Book Review: "His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life" by Jonathan Alter

I first saw Jimmy Carter with a few other students during my first year as a graduate student at Emory University where he remains a visiting professor - I still remember the then 81-year-old briskly striding in with his signature broad, toothy smile and the energy of a man half his age. The amusing thing was that when he opened up the floor to any question that we wanted to ask him, the first question someone asked right away was whether LBJ was responsible for JFK's assassination. Without batting an eyelid Carter said no and moved on.

Now I am finishing Jonathan Alter's comprehensive biography of Carter and it's a revelation. The book's main goal is to show that Jimmy Carter is a much more complex human being and president than what people believe, and it succeeds exceedingly well in this goal. Carter was a highly intelligent, immensely hard working and, most importantly, a good man in the wrong job. But even then, the things he accomplished were very substantial. Most important were his two signature foreign policy achievements - giving the Panama Canal back to Panama, and brokering a peace between Israel and Egypt which has lasted up to to the present day. The Camp David Accords in particular showed a commitment over thirteen days that is without precedent before or since; Carter simply refused to give up, even when Begin and Sadat were on the verge of going home multiple times. The other huge achievement - albeit one that now seems like a mixed blessing - was to normalize relations with China. He also campaigned for human rights at a time when it wasn't fashionable for American presidents to do so, abandoning American presidents' traditional cozy relationship with anti-communist dictatorships.

There are also other, more minor achievements that are now forgotten - appointing more liberal federal judges (even more than Trump), deregulating the airline industry, appointing more African-Americans to important government positions than many of his predecessors, restoring a sense of decency and common sense to the White House after the tumultuous years of Vietnam and lackluster years of Ford, being the first Democratic president to woo evangelicals (the last before they turned Republican) and popularizing alternative energy and climate change at a time when few people cared about it. There's no doubt that the binary classification of Carter as "failed president, great ex-president" is flawed and reality is more complex.

The book is also fabulous at exploring Carter's childhood and background in rural Georgia as a farmer and his education in nuclear engineering at Annapolis. Carter grew up as the son of a farmer and general store owner, Earl Carter, who competed with his son in daily tasks and sports and was a fair if harsh father. Carter's mother Lillian who lived to see her son became president was quite liberal for her time, and astonishingly joined the Peace Corps and went to India for a few months for public service in her sixties. Alter does not shirk from criticizing Carter's poor record on civil rights before he became president (at one point he was friendly with George Wallace). Carter was a product of his time and grew up in the segregated Deep South after all, but this does not excuse his reluctance to take a stand even in matters like school desegregation. Of course, the defining relationship that Carter has had is with his wife Rosalynn who he married when he was twenty-one and she was nineteen; they have been married for more than seventy-five years now. Rosalynn has been a commanding presence in his life, and he often sought advice from her along with his other advisors during the most crucial moments of his presidency.

Carter's main problem was that he was dour, practical and business-like and almost completely lacked the warmth, optimism and PR skills that are necessary for political leaders to win over not just minds but hearts. He was the strict father who wants to lecture his children about what's best for them. His grim fireside chats about consumption and self-indulgence, while sensible, did not go down well with the American people.

In addition, while he did a good job during his first two years, Carter was completely overtaken by global events during his second two, most notably the Iranian Revolution, Soviet aggression and the oil crisis that hiked up oil prices. The book does a good job showing that while Carter was not responsible for these events, he was as clueless in understanding the situation in Iran as anyone else.

There is an excellent account of the Iranian Hostage crisis in Alter's biography which includes many details that I did not know. It seems like a real tragedy since it was a comedy of errors in some sense, albeit one which the US had yoked itself with since installing the Shah of Iran in a coup in 1953 (there is an excellent account of how Mohammed Mosaddegh's democratic government was toppled in Stephen Kinzer's book "All the Shah's Men"). The hostage crisis was essentially triggered by the Shah being allowed into the US for medical treatment. He had fled from Iran after the Ayatollah had been reinstalled and flown in from exile in France.

The Shah's case was engineered by a lobby prominently led among others by Kissinger - the man's villainy continued unabated even after leaving the Nixon administration. He and his cabal greatly exaggerated the Shah's medical condition and forced Carter to admit him into the US on humanitarian grounds; he was in Mexico, and the Kissinger faction wrongly made the case that Mexican hospitals weren't equipped to diagnose and treat him. This was the last straw since it told the Iranians that the US was about to embark on another 1953-like adventure. This wasn't true, but at this point cooler heads weren't prevailing.

