Cronkite. By Douglas Brinkley. Harper Collins, 2012, 819 pp., $35.

“From Dallas, Texas, the flash, apparently official, President Kennedy died at 1 o’clock p.m., Central Standard Time, 2 o’clock, Eastern Standard Time, some thirty-eight minutes ago.”

Last week I wrote about the 50^th anniversary of the JFK assassination that America commemorated last November. Among all the moments that linger from that day in Dallas, there is another iconic image that has entered into our collective historical consciousness: that of Walter Cronkite sitting at his anchor desk at the CBS studios in New York, overcome with emotion as he announced President’s Kennedy’s death to a shocked and startled nation. Cronkite taking off his glasses and blinking back tears remains for an entire generation one of the most-remembered moments from that awful day and one of the most famous pieces of television theater in the history of the medium. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RE-TCzIHrLI)

Imagine now to find out that “Uncle Walter” staged the whole bit with the glasses, as Douglas Brinkley tells us in this new biography of the broadcasting legend. November 22, 1963, cemented Cronkite as presiding media king of America’s booming television empire. He metaphorically held the nation’s hand during those four excruciating days through Kennedy’s funeral, and when it was all over he was on his way to becoming the “Most Trusted Man in America.”

It’s hard now, given all the television, satellite, cable, and internet viewing choices we have and the proliferation of social media, to remember or appreciate what it was like for millions of Americans to turn on their TVs each evening and invite the anchormen at the Big Three into their dinner hours. Chet Huntley and David Brinkley ruled on NBC (and beat Cronkite in the ratings till 1967), with Howard K. Smith and later Harry Reasoner at ABC. Even when I was in journalism school at the University of Georgia in the mid-1980s, the mantra was “hear it now [radio], see it tonight [TV], read it tomorrow [newspapers].” First CNN, then the internet and now the smart phone have made all of that obsolete.

But in post-World War II America, no one was more trusted or relied upon to tell Americans “that’s the way it was,” and for many Baby Boomers, Walter Cronkite was America. From the launch of the Telstar satellite, through Sputnik, JFK’s assassination, the moon landing, the Vietnam War, and Watergate, no other media figure commanded the authority or the trust that Cronkite did as CBS reporter from the mid-1950s and as anchor of the CBS Evening News from 1962 to 1981.

For those of us who grew up in the 1960s and 70s, this book is chock full of the faces and voices we all knew and loved: Cronkite, Roger Mudd, Eric Severeid, Douglas Edwards, Charles Collingwood, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, Connie Chung, Leslie Stahl, Bernard Shaw, Barbara Walters, Charles Kuralt, Andy Rooney, right up to Brian Williams, the current NBC News anchor who revered Uncle Walter and had a special relationship with him. For an old news junkie like me this book was a feast.

Brinkley details Cronkite’s rise from Kansas City and United Presser scribe through World War II to the top of the media mountain as the revered CBS newsman. Most interesting to me was his volatile relationship with the legendary Edward R. Murrow and his later fierce competition for interviews with Barbara Walters at ABC, whom he did not at first take seriously.

Cronkite hadn’t been one of Murrow’s Boys during World War II, and the fiercely competitive and territorial Cronkite was never beholden to Murrow once he went to work at CBS. Murrow was good on CBS specials with a script and the ever-present cigarette in his hand, exposing Joseph McCarthy or some other corrupt politician, but Cronkite was better on the fly, as he proved repeatedly at political conventions, NASA rocket launchings, and especially on the day of Kennedy’s assassination. No one was smoother, more relaxed, or more reassuring than Walter Cronkite in a crisis. When he finally denounced the Vietnam War as a stalemate in 1968 following the Tet Offensive, LBJ knew he had lost middle America.

For Cronkite, Barbara Walters heralded the advent of “entertainment as news” and he scoffed at the notion that she was serving the public’s interest or practicing serious journalism. He refused to take her seriously until she repeatedly got the big story, leaving Cronkite sputtering that this glamorous upstart had scooped him once again.

