An expert addition to the boundless literature surrounding Washington and the founding era.
The first president’s role in creating his eponymous city.
Historian Watson reminds readers that the Constitution granted Congress the power to create a national capital. However, from the first meeting in 1789, controversy over the location was fierce. Washington, writes the author, “grumbled” that it was causing “ ‘more bitterness, more sectional divisiveness and more commentary by participants’ than any other issue, including slavery.” Watson joins fellow historians in praising the “Compromise of 1790,” which broke the logjam. With Washington’s approval, Alexander Hamilton sought a federal government that could assume the states’ war debts and establish a national bank. Thomas Jefferson and the anti-Federalists hated the ideas. In exchange for dropping their opposition, Hamilton agreed to use his influence for a Potomac capital. The author ably describes the tumultuous process that followed, a tale that will be familiar to readers well versed in other grand projects like the Panama Canal or Transcontinental Railroad. Historians extol the design of Washington’s chosen architect, Pierre L’Enfant, but he was so obnoxious that everyone approved his dismissal after a year. The Founding Fathers, brilliant in so many ways, agreed that taxes were unnecessary and that selling lots in the new city would pay for everything. The result was two decades of pleas for loans, unpaid bills, and construction delays. Working conditions were brutal, and America possessed few skilled craftsmen, so builders imported workers from Europe and eventually used a great deal of slave labor (“cruelly inevitable”). By the time John Adams took up residence in November 1800, the White House roof was partially completed. Furthermore, “only a third of the nearby Capitol was nearing completion, temporary shanty homes dotted the landscape, and construction equipment littered the grounds of the unfinished buildings.” Matters improved, but it took another decade. Washington’s final battle turned out to be unexpectedly difficult, and Watson makes a strong argument that only his astute leadership assured victory.
An expert addition to the boundless literature surrounding Washington and the founding era.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-62616-784-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Georgetown Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2021
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
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
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