Truman Books

As in "White House", Truman relies heavily on her Washington memories rather than researching new ones. So instead of interesting and detailed insights into the Senate's back rooms, we get a lot of chats in restaurants and bars. Despite its title, there is very little description of Capitol Hill. Readers interested in juicy insider insights will be disappointed. With a few pen strokes, the book could be set in any city. A quick read, not bad, but lots of room for improvement.

The bulk of the book deals with recollections of crewmembers on shipboard life, with emphasis on December 7, 1941, obviously. These recollections form a valuable oral history of the ship, and though there are minor conflicts between the stories on a couple of details, they are heartfelt, well told, captivating, and historically irreplaceable.

Equally important is the story of the current preservation efforts of the National Park Service to manage the wreck. In particular, the stories of survivors who elect to rejoin their fallen comrades when they are interred in Turret Four are moving beyond all expectations, and reinforce the significance of the Pearl Harbor attack in their lives.

There are some minor errors in the book, many of which are typographical, for instance using "savage" instead of "salvage". Some of the errors are a bit more careless as in a reference to 'General Yamamoto', when he was, of course, and Admiral, and going back and forth on whether the 'Arizona' was tied up at quay F-7 or F-8 (I believe it was F-8.) These are pretty nit-picky, but need to be mentioned. The book does have a couple of standout features in the five appendices. Appendix A is an excellent, if brief, overview of the key events in the Pacific war, Appendix B is an 'Arizona' casualty list, Appendix C is a list of 'Arizona' survivors, and Appendix E is a list of ship casualties of Japan in World War Two. Appendix E makes a sobering statement, that I have never heard anywhere else and found utterly fascinating: "Of the attacking Japanese fleet that initiated the war against the United States on December 7, 1941, all ships ended up on the bottom of the sea by the war's end except one midget submarine." As horrible as Pearl Harbor was for the American forces, the whirlwind reaped by Japan, in the end, was no less ferocious.

Mac Smith is appointed by the Vice-President Angrile to go to Mexico to oversee the elections there. There have been a series of murders lately ~~ and it all points to the ruling class in Mexico ~~ as they fought to keep the political powers in their grasp. Stories and rumors fly about in Washington and Mac Smith is right in the middle of it. His wife joins him on the trip to Mexico and they're in the midst of all the excitement.

It is a fast read ~~ an interesting one. But if you're looking for a book with some substance to it ~~ this book would not be it. It is just a fast mystery read that you don't have to think about the characters much. It's a perfect read for a lying-in on a blanket while enjoying the fall colors.

9-22-03

It was nice to go back and visit again... but next time i want aces and jokers...

Daniel Abraham's story, "Father Henry's Little Miracle" is the best short story I have read in sometime. The two main characters of the story are Father Henry and Gina. When I had read the story, I really wanted to take Father Henry out for a beer, and I really wanted to sleep with Gina.

Tocqueville's insights into the American worldview and its application by the wide public led him to forecasts and warnings about the future expressed in detail by Ledeen. The future developments will bridge over fads like American feminism, Africanism and other trends ,as well as views of "intellectuals" who are considering themselves culturally superior and try to influence the political elite . They are for controls of centralized state and, as one of the powers of the expanded state they advance, removal of religious discourse from public forum. Tocqueville found and the recent polls quted by Ledeen still confirm it, that that the overwhelming majority of Americans do not agree with the anti-religious intellectuals and judges. The advice is: religion is a guarantee of freedom, as his native France has tested by trying to supress it.
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Ben Benda
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The concept of the book is to summarize de Tocqueville, and then to test his observations against what has happened since. I have not seen that done before, and looked forward to seeing the results.

When Michael Ledeen is describing de Tocqueville, or political thinking of that time, the book is superb. If the book had stopped there, it would have been a five star book. So if you want to read it for that background, you will be well rewarded. Alternatively, you can read de Tocqueville directly. I would prefer the original, but either would serve.

In his contemporary commentary on America, Mr. Ledeen is basically giving us a political sociology analysis. For such work, it is helpful to have facts that look from various perspectives and dimensions. The first problem with this book is that Mr. Ledeen prefers to give just one anecdote or one fact, and build his observations from that. That approach works well for stimulating debate, but falls short of being convincing about our unique character. I found this approach very suspect.