For all his on-air good manners and avuncular nature, Cronkite was fiercely competitive and never hesitated to go for the jugular when his territory or ego was involved. He deplored Dan Rather’s work in the anchor chair after succeeding Cronkite on the CBS Evening News and never missed an opportunity to blister Rather’s performance in public, particularly after Rather’s spectacular fall from grace at CBS. Brinkley says that Rather was the only man whom Cronkite despised, and the one person he would not mend fences with before he died.

Cronkite lived long enough to see not only entertainment become news, but also the advent of reality TV, Twitter, Facebook, and an entire generation that confuses fame with real accomplishment.  We are now all velocity and no coherence, and it will only get worse. But before we descend completely into curmudgeonly-ness, a la Cronkite in his dotage, we must remember that for young people coming of age now, this will eventually be “the good old days.” Context is everything.

As Brinkley points out, when so much of American culture is disposable, Cronkite and his work endures. Anchors will come and go, but there will be only one Uncle Walter, the one guy in TV, who, as Ted Turner noted, nobody ever got sick of. We seem now to long for his brand of authenticity, his pride of professionalism, his sense of moderation.  The American public sensed what fellow sailor Mike Ashford said at his funeral: when people asked him what Cronkite was really like, his answer was always “He’s just the way you hope he is.”

When those moments of collective shock come—assassinations, Watergate, the Challenger explosion, September 11—we still turn to the media, splintered and fragmented though it may be now, to help us understand it and to share our grief with each other. And as long as America remembers that tragic autumn day in Dallas, we’ll also remember that singular moment when Walter Cronkite cemented his position as national father-figure-in-chief.

And that’s the way it is, Wednesday, February 5, 2014. For GHS, I’m Stan Deaton. Thanks for reading.

The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson. By Robert Caro. Alfred A. Knopf, 2012, 712 pp., $35.

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, continues to fascinate fifty years after that horrific Friday in Dallas. With the nation having just commemorated that milestone, I decided it was time to delve into the latest volume of Robert Caro’s massive-and-as-yet-unfinished biography of Lyndon B. Johnson. The Passage of Power covers the years 1958 to early 1964, including the Kennedy assassination and Johnson’s rise to power because of it, and it’s a masterful if wordy account.

In 1988, the nation marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the tragedy, and CBS broadcast its coverage of the assassination and its aftermath in a 2-hour documentary entitled “Four Days in November 1963: The Assassination of President Kennedy.” Except for the occasional Dan Rather commentary, it was simply a re-broadcast of the coverage as it originally aired from November 22-25, 1963, and it was very powerful. Watching that show marked the first time I ever saw the unedited Abraham Zapruder film, and it shocked me. You can watch the CBS documentary on You Tube.

There have of course been innumerable documentaries on the Kennedy assassination and the conspiracies it has spawned, chief among the latter being Oliver Stone’s problematic film. Highly recommended, at least by me, is Robert Stone’s “Oswald’s Ghost,” originally broadcast in 2007 as an episode of PBS’s highly acclaimed “American Experience” series. There are too many others to mention but easily found—and in most cases watched—in the era of the internet.

Books and articles on the assassination abound too, of course, much of it written by amateur sleuths, would-be scholars, or outright hacks with a conspiracy theory ax to grind. It can be hard for published scholarship to keep up and compete with the overload of motion pictures, TV shows, and internet sites on the subject.

But make no mistake, the best written account of the assassination and its aftermath is here, in the pages of Caro’s fourth volume of his fascinating study.

Robert Caro’s biography is written in the grand style of the old nineteenth- and twentieth-century biographers, who spent decades and thousands of pages detailing the lives of their subjects. Who does this anymore? Dumas Malone spent nearly half a century researching and writing his 6-volume Jefferson and His Time, published in the 38 years between 1943 and 1981. Irving Brant’s 6-volume James Madison was published between 1941 and 1961, while Douglas Southall Freeman cranked out 4 volumes on Robert E. Lee, 3 more on Lee’s Lieutenants, and finished 6 books of a 7-volume biography of George Washington, all of it published in the 17 years between 1936 and Freeman’s death in 1953.

Caro is writing at a comparatively glacial pace. He began work on the LBJ project in 1976; the first volume, The Path to Power, appeared six years later in 1982, and three more volumes have been published in the intervening 30 years, averaging about 10 years between every book. Together the four tomes total about 3,300 pages and weigh more than Chris Christie’s lunch box.

