August 2004
James K. Polk by John Seigenthaler
John Seigenthaler, former publisher of The Tennessean and founding editorial editor of USA Today, has written a poignant perspective on the life and presidency of James K. Polk.
According to Seigenthaler, “James Knox Polk surely is history’s most underappreciated president. Few Americans have any awareness that in four years he engineered the annexation of Texas, bluffed the British out of Oregon, waged war with Mexico to take California and New Mexico, enlarged the country’s land mass by a third, and made the United States a continental nation.”
Polk went into the Democratic National Convention in 1844 with three strikes against him. He had not been able to deliver Tennessee for the Democrats in 1840, he had lost two bids to be Tennessee governor, and he had come out in favor of annexation of Texas — a move opposed by both Van Buren, the Democrat’s leading candidate, and Whigs’ candidate, Henry Clay. When public sentiment swelled in favor of annexation, Polk rode it all the way to the nomination and eventually the White House.
Seigenthaler’s work is particularly timely to read in the midst of the 2004 presidential campaigns. We found ourselves continually drawing comparisons — how much has changed in the world of politics but also how much is still the same.
April 2003
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert A. Caro
Master of the Senate, winner of the 2002 National Book Award in Non-Fiction, is a long, but hard-to-put-down, account of the period starting with Lyndon Johnson’s arrival in the Senate as a junior senator in 1949 until his election as JFK’s vice president in 1960.
The third in a projected four-volume biographical series on Johnson by Caro, Master of the Senate is as much about the U.S. Senate as it is about Johnson himself. At the heart of the book is the unprecedented revelation of how legislative power works in America and how Johnson mastered the Senate as no political leader before him had ever done.
Caro dissects how Johnson became the Majority Leader after only a single term; how he manipulated the Senate’s hallowed rules and customs; and played on the strengths and weaknesses of his colleagues to change the “unchangeable.” Much time is devoted to the milestone of Johnson’s Senate years: his amazing triumph in single-handedly maneuvering the passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the first since reconstruction.
P.S. You may want to save this one for a long international flight or a week at the beach. It’s 1,152 pages, but reviewers claim it’s a story that needs a thousand pages to describe how a political phenomenon horsewhipped the Senate and drove much of the dramatic history that predestined his presidency.
