A Long-Lost Love

Today's film: Finding Vivian Maier.

Car buffs dream of that once-in-a-lifetime discovery of the vintage '55 Porsche 550 Spyder or Mercedes 300 Gull Wing sitting dusty and forgotten in the back corner of some barn in Iowa, a miracle of automotive history covered in bird shit but otherwise pristine. Art buffs must have a similar dream of discovering the forgotten work of an indisputable master hanging forgotten in some dude's basement, or I think of Bach's Neumeister chorale preludes being found tucked in some book in the Yale library in 1984. Something of undeniable value and preciousness hidden in plain sight for decades.

Vivian Maier is that same kind of story in human form. Born in 1926 in New York City, she lived a quiet life almost entirely off the radar, eking out a career as a nanny in a succession of households around the country. But her real passion was photography, and she chose the profession of nannying in part because it let her spend her days wandering the streets taking photographs. Though she was of course known to the families with whom she worked, she was otherwise a bit of a recluse, and she made little or no effort to display her photographs to anyone, collecting more and more negatives and films around her to no end, moving an ever-larger collection of boxes with her from place to place.

She died in Chicago in 2009. A couple years prior to that, one of her unpaid storage units was emptied out and the contents, including a number of boxes of negatives, were put up for auction. A young man, John Maloof, purchased one of the boxes for some $300. When he got them home and began to look through them, he realized he was looking at a gold mine. He tracked down the other winning bidders of that auction and purchased their boxes of negatives from them. Maier was still alive at this point, but she died about the same time he decided to figure out who this unknown artist was. By the end of his search he had accumulated some 100,000 negatives and hundreds of rolls of undeveloped film, plus a whole storage unit worth of junk she had squirreled away. There was a lot of chaff, but it was undeniably a treasure trove.

The film Finding Vivian Maier, co-directed by Maloof and Charlie Siskel, is Maloof's attempt to put Maier's work before a wider public. It consists of Maloof himself telling his story (which includes a trip to France to interview people who knew her there) plus interviews with a number of people who were nannied by her over the decades. She seems to have had few if any friends and no acquaintances apart from the children with whom she worked. All of this is interspersed with her glorious photographs, mostly of street life in NYC and other places, and with the (to me) considerably less-compelling movie footage she shot and her cassette recordings of herself just... chattering.

I realize that a film needs to be something more than just a 90-minute slideshow of her photographic work, but Maloof tries mightily to find out what made Maier tick and in the process delves maybe more deeply into her mysterious personal life than is really necessary. She appears not to have been an entirely normal person, and her abnormality (if that's the right word) is compelling in a quiet, voyeuristic sort of way--she was stubbornly single and had a hot-and-cold temperament and was a packrat; as she got older she seemed to be more and more in the grip of paranoia. And loneliness. But I can't help thinking that none of these things really contributed much to what made her extraordinary. In any case, the film is certainly more intrusive than she herself would have welcomed or approved of. It's an open question about what she would think of her work finding a large audience, but there seems little doubt that she would hate the attention directed at her person.

Having said that, the borderline-obsessiveness with which she documented everything around her, and the cheeky boldness required to get many of the portraits she captures make her an appealing enigma (which is no doubt why Maloof focuses on it; he's trying to sell someone whose body of work needs to be recognized). I have long loved photography myself, and in my line of work I find that I snap photos kind of unconsciously. But--at the risk of comparing my brain-dead dabbling with the work of a great artist--I can't help feeling rather painfully the huge gulf between her photos and mine. So far as we know, she was entirely self-taught, yet the brilliance of her eye practically jumps off the page and grabs you by the lapels. The photos are just breathtaking, collectively as fabulous as any I've seen by any other photographer. (Susan is always ribbing me about how beautifully I scrub my own photos of any people; Maier, I can't help seeing, has a human subject in just about every photo she took, including a large number of quirky self-portraits.)

A sampling of the photos can be seen here.

Recommended, both for photography buffs (OK, especially for them) and history lovers alike.

Grade: A.

The Meltdown

My obsession of late has been nuclear disasters. I've been sucked into hours of surfing, mostly about the April, 1986 meltdown at Chernobyl in the Ukraine, and then on to last year's multiple meltdown in Japan at Fukushima. I was going to say that Chernobyl is our worst nuclear disaster, but as I read I see the jury is still very much out about just how bad Fukushima will end up being. The extent of damage to the power plant is certainly much greater in Japan and that crisis is ongoing (well, for that matter, the situation in Chernobyl is not stabile either).

(Right after the 1986 disaster. I wonder if the helicopter pilot knew how dangerous this proximity was.)

But I began with the Soviet Union. There's a semi-skeevy website I've followed off and on for several years called English Russia, and they've given a fair bit of coverage to the abandoned site of the power plant and the nearby ghost towns of Pripyat and Chernobyl, which were evacuated almost immediately after the disaster and are now inside an "exclusion zone" where people are prohibited. From the starting point of being a sucker for the old and abandoned, I find the pictures of what has become of these towns really magnetic; and an exploration of the ghost world of present-day Chernobyl leads one inexorably back to the events that made it so.

(Even looking around the satellite photos from Google is eerie. A fully-functional city abandoned abruptly and now being reclaimed by nature.)