Second, Mr. Ledeen prefers to always come at the problem from the perspective of being paranoid about losing our ideal character. I think his point of view is a valid one, but there are others. For example, one can also talk optimistically about how we routinely avoid certain traps (like having the best people decide to become politicians, or failing to use private institutions to serve important social needs). Those other perspectives are missing. The result is a book that seems like an anti-Democrat (as in the political party) rant in many places.

The third problem is that the book seems to have been weakly researched. Facts and details seem just a little out of focus, as though drawn from long-remembered impressions, rather than real knowledge or research.

For example, I rarely see Jack Welch's (the famous CEO of General Electric) name misspelled in any publication or book. But in this book, he was "Welsh" all the way through. Now, I believe Mr. Welch is an Irishman by background, so I don't think it's an accurate description of his familial history, either.

Then, the book goes on to describe his Mr. Welch's pronouncements of 1980 as creative destruction. The ideas that Mr. Welch advocated in that year were well established and broadly in application throughout American business when he pursued them. He primarily was advocating that the company stay in businesses in which it could be the leader or have the second place in market share. He solved the company's deficiencies by simply selling the lower market share operations, not by destroying them. For example, Utah International (a mining operation) was sold within months of his taking the helm. It was only later that Mr. Welch began to downsize the remaining General Electric operations to get rid of excess layers of bureaucatic fat.

The ideas Mr. Welch advocated later in his career were actually more important to General Electric's success, such as freeing General Electric Capital to be very entrepreneurial, focusing on leadership training, and implementing Six Sigma. So at best, Mr. Welch is misdescribed due to misfocus in Mr. Ledeen's example. At worst, Mr. Ledeen simply doesn't seem to grasp the example. There are several other sections of the book that display these kinds of fundamental flaws about contemporary observations.

As a result, I have to grade the analysis of current society somewhere in the two to three star range, creating an average of three and a half or four stars for the whole book.

After you finish reading this book, test its thesis by thinking about the evolution of American business. De Tocqueville did not have too much to say about that institution. Mr. Ledeen has somewhat more to say, suggesting it is an inheritor of the free association tendency of Americans. But I wonder if it is not something more. Is it not the case that business is replacing many of the other institutions in its effectiveness and broader social focus? Now that theme would make an interesting book.

Guard your liberty jealously, from all who threat it . . . including a greedy or thoughtless majority, sloppy thinking, or corrupt leaders. Trust must be earned.

"O Moon, nocturnal phthisic,
On the black pillow of the skies,
Your huge and feverish face
Attracts me like strange music!

...But thinking of physical pleasures,
A lover passes by, uncaring..."

Compare that to Stanley Appelbaum's translation (found in Verklarte Nacht and Pierrot Lunaire, Dover Publications):

"You moon, gloomy and sick to death
There on the black cushion of the sky,
Your eye, so feverishly enlarged,
Casts a spell over me like a strange melody.

...The lover, who in ecstacy,
is going off, carefree, to this sweetheart..."

This could be argued as an unfair comparison because the Appelbaum's translation is from the German translation from Giraud's text, but still, you can see how Richter's text lacks a singing quality, it feels "rushed", and the moon the does not really come out, where there is never a breath between the lines. If you are not convinced, here is another example, this time comparing Richter's text to another French translation. These are parts from Richter's translation of Sunset:

"The Sun has slit its veins
On a bed of russet clouds:
Its blood, through gaping chasms,
Sprays out in crimson fountains.

The agitated branches of the oaks
Convulse the crazed horizons...

...Like a Roman debauchee
Overcome with loathing
Who lets his sickly lifeblood flow
Into the filthy gutters..."

Now compare that to John Porter Houston and Mona Tobin Houston's translation (from An Anthology: French Symbolist Poets, Indiana University Press):

"The sun has cut his wrists
On a bed of reddish clouds:
His blood, through gaping holes,
Spurts in red fountains.

The oaks' convulsive branches
whip the mad horizons...

...Just like a delicate debauchee,
after the Roman Shame,
a debauchee allowing his sickly arteries
to bleed into filthy sewers..."