As a friend of mine once joked, all an author has to do to get me to buy a book is to put “Volume 1” on the cover. I’m a sucker for the multi-volume set and a completist at heart. My study is full of them, from all of the ones mentioned above, to the 60-volume Great Books of the Western World series (second edition), and its two companion series: the 10-volume Gateway to the Great Books,  and the 38 volumes of The Great Ideas Today (published between 1961 and 1998); the Harvard Classics (51 volumes), Gibbon’s 6-volumes of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a complete set of the famous 11^th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (29 volumes), and all manner of other multi-volume histories and biographies.

As multi-volume sets go, Caro’s four volumes on LBJ don’t sound like much, but they take up practically their own shelf. As I said above, they’re weighty tomes with small print—the shortest is 500 pages–but they’re all prize winners. The first two, The Path to Power and Means of Ascent, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, as has the latest volume. The third volume, Master of the Senate, won the Pulitzer Prize in biography and the National Book Award.  It’s worth noting that the third installment was almost as long as the first two combined.

The latest volume comes in at 605 pages of text, and half of that covers the 47 days between JFK’s assassination and LBJ’s State of the Union address on January 8, 1964.  The events of November 22 get 65 pages all by themselves, and it is riveting text. For Caro, LBJ’s flawless transition to the power of the presidency was his finest hour. Having witnessed so much of Johnson at his worst—the second volume, Means of Ascent, focuses almost entirely on the corrupt 1948 Senate election that LBJ won by 87 votes—Caro believes that the passage of power found the Texan at his best.

One reason the books are so big and so long is that Caro left no stone unturned in his research. He has talked to anyone and everyone associated with Johnson who would in fact talk with him (LBJ’s press secretary Bill Moyers never has). The book is filled to overflowing with insights, anecdotes, and analysis of LBJ and the Kennedy administration that make it hard to put down.

Caro is at his best in describing three things in particular: the Democratic campaign of 1960 in which LBJ’s dithering and failure to fully commit resulting in losing the nomination to JFK; the combustible LBJ-Bobby Kennedy relationship and the hatred on both sides; and LBJ’s masterful transition from VP to President in the minutes, hours, and days following Kennedy’s assassination.

Derided by Camelot denizens and journalists alike as Colonel Cornpone or Rufus Cornpone while he was vice president, Johnson assumed power flawlessly and tactfully before ever leaving Parkland Hospital in Dallas. Standing against a back wall in a cubicle in the Parkland Minor Medicine section, LBJ received the news of Kennedy’s death from a heart-broken Kenny O’Donnell: “He’s gone.”

In that moment, everything changed. The powerless vice president immediately became the Lyndon Johnson of old.  Insisting on taking the oath of office before leaving Dallas (and offending the Kennedys by doing so), in the next few days he retained key JFK aides, calmed and united the American people behind the new (and un-elected) president, and reassured the world that America would seamlessly continue its leadership in the Cold War.

In the 47 days following the assassination, the former Master of the Senate managed–through political savvy, flattery, and invoking the legacy of the martyred Kennedy–to skillfully maneuver key pieces of JFK’s legislative agenda through Congress that had been stalled for three years. The master stroke was getting Kennedy’s Civil Rights bill passed by both houses of Congress later in 1964, overcoming the usual southern intransigence and stonewalling.

“Power is where power goes,” LBJ said, and as president he used it effectively as few other presidents have before or since, as great a combination of restraint and outright political arm-twisting as can be imagined.  He wooed the fiscally conservative Harry Byrd relentlessly in passing a tax cut, strong-armed his segregationist mentor Richard Russell into serving on the Warren Commission (Russell hated Earl Warren for Brown v. Board of Education) and coaxed and flattered Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, and McGeorge Bundy into staying on in the Cabinet after Kennedy’s death. He even persuaded long-time Kennedy stalwart Ted Sorensen that he could best serve JFK’s legacy by writing the speech LBJ delivered to a joint session of Congress just two days after Kennedy’s funeral and the State of the Union address on January 8.

