While we all know George Washington as our first president and leader of American forces in the Revolutionary War, in The Return of George Washington: 1783-1789, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Edward J. Larson illuminates another key role he played: leading the Constitutional Convention.

It was, it turns out, a charge Washington took on reluctantly. After securing victory in the Revolutionary War after nine years of dedicated leadership, the towering 51-year-old general announced his retirement on December 23, 1783. But a private life was not to be his. Less than four years later, with health problems a continuing concern, Washington faced a dilemma: Should he attend the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia?

As Larson tells us, the future president realized that, “For his own sake and the sake of the country, he should not go unless the convention was likely to succeed, and yet it was not likely to succeed unless he went.”

And so it was. The delegates elected Washington president of the convention to lead them through the morass any rebelling society faces: It is one thing to achieve military victory, quite another to design a functioning government. In America’s case, there was also the need to balance the interests of the central government with the concerns of powerful, independent-minded states.

Larson brings readers into innards of the Constitutional Convention: the formation of committees to tackle issues such as presidential selection and executive power, debates on the power to tax and the length of the president’s term and the crafting of language to meet the desires of both nationalists and their opponents. There was even a “Committee of Style and Arrangement” charged with giving the draft document a “last polish.” And, of course, in the end, Washington accepted the mantle of leadership.

As elections role around once more, Larson’s impeccable research and impressive storytelling acumen may be just the thing readers need to restore appreciation for the system of government we inherited, and still strive to perfect. 

This article was originally published in the November 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In mid-19th-century America, newspapers were the primary sources of information and opinion. Most newspaper publishers and editors were closely aligned with politicians and, with few exceptions, opinions were emphasized more than news and loyalty to political parties more than the public interest. It was a time of significant change for the newspaper industry with technological innovations such as steam-driven printing presses and, most importantly, the telegraph, making delivery of the news much faster.

In his engrossing and enlightening new book, Lincoln and the Power of the Press, pre-eminent Lincoln authority Harold Holzer explores the complex relationships that influenced the political journalism of the era. He focuses on two of the most widely covered politicians, Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, and the chief journalistic personalities of the day, all from New York City: Horace Greeley of the Tribune, James Gordon Bennett of the Herald and Henry Raymond of the Times. Greeley and Raymond had, like Lincoln, been Whigs who became Republicans. Bennett was deeply conservative and almost always supported the Democrats. Each had strong views and used his paper to influence policy in many areas.

From very early in his life Lincoln devoured newspapers, and they were instrumental in both his rise to the presidency and his leadership while he was president. In his first signed newspaper article in March, 1832, he proposed himself as a candidate for the Illinois legislature. His first major address outside of the legislature was a call for reason in the face of extremist passion, and it was printed in full in a local paper. Lincoln even became co-owner of a Springfield German-language newspaper even though he did not speak that language. He believed that “Public sentiment is everything,” and Holzer shows how he became a master, especially as president, of his rarely acknowledged effort to control the press.

The most important pre-presidential newspaper help for Lincoln came in 1858 when he was the little-known challenger against the well-known incumbent Douglas for an Illinois Senate seat. The Chicago Press and Tribune proposed that the candidates engage in a series of statewide debates. Contrary to the debates’ historical reputation, neither candidate was at his best. And there were problems with the stenographers. They sat behind the candidates and could not always hear clearly what the debaters said, plus they had political loyalties of their own. Holzer demonstrates that the debates achieved their exalted place in history, not because of what the debaters said, but because of what the press made of their words in reprints, summaries and commentaries.

As an ambitious politician, Lincoln spent much time cultivating journalists at their offices throughout Illinois. He continued doing this as president although he never held a formal news conference and except for an 1862 White House visit by Nathaniel Hawthorne, did not grant any major interviews to journalists. He also found a way to reach the public and reduce the influence of newspaper editors by writing what appeared to be personal letters, and then strategically releasing the text of those letters to the press to reach far wider audiences.

The author vividly captures the lives of the colorful “big three” editors and other members of the press as they invented, for better or worse, modern journalism during the most divisive period in our country’s history. As the “first draft of history” was being written, we learn about the raw politics and undisguised philosophies that not only informed, but also divided, readers on issues such as slavery and the Civil War.