(Part of an amusement park at Pripyat. It had not yet opened when the disaster struck.)

An examination of those events immerses us in a dense, technical world that is utterly foreign and incredibly menacing. And really fascinating in a ghastly sort of way. The accident in Chernobyl occurred in the early morning hours of April 26, 1986 when engineers were attempting to run a kind of stress test of equipment on Chernobyl's Reactor #4. The test was not properly conducted, nor were all the numerous prerequisite safety procedures followed, and the test went wrong--almost unimaginably wrong. The detailed descriptions of the accident are mesmerizing, and are covered extensively at the Wikipedia page linked above. I know little about nuclear power, but I have to note in passing the similarity between this disaster and many airline accidents in that there was a whole series of mistakes and shortcuts and breaches of protocol that led to this very unlikely outcome. An airplane accident is almost never caused by a single thing, but rather by a series of breaks in the chain of safety. And so it was here.

That is itself something to contemplate--all the near-misses that might have averted such a monumental catastrophe. But it's the consequences that stay with one, the vastness and permanence of the aftermath and the really shocking toxicity that results from things going bad in the realm of nuclear fission. After a series of explosions and fires that pretty much destroyed the structure around reactor #4, the fuel in the reactor core overheated, causing a meltdown: the entire reactor core melted into an oozing, lava-like blob of almost unimaginable malignancy, eating through the concrete and steel floor of the reactor and oozing into the containment structure beneath (Jebus help us if it were to eat through THAT floor and enter the groundwater--a situation which Fukushima might be facing).

And that's where it now sits--a many-ton blob of pure, agonizing, flesh-melting death nicknamed "the elephant's foot" because of its size and color--though of course no person has laid eyes on it. It is so toxic that it can only be viewed with robotic cameras. The elephant's foot is emitting about 10,000 roentgen per hour--500 or so is a lethal dose for a human; so to be in its presence would cause certain and rapid death (as I understand it, people are only allowed to be in the huge reactor building itself--still quite a distance from the elephant's foot proper--for a maximum of two minutes. This at least partly explains why there have been somewhere between 600,000 and a million workers needed to stabilize the situation at Chernobyl; nobody can give more than a few minutes of their time before their eligibility expires).

The elephant's foot is of course the big central source of radiation at the site, but the explosions from April of 1986 spread nuclear fallout throughout a vast area covering parts of several countries. The intensity of the radioactivity gradually recedes with distance from the accident site. The worst of it--the exclusion zone--is an irregularly-shaped, cordoned-off area extending some 19 miles in every direction from the power plant within which human habitation is not allowed. People are allowed to visit the site only with permission and under supervision. Many places inside the zone are still dangerously radioactive, and they will remain so for hundreds or thousands of years to come. One of the websites I read said the reactor site itself would not be habitable for humans (without some as-yet nonexistent intervention) for some 20,000 years. Looking at the satellite photos, it's a mental challenge to envision a single point of such virulent toxicity that people are not allowed to spend any substantial amount of time within 20 miles of it.  20 miles! But concentrations of contaminated particles of much, much less toxicity than the elephant's foot are still enough to render large areas uninhabitable (as the map below shows).

(The various exclusion zones around Chernobyl.)

What to do with this? The destroyed reactor was hastily (and with great difficulty) encased in a metal structure nicknamed "the sarcophagus" designed to basically contain the spread of highly radioactive dust and debris from wind or water or further structural collapse. But because no one could be near the reactor for very long, the structure had to be hastily made and is neither structurally sound nor stable. Though it has served its very temporary purpose, now the sarcophagus itself is in jeopardy and plans are afoot for a more permanent encasement (the uncontrolled collapse of the building would, it is feared, cause another release of toxic matter into the surrounding area). But even then we're talking only about, say, hundred-year solutions. 20,000 years is way beyond us. You might encase the elephant's foot in concrete, if you could do it, and that would buy us what? At best 1000 years, maybe? 19,000 to go.

I daresay for most of us this is unfathomable territory, like contemplating astronomical numbers. There really is no other disaster like this in human history, one that essentially renders a section of the planet inhospitable for many times the length of recorded history. Death is death, true, but no fire, no plague, no oil spill, no chemical spill, not even the explosion of an atomic bomb; nothing in our history has this kind of deadly staying power, a fact which adds a tremendous burden of consequence to anything having to do with atomic power.

The invisible and mysterious nature of radiation only adds to the sense of awe and dread. There is a field some miles from the site of the power plant (though still inside the exclusion zone) called Rossokha where some of the vehicles and equipment used to combat the disaster are quarantined (zoom into this location here): some 1,300 cars and trucks and loaders, even large military helicopters (many other vehicles are scattered elsewhere or buried, as are the hundreds of thousands of used radiation suits and facemasks and other human equipment). It's hard for me to grasp a steel truck being contaminated--a lethal, toxic contamination!--such that a good wash job would not take care of it. I've read elsewhere that even the quarantine of these vehicles was deemed inadequate and since the satellite photos were taken many of the vehicles have been moved and buried for safety. Again, this is a toxicity that I have trouble wrapping my head around.