Also complicit in the disaster was Carter's hawkish national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, an early neoconservative. A dissenter was secretary of state Cyrus Vance who strenuously advised against letting the Shah in, having a good idea of how perilous the situation in Iran was. As it turned out, Carter was blindsided and ignorant of the internal situation in Iran and ended up letting the Shah in (before hurriedly getting him out again).

The irony was that the die had been cast by Carter's predecessors, especially Eisenhower and Nixon, and Carter himself had very little interest in adventurism abroad, but the Shah was America's burden to bear, and Carter's actions were conflated with previous ones by the Iranians. Once the hostages were taken Carter's hands were tied for months, his approval ratings plummeted and the way was paved for Reagan (and Ben Affleck and his team in 'Argo').

I always feel that the fractured relations between the US and Iran constitute one of the great international tragedies of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Both countries have a rich heritage and have so much to offer each other. If the US had not completely thrown in their lot with Saudi Arabia and Israel and instead been friends with Iran, we would have had a powerful ally against Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East. As it happened, the current Iranian regime is certainly nothing to praise and funds terrorist groups like Hezbollah. But it's important to note that it was largely US actions in the 1950s that led to the present state of affairs.

In retrospect, it appears obvious how someone like Reagan who was just fundamentally better at being a people pleaser and projected sunny optimism could defeat Carter. Fortunately Carter's career was just beginning at the end of his presidency, and in the next three decades he did very significant human rights work, including eradicating guinea worm from Africa and working on Habitat for Humanity, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in the process and becoming a far more deserving recipient than most others who got the prize. Now 97, he still teaches Sunday School in Plains, GA. What we need today is the pragmatism and intelligence of Jimmy Carter and the optimism of Ronald Reagan.

A fantastic book, well worth its almost 800 pages, and likely the definitive biography of a remarkable man for many years to come.

Book Review: "American Rebels", by Nina Sankovitch

I greatly enjoyed this excellent book on the intertwined lives and fortunes of three families from the little town of Braintree - the Adamses, the Hancocks and the Quincys. Nina Sankovitch has woven a wonderful tale of how these three families and the famous names they gave rise to were both spectators and participants in some of the most famous events in American history. The account is often quite engaging and it kept me glued to the pages. I was aware of the general facts and characters, of course, but the book accomplished the valuable goal of introducing me to Josiah Quincy in particular, a name I had only heard of but did not know much about.

Sankovitch''s account begins in the 1740s when she shows us how John Adams, John Hancock and Josiah Quincy grew up together in Braintree, along with other kids like Abigail Quincy. She leads us through well known events ranging from about 1765 to 1775 - the years of turmoil, and ones during which all these men and women found the role that history had created for them - with flair, and also sheds light on underappreciated events like the dysentery and smallpox epidemics that swept through Boston. The book portrays Braintree as a small town and quintessential example of American egalitarianism, one where everyone was equal - from the distinguished Quincys and wealthy Hancocks to the Adamses who came from yeoman farming stock. Today Braintree is simply the south end of the "T" for most Bostonians.

All the boys and girls played together in the same town square and attended the same church where their fathers were ministers. Abigail Adams came from the prominent Quincy family. Everyone had been drilled right from childhood in both the values of self-reliance and that of community service. The colony had already been enlightened about the evils of slavery, and many colonists did not own slaves unlike their Southern brethren. After John Hancock's father died, his wealthy uncle Thomas and aunt Lydia took him under their wing and spirited him away to Boston. There on Beacon Hill, in a wealthy mansion, Hancock grew up and took charge of the family's prosperous trading business. He soon became perhaps the most prominent citizen of Boston, certainly the wealthiest but also the most charitable. All spit and polish, he would throw dinner parties, give to the poor and somehow still avoid "entangling alliances" with the British, especially the much-hated Governor Thomas Hutchinson.