The seven weeks are for Caro probably the most pivotal in American history. Johnson, Caro writes, used those seven weeks “as a platform from which to launch a crusade for social justice on a vast new scale”—the beginning of LBJ’s historic Civil Rights bills, the war on poverty, Medicare, Medicaid,  and the Great Society, all of which transformed the country.

During those seven weeks, Johnson had conquered himself, held the worst of his personality in check—the insecurity, indecisiveness, paranoia, the need to dominate and control—and for Caro it was his finest hour: “In the life of Lyndon Baines Johnson, this period stands out as different from the rest, as perhaps that life’s finest moment, as a moment not only masterful, but, in its way, heroic.”

The tragedy is that it wouldn’t last.  The next (and presumably last) volume will chronicle the spiral downward into the quagmire of the Vietnam War, civil unrest at home, the anti-war movement, the King and RFK assassinations of 1968, and a White House and president increasingly under siege. It all resulted, of course, in a Richard Nixon presidency and eventually Watergate. As Caro points out, the prestige of the presidency would never be the same after those 47 days.

William Manchester didn’t live to finish his 3-volume biography of Winston Churchill. Douglas Southall Freeman’s George Washington was one volume short of the finish line at the time of his death. Robert Caro says that he’s completed the research on the next volume already, that all he needs to do is write it.  He’s now 78. One can only hope that his writing pace picks up, because having come this far, it would be a crime if Caro didn’t journey with LBJ all the way to the end. The last line of the last volume, he says, is already written.

But if these four volumes are all we get, if the story ends here, it will be more than enough. Caro has already given us a literary monument the likes of which we are not likely to see again.

Halloween is this week, and as the days grow shorter and the evening shadows lengthen,  it’s time for a good ghost story. I’ve been a fan of them all my life. One of my earliest and scariest memories of Halloween is listening to the Disney album, “Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House.” We also had an old 45 single of “The Headless Horseman,” sung by Thurl Ravenscroft (the man who sings the songs on “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas” and the voice of Tony the Tiger). That song sung in Ravenscroft’s basso profundo was so scary to me I couldn’t even listen to it, and my brother Jeff played it over and over. I found it on iTunes not long ago and it’s still as scary as ever.

To really get the feel of Halloween, however, there’s nothing quite like settling down on a dark night with a ghost story that scares the living bejeezus out of you, and I have several good suggestions.

Since Horace Walpole published The Castle of Otranto in 1764, the horror novel has been wildly popular. The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) made Ann Radcliffe the most popular novelist in England.  In the twentieth century the horror novel came to be viewed as a cheap knockoff of serious fiction, nothing more than junk reading, undoubtedly because it became linked with Hollywood horror flicks. And while I’m a big fan of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), there is a whole field of supernatural writing that predates Hollywood and Stephen King and that will make your hair stand on end.

Everyone knows about Edgar Allan Poe, who practically invented the modern horror story when his Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque was published in 1839, and Bram Stoker, whose Dracula (1897) defined for all time in literature and film the vampire genre. And if you haven’t read Stoker’s short story, “The Squaw,” you should.

We also know about the Headless Horseman (surging in popularity again thanks to the new Fox show, “Sleepy Hollow”) thanks to Washington Irving’s short story, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” first published in 1820. Like all good writers of the ghost story, it’s all about setting the proper mood, which Irving did: “It was the very witching time of night that Ichabod, heavy-hearted and crestfallen, pursued his travel homewards along the sides of the lofty hills which rise above Tarry Town, and which he had traversed so cheerily in the afternoon. . .All the stories of  ghosts and goblins that he had heard in the afternoon now came crowding upon his recollection. The night grew darker and darker; the stars seemed to sink deeper in the sky. . .he had never felt so lonely and dismal. He was, moreover, approaching the very place where many of the scenes of the ghost-stories had been laid.”

Besides its familiar tale of the no-noggin Hessian, Irving’s story contains one of the richest literary portraits of a golden Hudson Valley autumn you’ll ever read.  If for no other reason, if you love fall, you’ll love reading or re-reading “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” [Comic Aside 1: Watch Andy Griffith repeatedly read the Washington Irving lines above to Opie in “A Wife for Andy,” episode 29 of season 3 of “The Andy Griffith Show.”]