The subject of nuclear power is another one of those topics where I suspect many people already have well-informed and firmly-held opinions, but I find myself unable to commit too firmly to either advocacy or condemnation. The monumental nature of the evil released in the Chernobyl accident raises very legitimate questions about whether any benefit of nuclear power can possibly justify the risk of such a disaster; and it raises questions about how well we understand these risks and how informed we are as a people about the risks for which we are on the hook.

I find myself thinking about the environmental fallout of every alternative form of energy, and I wonder if it isn't largely a question of how concentrated the penalties are. The consequences of our use of fossil fuel are concentrated in some places in the form of respiratory disease and acid rain and oil spills, but mostly we're feeling the effects globally as the entire planet warms, putting whole ecosystems in jeopardy and perhaps, down the road, life itself. I remind myself that while the spent nuclear fuel is itself a nasty material, the problems of Chernobyl are the result of otherwise-controlled activities going wrong. Nuclear power when everything goes as planned is clean (though its leavings are a problem to be coped with). But we must grapple with an astounding malignancy if things get out of hand--and we must evidently do a better job of designing our circumstances to prevent things from getting out of hand, even in extremis.

Fukushima puts all this front and center. While Chernobyl is a relatively remote place (and the power plant was very wisely put there intentionally instead of near Kiev, which is the primary user of the plant's output) Japan is a densely-populated island nation, and a country prone to earthquakes and tsunamis. They appear to be grappling with a triple-meltdown, and if the same kind of monstrously-toxic materials as we find in Chernobyl--strike that, three times the material--should make its way into the environment, the consequences may be such as to make the tale of Chernobyl seem like a nursery rhyme.

Stay tuned.

***

For those interested, one can get quickly sucked into an almost endless chain of links on Wikipedia about this and related matters. Though I've long been interested in science and in a layman's version of physics, I grasp that physics without the maths is pretty much not physics. And that applies here, I'm sure. But the physics and chemistry involved with controlled nuclear fission seem like very heady and amazing stuff. For all those who believe that science is just religion by another name, it's worth noting that nuclear physics is a branch of pure science which is proven daily in very practical ways. There's no bullshitting your way through nuclear science, and the fact that we understand it and can build and (mostly) control it is a magnificent testament to human capacity and ingenuity. This is not intended as an argument in favor of nuclear power; I only mean to say that reading the descriptions of what it is and how it works and what we had to do to figure it out places scientists in a pretty rarified stratum. We need only to step to the wrong side of the line--which unfortunately we've done many times, and as a routine part of learning how the world works--to have demonstrated to us that "truth" is not a fuzzy concept. In the world of nuclear physics, things are right and wrong and the difference between them may be life and death.

The Great Curio

Just finished with Ron Chernow's Pulitzer-Prize-Winning biography, George Washington, A Life.

I've managed to make it almost to my 50th year without reading much about Washington.  Accordingly, I found going in that my sense of Washington is comprised of a vague bundle of half-baked ideas and mythical associations: that he "cannot tell a lie," that he was upright, that he was a great military leader. Even in life it seems there was a god-like aura surrounding Washington, and it hampered people forming a very down-to-earth sense of the man. The first biographies after his death were almost comically unrealistic.

Chernow starts with a clean slate and aims at a full-color portrait of Washington, tossing aside the mythology and assembling a fresh picture of Washington from original sources. Luckily for history, there are many contemporary accounts of him, and with so much repetition these views slot into our minds almost as our own--we almost come to think we know him. And while our cliched views have grown out of kernels of truth, the reality of the man was of course more human and flawed, more nuanced.

Part of Washington's legend involves his status as a great military general, so it's surprising to find that his skills were more political--think diplomacy and constancy--than military (to the extent that I can judge such things). While no one, it seems, failed to note his regal, almost royal, bearing, and his stoicism and unpretentiousness, it turns out there was plenty of dispute about his suitability for the country's highest military command. Though he had fought in the French and Indian War, when he was appointed to lead the Continental Army he was not widely experienced in running a large army. Many men felt themselves better qualified than he, and they may have had a point. The dominant characteristics from the many accounts of his character give a picture of charm and ease of manner and dignity without pretense or self-aggrandizement. And many people comment on his tendency to listen intensely but talk little. These things were very useful political skills. But on the field of battle he made as many blunders as triumphs, and his talent in what turned out to be largely a war of attrition was more in assembling and holding together an army from such meager raw materials as in how he used that army. In the circumstances this was an extremely valuable talent: greater military skill could have availed him little if there was no army to muster, and that was the very real threat facing him for much of the duration. Even with his great administrational talents, his army teetered many times on the brink of chaotic dissolution throughout the war.

This was another bit of news to me. I hadn't realized how difficult the conditions were under which the newly-formed army toiled. It's common that soldiers in antiquity died much more from disease than from battle wounds, but conditions for the Continental Army were appalling. They existed for the whole of the war with hardly any resources; their pay was always in arrears (often extraordinarily so); the ability to feed the men was often doubtful on a day-to-day basis; there were not enough weapons and a constant shortage of ammunition; the army had no uniforms and men were typically half-naked and / or dressed in rags and typically shoeless--even in the depths of winter. Many soldiers lived in camp for whole winters without a tent or even a blanket. Washington complained about these things vocally and continually, but it seems no one was able to act, even as men were dying from exposure.

Colonies or nation.

