justice at all, except in one respect: this scene.  The book is just too complicated to capture in a film --- too many characters, too many different stories.  That scene captured perfectly, though, how I felt when I finished reading this unique history book.  It's an ugly story in parts, and it is certainly the case that maybe even now we don't really know the "true" ending of the story at all.  But it's hard to read this book and not fall in love with America. 

--- Stag Staff

Review: The House of Morgan

Chernow, Ron. (1990)  The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance.  Grove Press, New York.  (Republished in 2001). 

The House of Morgan is a really fascinating read.  It is commonplace these days to talk about the effects (either positive or negative, depending on political view) of the modern legal and regulatory environment for banking and business.  The House of Morgan helps explain how we got here and what happened under earlier systems.  It also does this with a surprising degree of even-handedness: the author did not set out to prove the evilness of the banking industry nor was he unafraid to make fair criticisms. 

The author also does a really good job of taking a somewhat dry subject - I realize not everyone is always excited about the history of banking - and adds quite a bit of color to it.  The book comes complete with -

Dickens-like characters:

"Beneath a genial air, Peabody was a solitary miser.  He lived in furnished rooms in a Regent Street hotel and aside from taking occasional fishing trips, worked nonstop.  During one twelve-year period, he never took off two consecutive days and spent an average of ten hours per day at work."  (pp. 5). 

Buying substitutes in the Civil War:

"The unarguable point is that he saw the Civil War as an occasion for profit, not service - though he had an alterantive role model in his grandfather, the Reverend Pierpont, who served as a chaplain for the Union army when it was camped on the Potomac.  Like other well-to-do young men, Pierpont paid a stand-in $300 to take his place when he was drafted after Gettysburg - a common, if inequitable, practice that contributed to draft riots in July 1863.  (A future president, Grover Cleveland, also hired a stand-in, although he had a widowed mother to support.)  In later years, Pierpont would humorously refer to his proxy as 'the other Pierpont Morgan,' and he subsidized the man.  During the war, he also leapt into wild speculation in the infamous 'gold room' at the corner of William Street and Exchange Place.  Prices would gyrate with each new victory or defeat for the Union army.  Pierpont and an associate tried to rig the market by shipping out a large amount of gold on a steamer and earned $160,000 in the process."  (pp. 22)

Tales of trust-making in the good old days:

"In trying to coax recalcitrant companies into the steel trust, Pierpont showed his ringmaster's flair for cracking the whip.  He was irate with those who tried to extract undue advantage.  During negotiations at 23 Wall, one major holdout was Bet-a-Million Gates and his American Steel and Wire.  To break a deadlock, Pierpont materialized like the wrath of God and thumped a desk.  'Gentlemen, I am going to leave this building in 10 minutes.  If by that time you have not accepted our offer, the matter will be closed.  We will build our own wire plant.'  His bluff called, Gates capitulated and sold out.  Pierpont went home, boyishly elated."  (pp. 84)

The House of Morgan isn't quite like P.G. Wodehouse - you can be a member of civilized society without reading it - but, especially for those interested in American policy and American finance, I think this is a really interesting piece of history.  I have certainly enjoyed it. 

--- Stag Staff

Review: The Autobiography of Malcolm X

The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley, originally published 1965.  (And very inexpensive on Amazon now... here).

I read this book on a whim as a sophomore in college.  I can remember very clearly laying down on my bed to read for an hour or two... and then, several hours later, finishing the book after completely neglecting to do any of the homework I should have done that day.  It proves the truth of Mark Twain's remark: "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."

The most interesting part of the experience reading this book is that it challenges our "AP US History" version of the struggle for Civil Rights.  From kindergarten on we were always taught about Martin Luther King in school; when in high school we were briefly (in the way things are) introduced to this shady "Malcolm X" character, he was really lost in the prevailing narrative already established for us. 

For me, though, I never personally related well to Martin Luther King.  He seemed too saintly; I knew I would never have the patience to be like him.  He seemed like a great man but, like many great men, is then inherently inaccessible.

That's the neat part about The Autobiography of Malcolm X.  Somehow, through the collaboration with Alex Haley, the story is incredibly accessible.  While I think my background and life experiences are about as far different as they could possibly be from his, I really felt like I recognized a kindred intellectual spirit.  That is not to say that I always agreed with everything he (they) wrote; it is just that I could follow along in a way that made me feel like I understood their point of view.  While Malcolm X remains a controversial public figure, I couldn't help but admire him after reading this book.

If you haven't already done so - get a copy.  You may not always agree but it will at least challenge you.

Update on February 7, 2012 at 7:27 AM by Stag Staff

An additional member of the Stag Staff would like to echo this review's praise for Malcolm X's Autobiography.  It nearly inspired him to go to prison to focus on his intellectual development just as Malcolm Little did! Thankfully he only entertained the idea, but this work is simply that powerful.

Above all, the book gave me a unique appreciation for Malcolm X as a serious thinker about human kind. While he was primarily a leader in a constant struggle to earn his people's freedom, I will remember his many, many transformations of throught.  He had the admirable quality of remaining open to the world. As he learned, his ideas changed. And is this not the defining mark of a true intellectual? Someone objectively curious such that they can be persuaded by something new? Someone who is decidedly not bogged down by dogma and orhtodoxy?  

American history seems to have remembered Malcolm X as a radical militant who advocated violence as a means to an end.  The image most will associate is the one of him in a suit peering out the side of a window, brandishing something like an assault rifle. There's no question that for a time, he was that man with the gun, but to assign this complex figure just one memory terribly undermines the many iterations of Malcolm X. Any reader of this autobiography knows, that by the end of his life he was nearly the antithesis of the man next to the window.

In summary: this was an incredible value for just $5 (bought it used) and 8-9 hours of my time (I can't read as fast as the above reviewer). Go get it!

Update on February 7, 2012 at 2:14 PM by Stag Staff

What a funny coincidence!  This Stag Staffer has also read The Autobiography of Malcom X (as a high school sophmore no less!) and greatly enjoyed the work.  

While his memory is a bit fuzzier than his dear colleagues and his writing certainly less eloquent -- though perhaps, as his colleagues are wont to say, more obtuse -- he vividly remembers plowing through this great book as a young High School sophmore and thinking "Alright!  History's finally getting real."  

Enough with the sanitized platitudes of our whitewashed textbooks, here's the writing of a man who truly lived.