So yes, read Poe, Stoker, and Irving. But now, please allow me to introduce you to some of the best of the genre of the classic ghost story, masters of the craft who aren’t so widely read today, but who should be.

Start with the Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873), the leading gothic writer of the nineteenth century. A contemporary of Poe, his stories are filled with gloomy castles, supernatural visitations, and descents into madness and suicide. You could do a lot worse than beginning with his short story, “Squire Toby’s Will” (1868), which sets the mood perfectly in the opening sentence: “Many persons accustomed to travel the old York and London road, in the days of the stagecoaches, will remember passing, in the afternoon, say, of an autumn day. . .a large black and white house…overgrown with grass and weeds…” You know this is going to be good, and it is, a classic complete with demon dogs, voices in the night, and spectral vengeance.

Le Fanu was a master of the craft, and he heavily influenced later writers of supernatural stories like M.R. James and Algernon Blackwood. For some of his longer work, check out Uncle Silas (1864) and The House by the Churchyard (1863). Many think his best work is In a Glass Darkly (1872), which contains the short story “Carmilla,” which popularized the theme of the female vampire.

Next up is Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951), a prolific British writer who wrote a lot of great stories that now stand as classics in the field. H.P. Lovecraft, no slouch himself in this genre (read “The Dunwich Horror”), called Blackwood “the one absolute and unquestioned master of weird atmosphere.” The next time you find yourself alone on a cold, dark winter evening, with the rain and wind lashing the windowpanes, read his short story “The Wendigo” about a legendary creature that prowls the Canadian northwoods and stalks a hunting party:  “This then was the party of four that found themselves in camp the last week of October. . .way up in the wilderness north of Rat Portage, a forsaken and desolate country.” His story “The Willows” is equally famous but in my humble opinion pales in comparison to “The Wendigo.” Start with these two and then check out any of the myriad of other ghost stories he wrote over the course of his 82 years, many of them collected in Tales of the Uncanny and the Supernatural (1949).

Le Fanu and Blackwood are superior storytellers, but the absolute master of this genre—again, in my opinion—is M.R. James. Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936) was a British medieval scholar and provost of King’s College, Cambridge, and of Eton College.  If you’ve ever heard Andy Williams’ great Christmas song, “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” you’ll recall the line about “there’ll be scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago.” I always assumed that line referred to Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, but it harkens back to an English tradition in the Victorian era of telling ghost stories on Christmas Eve, a tradition personified by James. He wrote most of his ghost stories to be read aloud to his colleagues, family, and friends on Christmas Eve.  The stories were originally published in four books between 1904 and 1925, and they are unequalled in their perfection of the genre. He took the Gothic tales of the nineteenth century and modernized them, placing them in contemporary British society and updated them for a twentieth-century audience. [Comic Aside 2: “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” was co-written by George Wyle, who also co-wrote the “Gilligan’s Island” theme song]

Thankfully for the modern reader, thirty-five of his stories have been gathered in two paperback volumes and re-published by Penguin Press, edited with introduction and notes by S.T. Joshi: Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories: The Complete Ghost Stories of M.R. James, Volume 1, and The Haunted Dolls’ House and Other Ghost Stories: The Complete Ghost Stories of M.R. James, Volume 2. They’re worth every penny.

James was unparalleled in creating a mood that sets the perfect tone for his stories, almost all of which followed the same formula: the story is set in an English village, seaside town or country estate, an ancient town in Europe, or in old church institution or university; the protagonist is usually a reserved, bookish type, naïve and unassuming, who somehow manages to find themselves receiving several unwanted supernatural visitations from beyond the grave, often through the discovery of an old book, map, or manuscript. And while many of the stories take place in characteristically gloomy settings, James turned many of the traditional literary devices on their collective heads. The scariest parts of many stories—like “Rats”—take place in broad daylight, for instance.