Maybe the single most striking thing of the Revolutionary War to me was the inability of the newborn nation to think and act in a collective way, even about its defense. The colonists did manage to muster an army, such as it was, and from the push for independence there arose a series of congresses that resulted in the Constitution. But these things were the first steps in forming a nation, and people needed time to begin to think collectively about their common goals. This collective thought was the great accomplishment of this small group of fertile minds in a sea of self-interest, and prior to this the individual colonies were quite insular. At any given moment during the war the army found support or scorn in exact proportion to the advantage expected by the people directly underfoot. There was naturally a strong thread of states' rights running through the delegates to the Continental Congresses, and most people were reluctant to cede any rights and responsibilities to a federal authority, even when in the midst of an altercation that needed a collective, national response. They would come to see their common purpose, but not without a struggle. History has many accounts of the disconnect between the soldier in the field and the citizen removed from the struggle. The soldiers are asked to sacrifice everything, while society at large--for whose rights and protection the soldiers are presumably asked to sacrifice--lives on in comfort. But Washington struggled for seven years to provide even the most essential things to his army--clothing and ammunition and food--and many times found himself with massive desertions and even starvations and exposure deaths because he could not get the Continental Congress to provide. That the coffers were empty did not help, nor did the inability of the new nation to borrow money when there was no strong, central entity with which other nations might deal.

And yet the colonies had plenty of money, but none of it was volunteered--nor requisitioned--for public use. Taxation to the British crown without representation in that crown's government was one of the things that forced the colonies to break with Britain; and so the states--which were the salient entities at the time--were reluctant to levy taxes to pay for war, especially when many citizens were slow to relinquish their allegiance to England. As soldiers were literally freezing and starving to death in camps positioned to defend cities from British attack, the citizens of those cities were selling their goods to the invading British Army. It's hard to imagine a more dispiriting circumstance for a soldier. (Washington, hinting early at his federalism, argued that a nation like England could borrow money to prosecute the war, giving them effectively unlimited resources.)

Slavery.

I'm always somehow unprepared to come face-to-face with this country's history of slavery, despite having read much about the Civil War, which placed the institution front and center. It is a thing so monstrously wrong, so repellant to any sense of morality or ethics, that to read about us warring over the subject--that is, to find a substantial portion of us willing to fight to keep it, especially so recently--can only be an indelible stain upon our national character. In thinking about WWII, I often wonder how Germany goes about life after the Third Reich; but we are faced with the same question after slavery.

Washington was, of course, a large slave holder, as were Jefferson and Madison and others of the founders. He is on record as disliking the institution, but his objections seem more practical than moral. His primary complaint seemed to be that he was not getting the best of the bargain when the cost of maintaining slaves was weighed against the value of their output as laborers. He prided himself on being fair-minded and liberal toward his slaves, and he was a more humane and sensitive master than most, and yet he drove them relentlessly and was not above having them whipped if he found them indolent. I'm skeptical that this kind of power would not alter a man's wiring in a deleterious way. For his whole life Washington seemed at a loss to understand why slaves were not eager to work hard despite there being no possibility of advancement or personal gain to come from it. This is a peculiar blindness.

Nothing casts more doubt upon Washington's character than his insistence on bringing slaves to Philadelphia during his presidency when the capitol was moved thence from New York City. Pennsylvania was a free state, and Philadelphia had a large population of free blacks, but Washington brought his own slaves into this environment and kept them in bondage even as they were surrounded by men and women enjoying freedom under the law. Worse yet, when he was made aware of a Pennsylvania law stipulating that any slaves residing in the state for six months would be automatically granted their freedom, he connived to be sure his own slaves were spirited back to Mount Vernon before this time elapsed to reset the clock--and then quickly returned to service in Philadelphia. And he lied about what he was doing and his motives, both to his slaves and to others. He told his slaves that they were returning briefly to Mount Vernon for humanitarian reasons, e.g. so that slaves could reunite with their spouses. (In breaking up the slave families in the first place he had broken one of his cardinal rules.) And letters between him and Martha showed that they maneuvered together to evade the Pennsylvania law. So much for not being able to tell a lie.

And for what? Where is the necessity to use slaves as your household servants? His argument that the  slave economy of Virginia and of his plantations could not simply be wiped away by fiat since there was no labor pool with which to replace the slaves has perhaps a shred of validity (though nobody seemed to consider freeing and then hiring the slaves to work for wages). But even if this argument holds true on his plantations in Virginia, it falls to pieces in Pennsylvania: as a free state, Pennsylvania DID have an economic structure where domestic servants for the President could be easily hired--and indeed their wages and attendant costs would have been paid by the federal government!

For the life of me, I can hardly see how to avoid seeing this as a stain on Washington's honor. It only makes sense in light of a man looking at other men in exactly the same way he looks at beasts of burden. The country is of course indebted to the man and his services on many fronts, but this chapter certainly scrubs away any godly patina.

