Kenneth D. AckermanReseñas

Памятный всем россиянам год не обойден и мировым вниманием. Подтверждение тому — эта книга, знакомящая читателя с малоизвестной страницей биографии ключевого героя событий столетней давности. Как известно, накануне Февральской революции Ленин сидел с Крупской в Швейцарии, а обратно в Петроград был доставлен в «пломбированном» вагоне немцами. Другой лидер грядущих октябрьских событий, Лев Троцкий, начинал год еще дальше — в Нью-Йорке, куда был последовательно изгнан французскими и испанскими властями за подрывные и пацифистские воззвания к солдатам и рабочим. Однако даже за три месяца в США Троцкий сумел оставить наследие, которое предопределило развитие американской политики на все последующие годы.

Америка встретила бунтаря с любопытством и некоторым сочувствием — он приехал с репутацией преследуемого борца за свободу слова, кроме того, американцы знали об антисемитизме в России. В стране функционировала Социалистическая партия, которая постепенно завоевывала себе позиции на политическом олимпе, тесня завсегдатаев — демократов и республиканцев. Ее единство и комфорт Троцкий разрушил, расколов социалистов по вопросу об отношении к готовящемуся вступлению США в Первую мировую. Все 10 недель в Нью-Йорке он положил на то, чтобы радикализировать партию в сторону саботажа правительства. Результатом стали раскол и репрессии со стороны властей. Социалисты Америки так никогда и не оправились от «помощи» Льва Давидовича.

Возвращение героя на родину тоже не было гладким. Англичане опасались, что его аморальная риторика разложит российскую армиию, и потому вся германская мощь обрушится на них; они решили перестраховаться и задержали пароход с Троцким в канадском Галифаксе. Однако и в лагере для интернированных Лев Давидович не сдавался, умудрившись обратить в коммунистическую веру две трети находившихся там пленных немцев, пока их испуганные офицеры не упросили канадцев посадить будущего командующего Красной армией в доменную печь, служившую карцером.

Задействованные связи вызволили Троцкого из Канады, и в мае он добрался до России.

I read this and Candice Millard’s Destiny of the Republic back to back. Both document one of the most dramatic episodes in U. S. history, the unexpected nomination and subsequent assassination of James A. Garfield. Ackerman’s strength is his reportorial skill. He tells the story in largely chronological order, skillfully interweaving the parallel tales of Garfield, the assassin Charles Guiteau, Garfield’s successor Chester A. Arthur, and others. He begins however neither in 1880, the year of the election, nor with any of these three figures, but with an incident more than a dozen years earlier that led to undying enmity between two of the most powerful figures in post-Civil War politics, James G. Blaine and the larger-than-life though today widely forgotten Roscoe Conkling. Like many political feuds, theirs was not based on their political views, which were nearly identical, but sprang from a clash of ambition. They came to Chicago for the 1880 convention locked in a struggle for the nomination, Blaine as candidate, Conkling as manager of convention favorite U. S. Grant, seeking a then-unprecedented third term. Neither would budge, leading to a deadlock and the risk of defeat in November. Ackerman recounts this battle in compelling detail, a style he maintains throughout the book.
One aspect of Ackerman’s account is his take on the two principal characters. He does not say so directly, but his depiction of Garfield’s dealings with Conkling, Blaine, and Levi Morton portray a man of surprising naivete, easily swayed by stronger personalities. It is probable that the titanic battle over political appointments that ended with the shooting of Garfield and the political self-destruction of Conkling would have happened even had Garfield been more circumspect in his conversations, but Ackerman’s depiction left me questioning the political skill of this otherwise most admirable of men. Ackerman is even more revisionist in his assessment of the man who gunned down Garfield. Although described then and since as a disappointed office-seeker, Guiteau’s mental imbalance seemed indubitable. Ackerman doesn’t directly dispute this, but points out that Guiteau had a clear political aim — to make Arthur president — and achieved it, something that can be said of no other presidential assassin. Of course, Arthur went on to confound the expectations not only of Guiteau, but of every other American at the time, by turning his back on Conkling and embracing the cause of Civil Service reform.
A good read.

Arrived Lausanne

The remarkable man from Ohio who beat the favorites and ended up as the Republican candidate and the eventual president. Of course, he has a very short presidency because he is assassinated by a disappointed office seeker early in his presidency. But this is the story of how the favorites such as Grant were turned aside in favor of Garfield.

For me, the Presidency between Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt was a murky parade of difficult-to-distinguish whiskered men. The achievement of this book is to give personality and context not only to presidents like Grant, Hayes, Garfield, and Arthur, but to congressmen and senators such as Roscoe Conkling and James Blaine, who arguably had far more influence over the government during their years of service (or self-service, as the case may be). These people and their political, not to say personal, conflicts come alive as vividly as more contemporary politicians such as Newt Gingrich and John Boehner. It's decently entertaining reading, and I now have a much better understanding of how government worked in the First Gilded Age—the second, of course, being our own.

