Gelderman (English/Univ. of New Orleans) departs from her usual genre of biography (Henry Ford, 1980; Mary McCarthy, 1988) in this thesis-driven history of speechwriting in the White House. The first half of her thesis—that presidents until Richard Nixon utilized a cadre of policymakers to double as speechwriters, thus uniting speechwriting with policy—is strong. Gelderman shows that, with varying degrees of effectiveness, presidents created policy through the speechwriting process itself, often taking months to draft their most famous words. The process was collegial, as with Eisenhower's ``Wheaties'' group, which drafted policy over breakfast every day. But with Nixon, media image, not substance, became the goal of the presidency. Nixon crafted his controversial speeches in isolation and kept key policy advisors in the dark. Gelderman's argument deteriorates in its post-Nixon passages. She identifies Nixon's heir as Ronald Reagan, which seems an odd choice, given Nixon's reputation as a workaholic who alienated his colleagues and Reagan's as a 9-to-5er who was content to let his aides do the work. The common ground, according to Gelderman, is the ``virtual presidency'': that is, the central importance to both leaders of image-crafting and the power of television. Gelderman claims that the reliance on TV has divorced policy from speechwriting and reduced the latter to the art of crafting attractive soundbites. But to prove this, she relies almost exclusively on foreign-policy issues, with little attention to domestic programs. She also shortchanges the Ford, Carter, and Bush administrations; Carter felt dishonest using speechwriters and wrote complex speeches. The author ultimately argues that Clinton is returning to the old marriage of speechwriting and policy (though here she bases her argument almost entirely on domestic issues, such as his masterful handling of the tragedy in Oklahoma City). An unfocused and unconvincing ending after a promising start.
Pub Date: March 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8027-1318-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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