From looking at this comparison between Richter and the Houstons, I find Richter's choice of words and placement in poor judgement, lacking a musical harmony that constantly misses the point of the illustrative details of Giraud's text. Richter, in his treatment to Pierrot, is either over-simplifying or over-complicating (by not paying attention to connotations, and the different degrees of effectiveness of words that share the same meaning) or doing both at the same time; it feels frustrating. The other two fantastic translations I have pointed out by Appelbaum and the Houston's treat Pierrot with a sincere diabolicalness; in their versions, you could feel the quietly clandestine moon flowers' rage because Pierrot, the moon, the Madonna, the tides, the blood...are all written in details that let the mind wander freely in Pierrot's landscape. Richter's version puts the mind in a mental boxcar: get to one poem, stop, and then quickly get to next one. I suggest to wait until someone else will translate the whole Pirrot Lunaire series and skip this book, or rather perhaps write letters to Dover and Mr. Appelbaum, or the Houstons and plead to them to offer a new translation of Giraud's mad text.

(I apologize for speaking abstractly, but when your talking about what is musical, often it is difficult to not get abstract.)

In Codename Downfall, Allen and Polmar accomplish an amazing feat. In a book describing U.S. President Harry Truman's decision to use the atom bomb, they make the world's only nuclear attacks seem almost unimportant.

Fifty years have passed since U.S. bombers annihilated the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but those events have been debated frequently and furiously ever since. Using insightful research the authors paint so terrible a picture of the Pacific war's escalating destruction it even dwarfs the instant vaporization of two complete cities.

Downfall does not linger on the classic numerical comparison of lives lost to nukes versus invasion. Instead, the authors provide a sweeping account of the Allies' efforts to liberate or capture island after island in their determined drive to seize the Japanese homeland and stop the Japanese war-making ability.

Both sides expected a full mobilization of every Japanese citizen to fight what would be the largest invasion of all time. As Japanese generals preached about "100 million souls" all dying together, the American leaders searched for any alternative to the "decisive battle" as the Japanese military referred to it. The book described how the U.S. leaders grasped at the atomic bomb as a last, desperate hope to avoid this bloody climax their enemies thirsted for.

By the end of the book, the reader no longer wonders why Truman dropped the Bomb, but how the Japanese leaders could refuse the mercy of a peaceful surrender. Responsibility for the bombing finally rests squarely on the shoulders of the Japanese "cabinet."

Codename Downfall gives a fresh and convincing perspective on a very old question.

R. Day: May 29, 1996

I do believe the book dwelled overly on the wildly varying estimates of casualties, but this entire futile pursuit misses the central point of whether the invasion would have been bloody enough to rationalize dropping the bomb. After Okinawa, Iwo Jima, and other island invasions where nearly every Japanese defender died rather than surrender, where kamikaze attacks were orchestrated rather than impulsive, it looked far more than likely. The unanswered moral question is how many American lives were worth how many Hiroshima or Nagasaki Japanese lives.

There are several points that the authors focus on refuting, the key one being that Japan was on the verge of surrender or a negotiated peace. The new piece in the puzzle, according to the authors, is the Japanese messages we decrypted during the war and did not declassify until the 90's, showing Japanese insincerity and duplicity in its peace feelers. Also, a negotiated peace may have been difficult for Americans to accept in light of bitterness over Pearl Harbor, an attack which may have ironically proved to be Japan's most collossal error.

Another interesting argument is that Truman did not see the bomb as an alternative to invasion, but a supplement. Although coupled with the Russian declaration of war, the bomb's success, and perhaps its cruelty, came as a surprise.

That said, this book falls short of the similarly-named but far more comprehensive Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire by Richard B. Frank, which I recommend reading first.

For readers who expect a lengthy discussion and analysis of the US invasion plans, this book is a great disappointment since the authors never discusses the plan in detail. The two sketch maps that depict the US plans "Olympic" (the landing on Kyushu) and "Coronet" (landing on Honshu) depict only US corps-level invasion areas; neither inland objectives, scheme of maneuver or Japanese dispositions are depicted. The orders of battle in the appendix are very generic, listing only US corps and divisions, and no Japanese units are listed. Air units are ignored. The three US corps commanders for "Olympic," generals Schmidt, Hall and Swift, are never mentioned by name. This could have been a great book if he had discussed the units involved on both sides (eg. which units were veteran units and which were untried), the terrain (obstacles, key terrain, avenues of approach), the commanders on both sides, logistics, etc. and discussed the likely timelines of US progress using phase lines. However, the actual account of US invasion delivered by this limp account is overly generic and hence, virtually useless.