I've also been disabused of any notion that our present state of divisive politics and brain-crumbling, 24-hour lying tits-and-ass news channels represent something new or unique to our age. Washington seemed to enjoy a special, even unique, status as our country was born; he was the universal choice for the country's first president, and even those who didn't especially like him or agree with his politics felt him the perfect choice for the office. But even if Washington for most of his presidential career remained aloof from most partisan issues, American political life, once delivered from the rancorous independence / colonialist question, quickly segmented into factions. One favored a strong federal government (the Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton) and the other believed that states should be the governing authority and a strong central government risked monarchy (what became the Republican Party, with Thomas Jefferson as its figurehead). Even as Washington tried to stay out of the increasingly bitter and intractable fight between Jefferson and Hamilton, he was excoriated in the press with every imaginable charge in quite shocking fashion, especially during his second term. And it all looks quite familiar: stuff was just made up out of whole cloth with the intent to further a cause and damage an "enemy," and when he refused to take the bait then the press doubled down and doubled down again, denigrating his personal honor and war service in really scurrilous fashion. Like what you hear on Faux News today or coming from Tea Baggers' gatherings, there was no charge that either side could think up to denigrate Washington that was deemed off-limits--never mind that BOTH factions scandalizing him made it clear that NEITHER side possessed his favors.

I remember thinking this when reading about Lincoln's presidency as well: people are shitty and the press is shitty and honor and decorum extend only so far as they get results--and then the gloves come off. Lincoln suffered really humiliating and baseless criticism from all sides during his first term, and history shows that none of the people hurling the stones had accurately taken his measure--quite the contrary. Washington had something of Lincoln's unflappability and aloofness, though perhaps not quite the same ability to absorb invective without comment. But he absorbed plenty, and it's everyone else that comes off the worse for it.

Lastly, I would say this. In the new world of twitter and texting, many have lamented that we're losing our ability to write coherent, long-line thoughts. Well, reading the correspondence of Washington, a man who never went to college, makes the point glaringly obvious. The wonderful eloquence of his letters and speeches make us seem as though we've lost our command of the language.

This was a splendid read, a great story about a rare and worthy character in a tumultuous time.  Recommended.

The World At War

I've been watching again the massive BBC Second World War documentary, The World At War (1974). A huge historical undertaking, the series was commissioned in the late '60s for TV and features 26 hour-long episodes plus half again as many related documentaries and special features.

It's quite too much to review like a movie, but a number of impressions stand out for me: these events, the fact of the war, what brought it on and how it unfolded; this is all a story so grand and terrible and glorious as to captivate me beyond any other story in life. The endless shades between absolute good and absolute evil, the terrible consequences riding on so many decisions (and the heartrending loss of life to dead-end decisions and bungling), the sickening baseness and heart-stopping courage and bravery, all demonstrate the full range of at least one part of the human experience.

Many times I've said that Hitler is the most fascinating of stories to me, and so he remains in this series. Outwardly very ordinary, there is something fantastically lurid in the heroic mythology that was constructed around him and in the diabolical and megalomaniacal character that lived inside such a mundane wrapper. And that this could all unfold to such a dark and unforgiveable place in such a civilized and educated part of the world is--it must be said--a truth stranger than fiction.

Naturally, I have a special interest in America's entry into the fracas. There really is a sense (despite plenty of evidence of darkness) of a fairly innocent country sending its troops and materiel to aid in the plights of others that is remarkable and moving. To see the US and Britain ramping their manufacturing up to and beyond maximum capacity and see the massive output of planes and ships and tanks and arms and everything else is to witness the rarity of whole societies pulling together for a common goal--something not often seen, and something far removed from today's world.

What must it have been like to be in a group of 156,000 men making a mass invasion of France? I imagine Eisenhower and his group assigning various tasks to this and that division or corps, knowing that the first wave would take very high casualties. How to reconcile yourself to looking at individuals as a statistic, knowing that with 70% casualties we'll need to throw, say, 11,000 men at this particular problem? And what was it like to walk among those men before the invasion began, knowing that many of them would have to die or be horribly maimed for life? And what other choice was there except to let Hitler keep killing and destroying? There are few things in our lives that play out with these consequences.

Thinking about the gigantic D-Day invasion, there's such a sense of the extraordinary difficulty of the task and of the huge resources marshaled to make it happen. I love that artificial harbors were conceived and built (knowing that no natural harbors would be available until they were conquered--and then rebuilt), plus all the tons and tons of stuff needed to make them function. When horrible weather heavily damaged the harbors shortly after the invasion--threatening the entire mission--additional resources were marshaled to quickly repair the damage and get the invasion back under way. And there are a zillion such stories, all a scale that's almost unimaginable now. This "can-do" sense in horrid conditions is inspiring.

What was it like to have your whole country conquered, overrun by brutality and murder and torture? If you collaborated, you may survive, but at the cost of sending others to the camps and to death. If you resisted, you would surely be tortured and killed if caught. At the war's end, survivors had to answer for what they had done. What a horrible calculus.

The scenes of some of these occupied countries as they are being liberated by the Allies bring quite a lump to the throat. What a deliverance! To have been under such a yoke as the Nazis imposed--the total destruction of personal liberty to be replaced by a brutal simulacrum of civilization--and to see soldiers from foreign nations who have come at unbelievable expense and with the highest sacrifice to give you your humanity back; well, it just doesn't get more moving than this.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler had written "Even if we cannot conquer, we shall drag the world into destruction with us." Fascinating to see how German citizens swung from euphoria at the Wehrmacht's long string of victories at the war's beginning to despair and shame as their fortunes turned. The bombing of cities and civilians is only what Hitler himself unleashed against everyone else; there was no grounds for objecting to the Allies' annihilation of everything they encountered. In so many scenes as the war turned against the Germans one sees this realization in their eyes: we have earned any brutality that awaits us; we have no foothold to ask for humane treatment or clemency.