A popular account of the "Palmer Raids" of 1919 that, while launched to confront supposed revolutionary danger in the United States in the wake of a series of anarchist bombing, were allowed to snow-ball out of control due to institutional pressures for a stronger stand against uncontrolled immigration.

Apart from outlining J. Edgar Hoover's public career in its early days, what I found particularly enlightening about the book is the institutional conflicts that turned what was intended to be a high-profile, but limited operation into an out-of-control steam roller. The key point is that in regards to the proposed deportation of suspect political dissidents the Justice Department did not have jurisdiction; that belonged to the Labor Department. That there were major stresses at Labor over the drive to deport supposed undesirables, regardless of their politics, along with Hoover's single-minded efficiency, created the resulting public-relations disaster. The end result was that Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer took the fall for the scandal to protect Woodrow Wilson's reputation, thus saving the career of a much-chastened Hoover.

In all this panicked security theater, Kenneth Ackerman finds the real hero to be Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis Post, who was willing to take responsibility for dismissing the deportation proceedings against the bulk of those detained and who had the political and bureaucratic skills to make the dismissals stick. Would that a little more enlightened restraint had been deployed sooner in regards to the excesses of the post-9/11 era.½

breezy, light on early biography. Fascinating otherwise.

Admittedly I am a Kenneth Ackerman fan, I find his work on 19th Century America nearly faultless. It is always well researched, documented and compelling and this book is no exception. I had recently finished Grant's biography which, if you have read it, contains little more than a topographical cover of his life and times and looked to this book to get a little more meat on one of the major controversy's of his presidency. This book delivers that and much more. Grant is portrayed as naive at the least and Fisk and Gould (two of the more interesting characters of the period) are fleshed out in full order. The back story of how these two personalities worked the East Coast Financial Markets is still relevant today and the details of their machinations are worthy of a play by Shakespeare. If you are interested in the Gilded Age, the robber barons, financial markets or just human deviousness I highly recommend this book.

In "Young J. Edgar: Hoover, the Red Scare, and the Assault on Civil Liberties," Kenneth Ackerman plays to his strengths. He has served more than 25 years in senior posts on Capitol Hill and in the executive branch, as well as in private practice as a Washington, D.C., attorney, and the result is a chilling account of how the rule of law in a war on terror can be subverted into a war of terror.

Mr. Ackerman traces Hoover's rise from 1917 as a young attorney in the Department of Justice, to his appointment in 1921 as deputy director of the Bureau of Investigation, to his promotion in 1924 as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. A hard worker superb at navigating the federal bureaucracy, Hoover made himself indispensable not long after Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer decided to implement his infamous raids ("the Red Scare") in November 1919.

At first, Mr. Ackerman acknowledges, the raids were "applauded by top officials in government, media, business, academia, and religion, almost across the board." In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, anarchists and communists in this country spoke openly about violently overthrowing the American government. A series of riots and bombings seemed to signal that the Reds were advancing toward their goal.

Palmer, a Woodrow Wilson progressive, had resisted calls for a government crackdown on radicals. But when his own home was bombed and he realized that he and his family had narrowly escaped death, he decided that nothing less than an extermination of the Red threat could secure his government's survival.

Implementation of extralegal procedures seemed essential. Or as Mr. Ackerman puts it:

There is a seductive downward spiral in times of crisis from ‘doing something' to ‘doing what it takes' to ‘doing anything.'

Abetted by Hoover's dogged surveillance of radicals and by his extraordinary record-keeping and filing apparatus, Palmer had plenty of people to round up. Mr. Ackerman provides a persuasive account of Palmer's mindset and why it led to a "civil liberties catastrophe":

Probable cause to get a search warrant or an arrest warrant, providing prisoners a fair trial, including access to a lawyer … these rules can seem arcane and counterproductive when they occasionally get in the way, stopping police from preventing a crime, helping a guilty person go free, or interfering in the tracking of a possible terrorist. But they serve an essential purpose: they force the government to get its facts straight before it deprives any person — citizen or immigrant — of his or her freedoms, locks them up, deports them, seizes their property, or invades their privacy.

On January 2, 1920, Hoover sent federal marshals to arrest 2,700 suspected communists in 33 cities A later raid rounded up another 3,000. Many of the arrested were union leaders and immigrants and their crime was, at worst "guilt by association," as Mr. Ackerman notes.

Not only did Hoover continue to feed Palmer's enthusiasm for the raids, he lied about his part in this despicable episode. Later he would use many of the same illegal methods to pursue suspects throughout his five decades as FBI director. Mr. Ackerman calls the attorney general's reliance on the 24-year-old Hoover Palmer's biggest single mistake. "Despite his clear genius for organization," he writes, "Edgar lacked the other essential qualification for the job, the life experience and human context to appreciate the responsibility that came with power."