The real star of the story, however, is Josiah Quincy. A brilliant student at Harvard who raided the library while the others were drinking and playing cards (he knew almost all of Shakespeare by heart), he became a prominent lawyer who started publishing letters promoting the liberty and property rights of the colonists in the "Boston Gazette" and the "Massachusetts Spy". His brilliance, eloquence and dedication to the cause of liberty and property rights all exceeded those of his compatriots, the two Johns. John Adams really became prominent only after his defense of the British soldiers accused of orchestrating the Boston Massacre of 1770, and before that the limelight seemed to belong to Hancock, Quincy and his brother Sam Adams who headed the incendiary group the Sons of Liberty which was responsible for the Boston Tea Party. Racked with consumption almost all his life, Josiah could be laid low for days and nights and it was remarkable that he undertook the work that he did with such enthusiasm and industry. His friend Dr. Joseph Warren regularly visited him and nursed him back to health every time - Warren later martyred himself on Bunker Hill. Josiah had a fraught relationship with his brother Samuel Quincy who was appointed solicitor general of Boston by Hutchinson; even while the other children who he grew up with were turning into patriots, Samuel remained a loyalist. Later he fled to England, leaving a young wife and three children behind, never to return. In some sense his story is a tragic one because he was never completely won over to the Loyalist cause, but at the very least he should be faulted for not realizing what direction the winds were blowing and especially for abandoning his family.

Josiah took it upon himself to spread the cause of Boston and rally the other colonies. In 1773 he traveled by himself to the South to wake up the Southern colonies and press home the oppression that was then being visited by the British on Boston by the Tea Act and then the blockade of the port of Boston. His brother Ned had died during a sea voyage and Josiah feared the same, but this did not come to pass. In 1774 he undertook an ever more serious mission, traveling to England to try to quell any misunderstandings between the parent and the child, trying to convince the prime minister, Lord North, and other high officials that Boston wanted to live in peace with England in spite of its rebellious spirit. But back at home, his incendiary pamphlets and letters indicated that he was completely won over to the cause of rebellion, if not independence. When he found out that the king and Parliament were deciding to tighten the screws even more on the colony (machinations and misunderstandings in England are brilliantly described in Nick Bunker's "An Empire on the Edge"), he decided to go back home in the spring of 1775 to alert his countrymen. Sadly, he fell prey to consumption on the voyage back. Sankovitch's account has convinced me that if Josiah had lived and been in good health, he would likely have surpassed both John Adams and John Hancock in his success, perhaps rising to the stature of Jefferson and certainly occupying high office. Sadly this was not to be. His wife Abigail bore him two children, but the girl died when she was a baby. The son later became a prominent political leader and a governor of Massachusetts.

John Hancock, meanwhile, was treading a delicate balancing act. As perhaps the wealthiest and most prominent citizen of Boston, he had to associate with the governor and royal officials and was given a commission as a colonel. But he still had to stand firm on the principles that his friends were fighting for. Admirably enough, both he and John Adams turned down many very tempting offers from the crown to occupy high office. When the colony's leaders signed a non-importation clause to punish British trade, Hancock who had made his fortune based on trade with Britain joined in. It was Hancock and the firebrand Adams brother, Sam Adams, who later became the most prominent targets of the crown, Hancock commanding the Massachusetts militia and the minutemen who were soon to became famous. By 1775, when the first shots at Lexington and Concord had been fired, there was a price on Hancock and Sam Adams's heads and they had to abandon Boston.

The last part of the book deals with the momentous summer of 1775 when the Declaration of Independence was signed. Abigail Adams had stood guard over the house in Braintree to protect it and her four children from both marauding British soldiers and the horrors of the plague, even as John was away for months during the first, second and third continental congresses in Philadelphia, overseeing logistics and communicating with George Washington who had immediately made his way to Cambridge as the new commander of the Continental Army. Sankovitch tells us how Abigail made a remarkable and brave effort to convince John to include the cause of women, poor people and black people during the signing ("Remember the ladies", she said); when John flippantly dismissed her admonitions as female ignorance, she wouldn't back down. Later of course, Abigail became known as "Mrs. President" because of her strong and intelligent opinions as President Adams's wife.