The series covers the war in the Pacific as well, though I've always had a harder time sinking my teeth into this part of the conflict. The settings are so foreign and everything seems reduced simply to two warring bands, each trying to best the other. The comparative lack of political intrigue or close political alliance--to say nothing of cultural roots--just make this an ugly part of the war that had to be won with brute force.

The production is fine, though it has a made-for-TV aura about it. Laurence Olivier narrates throughout, and Carl Davis has written a memorable theme song. I do find myself a bit tweaked at the foley work. In all the vast footage from the war, sound effects have been dubbed in to everything: horse hooves on cobbles, men traipsing through muck, motorized vehicles, the sound of guns and artillery, everything. And once it becomes clear that none of it is authentic to the footage being watched, I couldn't stop thinking about how contrived it sounded. Better than silence, I suppose, or, worse yet, than "mood music."

But I'd still recommend it to anyone with even a remote interest.

Come On People Now, Smile On Your Brother

I remember the point a couple years into college where I had a revelation about the subject of history. Always a lazy student, I spent my whole academic career chafing against the necessity of doing a bunch of stuff I didn't want to do, and this caused me to equate reading history for pleasure as akin to volunteering for torture.

I forget the circumstance now, but sometime in the early '80s I remember finding a book on my parents' bookshelves and deciding to take it on. The book was William Shirer's epic Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which clocked in at a whopping 1,386 pages. For a guy who basically didn't read, that was an undertaking.

It's one thing to undertake it, and quite another to finish it. But I hardly put the book down until I turned the last page. Turns out it wasn't what I expected, and it kind of changed my whole perception of history. Instead of having to commit to memory a bunch of names and dates that had tenuous (or no) relevance to modern life, this book read almost like a novel. It was a personal eyewitness account of an almost unbelievable, world-shaking tale of events only recently past. And what a story; to this day nothing I have read in fiction can match the character of Adolph Hitler or the Nazi Party's rise to power and the consequences thereof. Whether inherently or because of this awakening event, the events of Germany in the 20s-40s retain a particular power on me.

I hope it's unnecessary to stress that nothing in the Nazi racial philosophy, and very little of their methods, resonated with me; on the contrary, I think (as I have said elsewhere) the idea that any meaningful thing about a person, or especially a group of people, can be known by their race is about as strongly disproven as anything can be. But I'm lying if I don't admit to finding the whole business magnetic: the downtrodden country unable to hold onto a government; the tyranny of the Versailles Treaty; the easy resort to scapegoating and the ready-made culture of anti-Semitism; the raucous street competition between thuggish groups of political adherents; the Nazis' utterly brilliant use of propaganda; the marches and mass rallies and symbolism; the snappy uniforms. And there is the character of Hitler himself, whose impact on people far surpassed anything I had seen in tepid, cynical American politics. I find myself instantly sucked in, and the film footage and photographs of that era are endlessly fascinating.

All this by way of introduction. Another crewmember mentioned a while back that there was a Nazi history museum here in Cologne. In my three years of coming here I had heard nary a peep about the place. I always assumed there would be such a facility in Berlin, but I hadn't thought to look for anything here. The party's control over the country was absolute, and the organs of state were everywhere, but I hadn't assumed that this chapter would be immortalized in museums in various places around the country. I just hadn't stopped to wonder about how modern Germany dealt with Nazi history.

I did a little research yesterday and located the place--not far from our hotel--but after walking over I found it closed for the holidays. I tried again this morning with better results.

Called the El-De Haus (i.e. L.D. House, for Leopold Dahmen, the name of the jeweler who owned the building before it was taken over by the Gestapo), it served as the Gestapo's headquarters in Cologne from the middle '30s up to the end of WWII in 1945. And the reality of the place throws one straight into the brutality of the movement. It's not surprising that the Nazis would have had offices in any city or town, but the El-De Haus is sobering for its collection of detention cells in the basement and for its courtyard out back where hundreds of executions took place. The rest of the museum pulls no punches about what went on here and elsewhere. There were no laughing, chattering kids here; everyone walked around in a stunned silence.

I'm fascinated by the question of how a country moves on after something like the Third Reich. In some ways I think this kind of descent into mass insanity could have happened anywhere (we see plenty of scary parallels in American culture right now, in fact). But it didn't happen just anywhere: it happened in the very center of Western civilization, in one of the most advanced and learned societies in human history. The arc of the Third Reich dragged much of the world along in its wake to its fiery conclusion, leaving a trail of millions of dead and billions of dollars spent to undo and / or contain what never needed to happen in the first place.

I certainly don't contend that contemporary Germans are under an obligation to atone again and again ad infinitum for the (admittedly unfathomably huge and ubiquitous) sins of their forebears; but neither can one just say "well that's done--let's move on!" however tiring it might be to have the elephant re-enter the room seemingly without end. It's important that these lessons, after all still very close in historical terms, not be swept under the rug of time. But how does the German state approach these things? And how should regular Germans look on them?