His most famous story is “Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,” but they are all scary and unsettling. This passage from “Casting the Runes” is typical: “He was in bed with the lights out . . .when he heard the unmistakable sound of his study door opening. . .no light was visible, no further sound came. . .he decided to lock himself in his room . . .he put his hand into the well-known nook under the pillow, only it did not get so far. What he touched was, according to his own account, a mouth with teeth, and with hair about it, and not the mouth of a human being. . .”

Le Fanu, Blackwood, and James are three nearly forgotten authors who are all worth reading, but no suggestion of good Halloween reading would be complete without a visit to the gloomy, haunted moors of Devon, in England’s West Country, where, as Sherlock Holmes said, the setting is a worthy one “if the devil did desire to have a hand in the affairs of men”:

“But one false statement was made by Barrymore at the inquest. He said that there were no traces upon the ground round the body. He did not observe any. But I did—some little distance off, but fresh and clear.” “Footprints?” “Footprints.”  “A man’s or a woman’s?”  Dr. Mortimer looked strangely at us for an instant, and his voice sank almost to a whisper as he answered:  “Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!”

I first discovered Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901-1902) when I was ten years old, and I have re-read it many times since.  There are other masters of the macabre that will chill your blood on a dark night: W.W. Jacobs (most famously “The Monkey’s Paw”), Ambrose Bierce, and the aforementioned H.P. Lovecraft. Dip into these authors almost anywhere and you’ll be amply repaid, though you probably won’t sleep well.

A final note on how to get copies of all these stories: the advent of the Kindle and other electronic reading devices have made all these otherwise hard-to-find stories available at your fingertips. Some authors like Doyle are easily found in almost any bookstore, but others (beside the James books above) are long out of print—and out of copyright. For the latter reason, they are cheaply and widely available on your Kindle. You can get the complete works of Sheridan Le Fanu, for instance, for $2.99 on Kindle, and it downloads in minutes. I’m not advocating the e-book over the real thing (a subject for another blog entry), but one of the beauties of the Kindle is the ease with which one can find the complete works of some great authors and their otherwise scarce books for practically nothing.

Whether you read these authors on dark autumn nights or bright summer days, make their acquaintance. You will not be disappointed. You may then agree with John Milton that “millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep.” Or they may leave you invoking the old Scottish prayer: “From ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties, and things that go bump in the night, good Lord deliver us!” This autumn pull your chair closer to the fire, turn down the lamp, and turn the page. Did you hear that? I think there’s something out there.

Jefferson and Hamilton: The Rivalry That Forged a Nation. By John Ferling. Bloomsbury, 2013, 436 pp., $30.

There’s an old saying that the only new thing in the world is the history you don’t know. To the casual observer, the Tea Party that rose up in opposition to President Barack Obama’s policies in 2009 might seem to be a new phenomenon. But after reading John Ferling’s new book about Jefferson and Hamilton: The Rivalry That Forged a Nation, you realize that the Tea Party is nothing more than the latest iteration of a movement that goes back to our country’s founding.

Jefferson as a Tea Partier? Probably not. But the political strain they represent goes back to Jefferson’s earliest opposition to the nationalist policies of Alexander Hamilton in the 1790s.

What is the proper role of government in our lives? Americans have never been able to agree on the answer to that question, and it has bedeviled us since the Revolution. And what, after all, was the real  legacy of the American Revolution? A strong central government that could properly govern and defend the states united while promoting business and trade, or a loose confederation of states that could look after their own affairs and where farmers and small landowners would flourish? This was the breeding ground for the dispute that began at the Constitutional Convention and that has continued from that day to this. What should government do and not do? What is an inalienable right? What is equal justice under the law? These three questions have run on parallel tracks through our national history from that day to this, and in trying to answer these questions Americans have created Democrats, Know Nothings, Republicans, Populists, labor unions, conservative think tanks, Progressives, Dixiecrats, and the Tea Party, among many other strains of the American body politic. It was the central reason for the rivalry between Jefferson and Hamilton as their personal disagreements hardened into institutionalized political parties as they argued over the true legacy of the American Revolution.