Sadly as is well known (and superbly documented by Danielle Allen in her book "Our Declaration"), a paragraph condemning slavery and King George's slave trade had been included even by Jefferson in the original draft of the Declaration but had to be taken out to gain the Southern states' fealty. Both John Hancock and John Adams along with their wives were utterly opposed to the institution, and it was Josiah Quincy who had first called it a "peculiar curse" (forerunner of the more famous phrase "a peculiar institution"). John Hancock had his beloved aunt free all their slaves in her will. The summer of 1775 presented a signal opportunity to right the wrongs in both the country's past and its future, but it would not come to pass and the peculiar institution would only be eradicated in a horrifying and destructive war a hundred years later even as its informal effects persevered for another hundred. But they tried, these residents of small Braintree where all were as equal as was possible during those times, and where the ministers and residents alike preached the message that you cannot succeed in your own estimation and that of God's if you don't succeed in the estimation of your community.

Book review: The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777 by Rick Atkinson

When the British army of regulars captured American troops during the Battle of New York, they contemptuously noted how they were surprised to see so many ordinary people among them – tanners, brewers, farmers, metal workers, carpenters and the like. That observation in one sense summed up the difference between the British and American causes: a ragtag group of ordinary citizens with little battle experience pitted against a professional, experienced and disciplined army belonging to a nation that then possessed the biggest empire since the Roman Empire. The latter were fighting for imperial power, the former for conducting an experiment in individual rights and freedom. The former improbably won.

Rick Atkinson shows us how in this densely-packed, rousing military history of the first two years of the Revolutionary War. The Americans kept on foiling the British through a combination of brilliant tactical retreats, dogged determination, improvisation and faith in providence. His is primarily a military history that covers the opening salvo in Lexington and Concord to the engagements in Princeton and Trenton and Washington's legendary crossing of the frozen Delaware. However, there is enough observational detail on the social and political aspects of the conflict and the sometimes larger than life personalities involved to make it a broader history. The account could be supplemented with other political histories such as ones by Gordon Wood, Bernard Bailyn and Joseph Ellis to provide a fuller view of the politics and the personalities.

Atkinson’s greatest strength is to bring an incredible wealth of detail to the narrative and pepper it with primary quotes from not just generals and soldiers but from ordinary men and women. His other big strength is logistical information. No detail seems to escape his eye; the number and tonnage of food and clothing provisions and shipping, sundry details of types of weapons, ships, beasts of burden and ammunition, the kinds of diseases riddling the camps and the medieval medicine used to treat them (some of them positively so - "oil of whelps" was a grotesque substance concocted from white wine, earthworms and the flesh of dogs boiled alive), ditties and plays that were being performed by the soldiers ("Clinton, Burgoyne, Howe, Bow, wow, wow"), the constantly-changing weather, the political machinations in Whitehall and the Continental Congress…the list goes on and on. Sometimes the overwhelming detail can be distracting – for instance do we need to know the exact number of blankets and weight of salt pork supplied during the eve of a particular battle? – but overall the dense statistics and detail have the effect of immersing the reader in the narrative.

The major battles – Lexington and Bunker Hill, Long Island and Manhattan, Quebec and Ticonderoga, Charleston and Norfolk, Princeton and Trenton – are dissected with fine detail and rousing descriptions of men, material, the thrust and parry at the front and the desperation, disappointments, retreats and triumphs that often marked the field of battle. The writing can occasionally be almost hallucinatory: "Revere swung into the saddle and took off at a canter across Charlestown Neck, hooves striking sparks, rider and steed merged into a single elegant creature, bound for glory". The accounts of the almost unbelievably desperate and excruciating winter fighting and retreat in Canada are probably the highlights of the military narratives. Lesser-known conflicts in Virginia and South Carolina in which the British were squarely routed also get ample space. Particularly interesting is the improbable and self-serving slave uprising drummed up by Lord Dunmore, Virginia's governor, and the far-reaching fears that it inspired in the Southern Colonies. Epic quotes that have become part of American history are seen in a more circumspect light; for instance, it’s not clear who said “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes” during Bunker Hill, and instead of the famous “The British are coming” cry that is attributed to Paul Revere, it’s more likely that he said “The regulars are coming.” Also, the British army might have been experienced, but they too were constantly impacted by shortage of food and material, and this shortage was a major factor in many of their decisions, including the retreat from Boston. Brittania might have ruled the waves, but she wasn’t always properly nourished.