Holzer’s book is a fascinating, detailed and very readable look at a crucial aspect of Lincoln’s leadership and political genius. It deserves a wide readership.

At the time Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, he did not have a definite plan for dealing with the postwar South. Although 360,000 Union troops had died during the Civil War, the North had not suffered the widespread devastation of the Southern states. The nine million white citizens and four million former slaves who lived in the former Confederacy faced a grim future.

Six weeks after he assumed the presidency, Andrew Johnson revealed his vision for uniting the country. He declared a sweeping amnesty that restored all property, except slaves, to most rebels as long as they swore to “support, protect, and defend” the Constitution and the Union. To Radical Republican leaders such as Senator Charles Sumner and Representative Thaddeus Stevens, it seemed white residents of the South were treated with remarkable leniency.

In his magnificent After Lincoln: How the North Won the Civil War and Lost the Peace, A.J. Langguth takes us through the Reconstruction period and its many heroic and tragic events. Among the latter were the so-called Black Codes, stringent state laws passed after Johnson became president. They ranged from a South Carolina law requiring any black man who wanted work other than as a servant or farmer to apply for a license from a judge and pay an annual tax, to Kentucky, where all contracts had to be approved by a white citizen, to Florida where “impudence,” a form of vagrancy, could cause the violator to be whipped. Lynchings and the killing of innocent black citizens went unpunished.

For all practical purposes, Reconstruction ended in 1887 when Republican President Rutherford Hayes joined with Democrats in a deal that led to the removal of federal troops from Louisiana and South Carolina. That arrangement brought to an end any hopes that African Americans would enjoy full equality as U.S. citizens.

Langguth skillfully illuminates the roles of key figures and offers enlightening commentary on events. After Lincoln is an excellent choice for readers who want to understand why the post-Civil War period was a major disappointment and why the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not come until 99 years after the end of the Civil War.

This article was originally published in the September 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The 1970s were a tumultuous time in the U.S, defined by such events as the Vietnam War; the Watergate scandal; the Arab oil boycott; serious economic problems; and shocking revelations about illegal activities by our intelligence agencies. At one point, a Gallup poll found that 68 percent of Americans believed the government lied to them. All of this happened as the nation, somewhat dispirited, celebrated its bicentennial. Drawing on a vast array of sources, Rick Perlstein captures all of this and more in his sweeping, insightful and richly rewarding The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan. His riveting narrative continues the author’s efforts to chronicle the ascendancy of conservatism in American political life (following the acclaimed Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus and Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America).

At the heart of Perlstein’s book is the question of what kind of nation we want to be. The turbulence of the 1960s and ’70s had given Americans an opportunity to reflect on our power and what some considered our arrogance. Many reasoned we should become more humble, question authority and have a greater sense of limits. Politicians, labeled “Watergate babies,” were elected to Congress, pledged to reform the country’s broken institutions. But that approach did not prevail. Among major political figures, only Ronald Reagan took a different path. He rarely discussed Watergate and Vietnam and, when he did, he downplayed their place in history. He described Watergate as a “witch hunt” and “lynching” and said the conspirators were “no worse than double parkers.” On Vietnam, his view was that America had not expended enough force; “the greatest immorality is to ask young men to fight or die for my country if it’s not a cause we are willing to win.” Instead, Reagan and others continued to emphasize that the U.S. was “the greatest nation in the history of the world.” The Invisible Bridge examines how such rhetoric came into being and how such hubris has come to define us.

The most important political expression of this belief was Reagan’s announcement that he would challenge Gerald Ford, the sitting president of his own party, for the presidential nomination in 1976. Reagan and Ford believed many of the same things, but they had very different styles. Every major distinction between the two had to do with the kind of nation America was. Ford liked the idea of national modesty; Reagan felt that the world’s rules didn’t necessarily apply to America

At more than 800 pages, Perlstein’s book is a work of prodigious research. He appears to have read virtually all of the available contemporary accounts of political life in the ‘70s and watched many of the era’s television news programs. He is also keenly aware of social currents and popular culture in the decade as well. The Invisible Bridge delves into the lives of colorful personalities and discusses significant events that influenced the political landscape at the time but are almost forgotten today.  This is a fascinating, extremely readable account of an important decade in America’s political history.

This article was originally published in the August 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.