Apparently, without flinching and without pulling punches. The El-De Haus is a stark and grim reminder of just what the Third Reich was all about. In room after room, and display after display, no stone is left covering the ugliness that characterized what really happened here and across Germany. The numbers of people killed and tortured, who they were and how and when it was done, how it was justified and how and why citizens went along with it--all these things and more are gone over in graphic detail in the museum's five levels. I rented an excellent little audio player (there is some English in the displays, but obviously most everything is in German) and the displays have numbers which one punches into the player for an accompanying narrative.

Everybody knows about Hitler and Goebbels and Goering and Rudolph Hess, and maybe even about Julius Streicher and Martin Bormann and Ernst Röhm. But the thousands of other uniformed functionaries fade to history. Here we see a small progression of Nazi leaders from Cologne's past, none of whom I had heard of.

The only actual Nazi flag in the place. I'm fascinating that it is displayed in a rumpled fashion and not unfurled. There is something undeniably dangerous in the idea of displaying this flag unfurled. There remains a kind of mystical power in the symbol, which is surely a function of how its image was manipulated by Goebbels and others and of all the turmoil it caused.

War's end. This is the area right near our hotel, looking North toward the dom. The devastation was near-total--90% of the city, we are told. 

Where the 'love locks' are currently.

There are numerous displays and photographs spread through the offices, mostly organized a topic to a room and arranged chronologically within subjects. Rather than a history of the El-De Haus and the Nazi doings in Cologne, it's a more comprehensive exposé of Nazism with an emphasis on Cologne. The museum finishes up with displays showing the state of things in Cologne at war's end. A video screen shows aerial footage of a completely bombed-out Cologne while the opening strains of Glenn Miller's "In The Mood" plays in a loop.

I'm glad I went, and it's a really important undertaking; but it's probably not a place I ever need to see again.

This Won't Hurt A Bit

Just finished with Philippa Gregory's The Other Boleyn Girl. About a year ago I listened with unexpected pleasure to Margaret George's Helen of Troy, and it whetted my appetite for other historical novels. A few months back now I watched the 2008 film The Other Boleyn Girl (based on Gregory's book) and decided to put the b00k on my iPod for future long drives. But the story was so engaging that I ended up listening to it on my daily walks as well, and last night was so taken with the story that I sat on the sofa and listened for six hours (it helped that I was stuck alone in Louisville with little else to do; but this won out over several new movies to watch).

The historical events on which this book is based, and to which it mostly conforms (though there are some disputes and, apparently, some license taken) are known at least in broad strokes to most everybody. Anne Boleyn's ascent to the throne as the second of what turned out to be six wives of Henry VIII is bold enough even in outline. But to have the whole story laid out in its myriad details is rich and captivating. I'm always taken by huge, earth-shaking events as seen through the eyes of the individuals who lived them; here we have the ugly business of national politics (with large dollops of international strategizing in the bargain) mixed with things familiar to all of us--love and desire and courtship and childrearing--but also mixed with a rigid class system and ruthless family politics, these latter elements quite foreign to modern sensibilities. And underneath it all is naked ambition, the lust for power and wealth and control.

The story is told from the point of view of Mary Boleyn, the older sister of eventual Queen of England Anne Boleyn. The Boleyn family was a powerful and influential house at the time in England, and both daughters were raised in the manner of people who exerted influence on the doings at court. Mary and Anne were extensively educated and, after further finishing and training in the French court, were brought into service as ladies-in-waiting for the English Queen, Catherine of Aragon. Mary was primed for, and actively maneuvered by her family into, the role of the King's mistress, the motivation being the inevitable advancement for the family that the King's favor would bestow. But Mary was already married at the time, and was thus unable to do more than provide pleasure and sexual release for the King (and perhaps produce a couple illegitimate children). It's a significant part of the story that Mary's feelings about the whole endeavor were never considered, and to express them would have been seen by the men who controlled the household as extreme impertinence. It soon became clear that events were at a rare alignment for the Boleyn family: with the family in privileged standing, and Catherine of Aragon having failed to produce a male heir for the King before going through menopause, the still-unmarried Anne might be maneuvered not simply to take Mary's place, but to take Catherine's place: the Queen's throne itself. And so it was to be.

But not without a couple mountains to move first. Queen Catherine was married for 20 years to Henry, and was a devoted wife to him and quite politically-savvy in her own right. Further, she was the basis for a political alliance between England and Spain, a relationship the importance of which ebbed and flowed. And she was beloved by the people of England. A formidable woman quite apart from her husband, she was not going to sit idly while the lecherous and desperate King plotted to have her set aside. Even if she would have consented, England was an officially-Catholic country, the Church of England being an arm of the Holy Roman Church; and that meant that setting aside the Queen required an annulment from the Pope himself. This seems pretty heady stuff in itself. But as the King became more and more desperate for an heir, and with Anne Boleyn (as we are to believe) pestering him for a divorce and refusing herself to him until marriage, the King was moved to more and more extreme maneuvering, resulting eventually in a break with Rome and the establishment of the official Church of England, with Henry himself as the divine overseer--thus enabling him to grant himself the annulment he needed (yet another of a zillion examples of the murderous folly of mixing religion with politics).