The one lesson that is constantly driven home is how events that seem providential and epic now were so uncertain and riddled with improvisation and desperation when they happened; in that sense hindsight is always convenient. Atkinson makes us aware of the sheer miserable conditions the soldiers and generals lived in; the threadbare clothing which provided scant protection against the cold, the horrific smallpox, dysentery and other diseases which swept entire battle companies off the face of the planet without warning and the problems constantly posed by loyalists and deserters to American patriots. There were many opportunities for men to turn on one another, and yet we also see both friends and enemies being surprisingly humane toward each other. In many ways, it is Atkinson’s ability to provide insights across a wide cross-section of society, to make the reader feel the pain and uncertainty faced by ordinary men and women, that contribute to the uniqueness of his writing.

Atkinson paints a sympathetic and sometimes heroic portrait of both British politicians and military leaders, but he also makes it clear how clueless, bumbling and misguided they were when it came to understanding the fundamental DNA of the colonies, their frontier spirit, their Enlightenment thinking and their very different perception of their relationship with Britain. A excellent complement to Atkinson’s book for understanding British political miscalculations leading up to the war would be Nick Bunker’s “An Empire on the Edge”. While primarily not a study of personality, Atkinson’s portraits of American commanders George Washington, Benedict Arnold, Henry Knox, Charles Lee, Israel Putnam and British commanders William and Richard Howe, George Clinton, Guy Carleton and others are crisp and vivid. Many of these commanders led their men and accomplished remarkable feats through cold and disease, in the wilderness and on the high seas; others like American John Sullivan in Canada and Briton George Clinton in Charleston could be remarkably naive and clueless in judging enemy strength and resolve. Atkinson also dispels some common beliefs; for instance, while the rank and file were indeed generally inexperienced, there were plenty of more senior officers including Washington who had gained good fighting experience in the ten-year-old French and Indian War. As a general, Washington’s genius was to know when to retreat, to make the enemy fight a battle of attrition, to inspire and scold when necessary, and somehow to keep this ragtag group fighting men and their logistical support together, emerging as a great leader in the process. He was also adept at carefully maneuvering the levers of Congress and to keep driving home the great need for ammunition, weapons and ordinary provision through a mixture of cajoling and appeals to men’s better angels.

For anyone wanting a detailed and definitive military history of the Revolutionary War, Atkinson’s book is highly recommended. It gives an excellent account of the military details of the “glorious cause” and it paints a convincing account of the sheer improbability and capriciousness of its success.

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Book review: The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America

The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America by Russell Shorto

About a decade ago when I was living in New Jersey, I used to drive every weekend from New Jersey to Massachusetts to see my then-girlfriend. While driving back I used to take a road called the Saw Mill Parkway, near a town called Yonkers, on the way to crossing the Tappan Zee bridge. Both reference points seemed completely nondescript to me then. What I did not know until now was that both Yonkers and the Saw Mill Parkway are the only tributes in this country to a remarkable man and a lost time which, if it had endured, could have significantly influenced the history of this country.

The remarkable man was Adriaen van der Donck, a Dutchman who brought the liberal outlook of 17th century Amsterdam to the Dutch colony of New Netherlands, with its capital New Amsterdam. He was known as a 'Jonkheer' or 'young lord', and on his estate up the Hudson river he built a saw mill. Hence Yonkers and the Saw Mill Parkway.

Today about the only two things that most people know about the place was that it was bought from the Indians in 1626 for the seemingly laughably small sum of 60 guilders or 24 dollars, and that New Amsterdam became New York when the English took over it in 1664. During that period it became the most progressive European colony in America, reflecting the liberal, multicultural, intellectual and progressive spirit of the Netherlands, but its history is basically taught today as an English history. Russell Shorto's engaging book charts the history of this remarkable and forgotten colony, from the discovery of the location by Henry Hudson in 1608 (about the time that Jamestown was founded) to its takeover by the English.

Much of the book centers on two larger-than-life characters; Adriaen van der Donck and Peter Stuyvesant who were sort of opposites; the former is virtually forgotten while the latter lives on in the form of names like Stuyvesant High School. Van der Donck was educated at Leiden which then had a university rivaling Oxford in its embrace of natural philosophy and logic, and the Netherlands was already serving as a refuge for religious apostates like pilgrims and Rene Descartes. Inspired by his law studies at Leiden, Van der Donck had a scientists' eye for observation and objectivity. He made friends with the Indians, lived with them, studied the plants, animals, mountains and rivers in the vast landscape of what is now the Albany region and wrote a book describing the land that became a bestseller. He brought principles of representative government and religious freedom to New Amsterdam.