As hard as Mr. Ackerman is on Hoover, he does not demonize him. The biographer's own "life experience" and knowledge of power tell him that men like Hoover result from how their superiors deport themselves. Thus Mr. Ackerman excoriates Woodrow Wilson's "loyalists" for creating the myth that the president "had nothing to do with" supporting the Palmer raids. If so, Mr. Ackerman insists, "it was only because he [Wilson] kept himself ignorant, not because Mitchell Palmer refused to tell him."

Mr. Ackerman finds Hoover's immediate superiors even more culpable: "There were at least five people in the Justice Department who outranked Edgar at the time. … But none of them objected. Instead, they let Edgar call the tune from below" — a point that attorney Jackson Ralston made clear testifying before Congress in 1921, when the public and Congress turned against Palmer's violation of the Constitution.

That Mr. Ackerman has a moral with an urgent contemporary ring is apparent in his conclusion: "To the extent that our modern war on terror is paralleling the attitudes of the 1919-1920 Red Scare, we have to wonder: How many young J. Edgar Hoovers are we creating today?"

The Gilded Age was a fascinating time: business tycoons in the East, cowboys and outlaws in the West, a booming country when a man born in a log cabin could become President of the United States. James Garfield was one of these - from rough poverty, Garfield became a highly educated man who eventually became a Major General in the Union Army and elected Congressional Representative from Ohio. During his time in Congress, James Blaine and Roscoe Conkling had a falling out over political maneuvering. Now, this normally wouldn't be anything of lasting consequence, but Blaine and Conkling were political bosses of Maine and New York, respectively, and both had egos bigger than the United States. This feud eventually became a split within the Republican party into the Stalwart faction who answered to Conkling and their opponents, the Half-Breeds, led by Blaine.

Fast forward to the 1880 election: the leading candidate was Ulysses Grant, trying for a third term and supported by Conkling and the Stalwarts. The main opposition was Blaine, with John Sherman a distant third and supported by Garfield. Through some incredible political maneuvering, the well-regarded Garfield became the Republican candidate, eventually winning the election.

Ackerman's The Dark Horse: the Surprise Election and Political Murder of James A. Garfield is, not surprisingly, about the election of 1880, the short presidency of Garfield, and how that led to Garfield's shooting and ultimate death. What's great about the book is that it's also about the Blaine/Conkling feud and how it rippled into everything associated with the choosing of candidate Garfield, the course of the election, and the completely dysfunctional relationship between Garfield and the Senate. It's about the patronage system and power, and about how the system enabled Conkling and those like him to control the political life of our country. It's about how Garfield finally stood up to Conkling and how Conkling's ego brought about his own downfall. And it's about how the split led a disturbed, wannabe-Stalwart to shoot Garfield to make room for Chester Arthur, a close friend of Conkling to take over as President following Garfield's death.

The Dark Horse is a great book about an interesting, and not very well known President. Highly recommended!

Once again I’m filling my unquenchable thirst for New York City history. This is an excellent biography of the blatantly corrupt William M. Tweed written in a way that sometimes makes me feel sympathetic for the man. Like many corrupt politicians he seems to also achieve great and monumental public works as well as benefiting the poor, while of course benefiting themselves as well. The book doesn’t cover much of Tweed’s early life and public life but jumps right into how the Tweed Ring was brought down, followed by Tweed’s trials, imprisonment, life on the lam, confessions and eventual death. A lot of detail is given to those who brought him down, The New York Times, cartoonist Thomas Nast, and lawyer Samuel Tilden.

The story of Boss Tweed, one of the greatest political swindlers of all time, and how the New York Times and a cartoonist named Thomas Nast brought him down makes for a real page-turner of a book, which is illustrated with many of Nast's cartoons and excepts from the Times (including the table showing the routing of money through various bank accounts--discovered through painstaking researxch and tracing of money and vouchers across many accounts and ledgers--which was the astounding smoking gun that finally did Tweed in) giving the reader a real feel for the story. Fascinating to see the man in all his complexity, he may have swindled millions from the New York coffers (at a time when you could live in comfortable affluence on around $5,000 a year) but he was also responsible for a great many public works, including the Brooklyn Bridge, and for helping the poor of his city. Those in power over his arrest and confinement don't acquit themselves with honours either making Tweed's tale even more morally complex, especially as none of his co-conspiritors were ever jailed. An interesting man living in interesting times.

As a lover of all things NYC, this book was required reading for me. I was absolutely enthralled at the re-telling of the history. The treatments I got in public education left Boss Tweed as a one dimensional charicature. This book fills out his personality, placing him in historical context as perfecter of political graft, not the innovator. However, I found myself craving more detail and perhaps more analysis into the psyche of the Boss and his Ring. The mists of history, and the necessity of silence in criminal endeavor, leaves us longing for more quotes, more explanation for the outrageousness of their behavior. I wanted to know why they believed they could get away with this excess, but felt at a loss to really grasp the man's soul. Every aspiring politician and leader should read this book for insights into the capabilities of others and your self.½

I learned a great deal from this well-written book, which covers but a few months in the life of a little-known President.

There are a few typos in the text. The index is incomplete, which is troublesome.

Boring!