John Ferling is one of our country’s best historians of the American Revolution. He ranks right up there with David McCullough, Joseph Ellis, and Gordon Wood, and even a casual glance at their work will show you how much they’ve relied upon Ferling’s books in their own. Ferling wrote a biography of John Adams (University of Tennessee Press, 1992) nearly ten years before McCullough, and it’s every bit as worthy of the accolades that the latter received for his work, even if it didn’t inspire an HBO miniseries. Ferling’s literary output since 2000 is amazing: seven books in the last thirteen years, each an original and thought-provoking work on the founders and the founding era (and all except the last few written while he was teaching at the University of West Georgia). Chock full of graceful prose and penetrating analysis, they’re all worth reading, as is his biography of Washington, published in 1988.

There are many good comprehensive histories of the Revolution, but the best place to start, in my opinion, is two volumes by John Ferling. A Leap in the Dark: The Struggle to Create the American Republic (Oxford, 2003) is the best political history of the years 1750-1800.  Ferling’s companion volume, Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence (Oxford, 2007) covers the military conflict, and—again, in my opinion—there is no better military history of the war available today. Here’s what I wrote on the flyleaf of the book when I finished it: “A first-rate book, the best one-volume history of the war to this point. Ferling’s best work yet. Probing analysis of leaders, campaigns, and issues on both sides. Its final summary chapter is the best account available of why the British lost and the Americans won, as is his summation of Washington.”

Among his other books is a prosopography (a Ferling-esque word; his books are scattered with words that you’ve never heard of, like persiflage, umbra, and lucubration) of Washington, Adams, and Jefferson (Setting the World Ablaze: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and the American Revolution, Oxford, 2000); a study of the pivotal election of 1800 (Adams v. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, Oxford, 2004); a political history of George Washington (The Ascent of George Washington: The Hidden Political Genius of an American Icon, Bloomsbury, 2009);  and Independence: The Struggle to Set America Free (Bloomsbury, 2011).

How, one might ask, does Ferling keep plowing the same ground and still have something new to say? Part of it is simply attributable to his maturity as a scholar. Unlike others who leap from one time period to another with each book, Ferling has spent his entire professional life laboring in the vineyard of the Founding era. Ferling isn’t just dabbling in this period; he knows it as well as anyone can who is now two centuries removed from the time about which he’s writing. He is well-versed in what the Founders wrote, what they read, what they believed, and what they hoped to achieve. But he’s not awe-struck by them. Simultaneously, his reflections on people and events have deepened with the years, as he himself has aged. As should happen as we grow older, his own insights about human nature reflect his growth as a human being; he’s more empathetic, more forgiving of human foibles and less harsh on their failures, though he isn’t afraid to point them out and to hold men and women accountable for not only what they achieve, but what they fail to achieve.  He knows what it’s like to live life, make mistakes, and have regrets. It’s the primary reason why people in their 20s shouldn’t write biographies.

Alexander Hamilton is one of the great success stories in American history. He was born in the West Indies and grew up in poverty. His father abandoned the family early on and his mother died when he was 13. After coming to America and eventually joining the Continental Army, Hamilton served on Washington’s staff and witnessed and endured first-hand the hardships of war.

His outlook from the beginning was national; having no family, he never left the army on leave, never went home, and after suffering through the winter of 1778 at Valley Forge, he came to believe that the decentralized government created by the Articles of Confederation wasn’t fit for war or peace. How could any government worthy of the name leave the army that was fighting for its country’s independence starving, unpaid,  and in rags? Put quite simply, the national government lacked not talent or leadership, but power. As Ferling puts it, “Fearing an oppressive central government, the states had overreacted [in the Articles of Confederation] and, in Hamilton’s opinion, had created a monster,” a government that was feeble, weak, and unable to pay its bills.

Hamilton proposed a new constitutional convention while he was still in the army in the early 1780s, though it wouldn’t happen till the famous gathering of demi-gods in 1787. Serving in Washington’s army shaped Hamilton’s worldview and his policies for the rest of his life and was the basis for his support of a strong central government and the economic policies that Jefferson despised.