Stuyvesant who had fought the Spanish in South America and lost a leg to a cannonball belonged to the conservative old guard and believed in exercising the will of the company of which he was director - the Dutch West India Company which was then scouting around the world looking for natural and human resources. Although Stuyvesant and van der Donck were on good terms before, Stuyvesant's heavy-handed management of the colony led van der Donck and a select few settlers to write protests to the Hague laying out some remarkably forward-looking principles of secular governance for the colony.

And yet somehow, between Stuyvesant's authoritarian but dogged direction and van der Donck's progressive views, New Amsterdam for a few decades became a model for secular civilization that later defined New York City as a melting pot, a unique place with a ragtag band of seamen, traders, brewers, prostitutes, soldiers, farmers, freethinkers, frontiersmen and people from all countries and professions which encouraged multiculturalism and religious freedom, in significant contrast to the monocultural, religiously rigid Puritan colonies of New England to the North; in fact it served as a refuge for persecuted Englishmen and women from New England who settled mainly in Long Island. It also largely regarded the neighboring Indian tribes as equals and traded beaver furs and wampum with them, and unlike the English at Jamestown rarely engaged in murderous conflict with the natives. Under van der Donck's leadership, the Netherlands was going to institute a bonafide progressive government in the place - the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 had inspired a general sentiment of tolerance and peace - but sadly the beginning of the Anglo-Dutch wars led the country to again cede authority to the West India Company, and Stuyvesant again had the upper hand. Nonetheless the colony still flourished because of its decentralized nature.

The book describes how the colony bequeathed many Americanisms, among them "boss" (from "baas"), "coleslaw" (from "koosla") and "cookies" (from "koekje"). A lot of upstate New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, (the name Schuylkill is Dutch) and especially New York City have a deeply embedded Dutch heritage, and there's even a non-trivial amount of Swedish and Finnish heritage that came from a Swedish colony that endured for about twenty years in what's now Delaware before it capitulated to the Dutch. The end of the colony came when the English first under Cromwell and then under Charles II realized the lucrative advantage that the location would provide in exploring the interior up the Hudson river, along with a strategic waypoint for the then exploding slave trade. Van der Donck sadly died in an Indian raid while Stuyvesant lived out his life in his colony and was buried there in 1672. The golden age of Dutch civilization and free thought was on the decline, and England - and the English version of history - took over.

There is no doubt that New Amsterdam was a model of religious and cultural tolerance that needs to be remembered, largely because there was no system of top-down governance there for a long time, but perhaps Shorto overstates the influence it had on future developments in the United States including the Constitution; nobody knows how exactly history would have turned out had there been two dominant colonies - the English to the North and the Dutch to the South, but it would have been very interesting indeed. Ironically, in his zeal to demonstrate how forgotten secular New Amsterdam was, Shorto fails, even when mentioning New England in some detail, to mention even once the equally secular and remarkable secular experiment to the North which I wrote about earlier - Roger Williams and his founding of Rhode Island. Seems like someone's always forgotten.

Book review: An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America

An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America by Nick Bunker

A highly illuminating, novel account of the lead-up to the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution from the British side, covering the critical years 1772 to 1775. British politics and economics played a seminal role in inciting the conflict (who knew that smuggling which drastically undercut the prices of tea and other commodities played such a huge role in the revolution). As an Englishman Bunker offers a very thoughtful and sympathetic but still fair and balanced portrait of British political leaders and convincingly demonstrates how they were complex characters with far from outright villainous intent.

Unlike the simplistic textbook version of events, Bunker explains in painstaking detail (sometimes too much detail) how the British simply misunderstood the colonists rather than actively oppressed them, seeing them as sources of revenue and little more, largely ignoring them until 1773. Occupied with extending their empire in other parts of the globe and chronically afraid of the French, they thought of the American colonies as a reliable outpost which they would never have to worry about, even as they were losing their grip both on the vast, overstretched geography as well as the hearts and minds of the colonists. They also badly misunderstood that what were for them simple matters of (modest) taxation were for the colonists fundamental matters of religion, individual rights and free trade; unlike other British colonies like India, the North Americans already had a lot of freedom and individual rights, which made England's petulant, scolding attitude highly inflammatory and the decision to separate from the mother country consequently easier.