Jefferson never served in the army and though it’s not fair to say he sat out the war, he certainly never experienced the privations and hardships of the soldiers in the Continental Army. His worldview was Virginia, which as Ferling fairly points out, had existed for 150 years when the Revolution began, and Jefferson’s roots there ran deep. It was perhaps only natural that Jefferson’s focus should remain there through most of the conflict, serving in the House of Burgesses and then as Virginia governor during a very difficult period. With the exception of one remarkable year in the Continental Congress when he penned the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson remained in Virginia throughout the war. His contemporaries and fellow Virginians from Richard Henry Lee to Washington himself pleaded with Jefferson to come down off the mountain and get involved in the conflict, but he always begged off, citing his wife’s precarious health or other domestic issues. He left himself wide open for criticism.

When they later became rivals in Washington’s cabinet, Hamilton always viewed Jefferson through the lens of Valley Forge—as did another Jefferson nemesis and Army veteran, John Marshall—and he could never understand how Jefferson could portray himself as the living embodiment of the American Revolution when he had spent that miserable winter and many others during the conflict snugly at home at Monticello.  For his part, Jefferson viewed Hamilton as nothing more than an Anglo-phile immigrant upstart who never really understood the character of the American people and whose policies would enslave small farmers to stock jobbers and the monied elite.

The truth is, Jefferson never favored anything more than a revision of the Articles of Confederation; he was never in favor of a wholesale re-boot that Hamilton et al. pulled off in the Constitutional Convention. While serving in Washington’s cabinet, the two men demonized each other and framed their rival’s opinions as not just wrong but as a threat to the future of the republic itself. Sound familiar?

As Ferling puts it, “Hamilton’s vision was distinctly different from that of Jefferson. The Virginian’s emphasis had been on the preservation and expansion of the individual’s freedom and independence. Hamilton emphasized the well-being and strength of the nation.” Jefferson may not have spent time at Valley Forge, but his tenure in the diplomatic circles of monarchical Europe strengthened his faith in democracy and civil liberties that Hamilton never shared. Conversely, Hamilton trusted the capitalist marketplace and a strong military in a way that  Jefferson loathed. Working out these differences would create the first two political parties, Hamilton’s Federalists and Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans, which institutionalized their personal disagreements. Their political rupture split the country asunder in the 1790s and set America on the course it still follows right up through the latest round of budget negotiations between the two parties in Congress: what is the proper role and scope of the national government of the United States?

There are many good stories here, and Ferling tells them well: Hamilton’s on-and-off relationship with Washington, his affair with Maria Reynolds, and his fall from political grace during the election of 1800. His account of the Jefferson-Hemings story is balanced, and he presents the evidence (and its problems) about as fairly as one could wish.

Hamilton was of course killed in a duel by Aaron Burr during his rival Jefferson’s first presidential administration. By that time, with Jefferson and the Republicans in the ascendant, Hamilton was convinced that his political career was over and that all of his dreams for a strong central government that would preside over a thriving business community lay in ruins. Jefferson’s Arcadian vision had seemingly won the day and the hearts of the American people. If he had only known. We may still revere Jefferson’s championing of civil liberties and the freedom of the common man, but we live in Hamilton’s America, an economic and military colossus that sits astride the world.

During the recent debate over raising the debt ceiling, economists forecast that an American default would be catastrophic for the world’s economy. I think Hamilton would have been pleased that the American economic engine has become that powerful. And I think he’d still be fuming at small-government proponents who, as he said in describing Jefferson, would reduce the national government to “the skeleton of power” and bring on “national disunion, national insignificance, public disorder and discredit.” Humbug, Jefferson might reply.

Does it comfort us to realize that the problems that confound us as a country—national debt, the size and role of government, our commitment to democracy and civil liberties, and the promise and limits of market capitalism–baffled some of the best minds in American history? It suggests that we’ll never figure this out, that we can’t really ever lay these eternal arguments to rest. But it also reinforces the point that the American republic is an ongoing experiment in self-government. The founders didn’t give us a finished product, they gave us a framework, and each generation adds another layer. As we argue over gay marriage, debate immigration and the country’s changing demography, or spar over whether corporations have the same rights as individuals, we’re reminded daily that the rivalry that forged a nation—and the heartbeats of these two founding icons—still echoes after more than two centuries.  As Abraham Lincoln said, our habit of argument is a mark of our liberty. A healthy and functioning democracy shouldn’t have it any other way.