Even after the Tea Party there was a huge gulf of misunderstanding between King George III, prime minister Lord North, the colonial secretary Lord Dartmouth and the colonists that led to missed opportunities. Support for taking hard measures against the colonies was also far from monolithic, with many famous members of parliament like Edmund Burke delivering fiery speeches against North, and the quality of British democracy was commendable, with even riotous events like the Boston pamphlets and the Tea Party needing proper legislative procedure, witness accounts and documentary evidence to prosecute (the book makes it clear that even by the 1770s the King could make almost no law without parliament's consent). News (including scurrilous "fake news") also took at least a month to travel from one shore to another during those days, compounding the misunderstanding.

The British also made a critical mistake by getting obsessed with Boston and Massachusetts which, although symbolically important, were politically as well as economically much less important than the Southern colonies and the Hudson Valley. After the tea was dumped North basically thought he could quell the rebellion through a targeted local war in Massachusetts or Rhode Island (the most radical state); little did he know that the colony shared deep resentments with other colonies. In a curious sense the British understanding of the colonists was as impoverished as the later American understanding of the Vietnamese. Just like an American General could never see through the eyes of Ho Chi Minh or a Vietnamese peasant, North and his ministers were simply too different from an Ethan Allen or Thomas Young.

Essentially this was a story of many missed opportunities. if they had played their cards right England could well have turned North America into a country like Australia or Canada, essentially an independent republic with intimate ties to the commonwealth, or even defused the budding revolution in 1772 by extending an olive branch of the right kind, perhaps dividing North from South, until it was too late. As it turned out, the two countries indeed turned out to be two nations separated by a common language.

October, 1949: Oppenheimer is on the cover of LIFE, and cigarettes are still cool

Back in the good old days of the late 1940s, the age of innocence still writ large on this country's lifeline, LIFE magazine was a microcosm of American life, a daily staple that brought the leading lights and events of the country into the living rooms of the middle class. When readers received the October, 1949 issue in their mail they found the godlike face of American science and technology gazing beneficently at them from the cover. Thanks to the substantial capabilities of eBAY I was able to retrieve a copy.

J. Robert Oppenheimer had already become a household name because of his leadership of the atomic bomb project, and now he seemed to have outdone himself by becoming the director of the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, effectively making himself the boss of Albert Einstein, John von Neumann and Kurt Gödel. The 1949 issue paints a picture of Oppenheimer as the quintessential polymath genius and new frontiersman, with a healthy contribution from Oppenheimer the Family Man making the picture complete. There are also other goodies in the installment, with a cheerful smattering of old-fashioned 1940s sexism advertising household products for men and their doting wives. And yes, the biggest concern about cigarettes is throat irritation, a myth reassuringly dismissed by Camel.

The good old times.

First, the father of the atomic bomb inspiring readers with his steel-blue eyes, thoughtful gaze and ever-present cigarette.

Oppenheimer was regarded as the quintessential intellectual plumbing the intricate depths of physics. His signature porkpie hat, cigarette, dazzling mastery of topics as far-flung as French poetry and Sanskrit literature made him the poster boy for the rarefied American intellectual, a species which until then had largely seemed endemic to Europe.

Daddy's Home!: The glowing, breathless profile packed with quotes from Oppie painted Oppenheimer as that rare combination of ivory tower genius and everyman with a great family life who enjoyed romping around with his kids when he returned from work. Reality was different: his wife Kitty was given to bouts of heavy drinking even during the day, and she could be a very unpleasant person in personal interactions. His children Toni and Peter lived in the shadow of their often acerbic and absent father, and both their lives ended in tragedy: Toni committed suicide after her parents' deaths, and Peter Oppenheimer is a recluse who very rarely talks about his father.

But enough about Oppie. Nothing says class and poise better than Van Heusen shirts for the modern American man, worn especially when his wife lovingly bathes him.

Finally, a piece of good news to divert readers' minds from all that heavy mathematical physics and philosophizing. Camel cigarettes don't cause any throat irritation! (only lung cancer).