But trumping up a flimsy pretext for setting the royal marriage aside is itself a perilous precedent. Having worked her way (by whatever combination of carnivorous personal ambition and vertiginous family meddling) to the throne of Queen of England, Anne Boleyn rather quickly found the position an extremely pressure-filled and hazardous one, a state of affairs which she herself had done much to effect. She was not to last three years as Queen, and was not to leave the position with her head still attached to her body. Whatever else one might say about it, a love story where people's very lives are on the line becomes something more.

I find my enthusiasm at least a little dampened by not knowing where reality ends and fiction begins. Ms. Gregory does a spectacular job of character development, and we come to have a visceral sense of who all these key players are; and insofar as the basic plot elements of barren queen and ambitious family and church turmoil and ascent to throne and beheading are parts of the factual record, perhaps the details do not need to matter (and in any case what is not known now will never be). But the emotional lives of the characters in the novel are vivid and we feel absolutely brought into events. The real story is kept at arm's length if the people here are pure fantasy--but I suppose it's as close as we will ever get, and indeed we're drawn much more into the story for the immersion in people's lives.

Regardless, it's not much of a criticism because what we are given is so vivid and engaging. The time period--the 1530s--is fascinating to me, and Ms. Gregory does not linger unduly on how things in our modern world have evolved. This is just the setting in which the story takes place, the "modern day" of the time. Still, the details seep out: how livings are made, how people get from place to place, what life is like with a houseful of servants, the sense of distance without mass transit; and especially the series of social strata, the classes to which one was born and which imposed so many rules and expectations on one. The Boleyn's uncle, Thomas Howard (the brother of Elizabeth Boleyn Howard, the Boleyn sisters' mother) was considered the leader of the extended Howard family--the Howards being even more influential than the Boleyns--and it's shocking to our modern sensibilities how he was able to order everyone around quite irrespective of their will, to include actions which would put them in mortal danger. Even the girls' father, Thomas Boleyn, could not (or at least did not) overrule the uncle. It's all foreign to us, but not so foreign that we cannot relate. And the relating--the translating of our modern lives into these experiences of 16th Century folks--is where so much of the story's pull lies.

The end result of all this for me is a desire to learn more about the period and the characters involved. Obviously, the story did not begin or end with Anne or Mary Boleyn, nor with the King himself. And each step along the way provides another color to the rich tapestry of history on which we can look back with wonder. Many of these people have Wikipedia pages dedicated to them, and quite a number of historical books and movies exist (in addition to the 2008 film starring Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman, Philippa Gregory's book was made into a 2003 BBC miniseries). It's like celebrity mania which has stood the test of time, a full-bodied justification for the ugly business of royalty-watching.

Lastly, I think there is something simply compelling, for me anyway, about being read to, about having a story told to one. Reading is faster, but a good reader is really a treat. This book is read by British actor Susan Lyons, and she is excellent.

Past The Tipping Point

This post is from seven months ago, and I just never got around to finishing it. Warts and all, here it is.

***

Today: the New York Transit Museum. It's New York City, transportation-related things, and nostalgia--all melded into one; a convergence of themes that threatens to turn me into a quivering pudding of rapture. (Once again, I'm without very good pictures. I've been here before, and didn't remember it being something I ought to be photographing.)



Located in the abandoned Court St. station at Schermerhorn St. and Boerum Place in Brooklyn, the Transit Museum is entered (appropriately) by an inconspicuous stairwell, marked only by a couple lighted subway station balls and a banner on the side of the building that sits on top of the station. The museum uses the whole station, taking up two levels--both underground. There is a large area of displays and a book / gift shop and little cafeteria below street level, and the tracks are on the level below this. The layout of the station is that of the familiar subway stop: two tracks with a platform in the middle, and the whole length of the station is filled with display cars on both tracks. The collection includes subway cars from most eras, plus odds and ends (an electric train motor, a display signal room, a maintenance locomotive, etc.).

The displays are quite thorough, talking in some detail about what was involved in digging the tunnels. Much of the New York subway runs just below the city streets, which is typical of many cities. This kind of construction is called "cut-and-cover," and involves removing the street surface and excavating down a couple stories, putting in the tracks, and covering everything back over. This seems like it should be fairly straightforward compared, say, to London, where the tunnels are deep below the surface. But the displays make clear that there is no straightforward way of tunneling beneath a functioning metropolis. With cut-and-cover, buildings had to be shored up at the surface and underpinned below ground, and all the utilities had first to be located and then either moved or temporarily suspended for later re-burial. The pictures are mind-boggling. Much of the actual digging took place with shovels and pickaxes. And that's without getting into the challenges--for a long time insurmountable--of putting the tunnels beneath the soft riverbeds. (A great history of the whole project, plus fabulous photos showing the seeming-chaos and impossibility of the task, is available at the Gutenberg Project here.)


(An aside I'm sure I mentioned in my posts from London a couple summers ago: because London was a medieval city, none of the streets ran in a straight line. When they built the first subway lines, this absence of a street grid made cut-and-cover difficult, not least because the resulting train line would have snaked around horribly. But they nonetheless tried this method for their first line in the early-1860s, and found the disruption to the bustling of the city so intrusive that Parliament forbid any further cut-and-cover operations for subway construction. Once deeper tunneling was thus dictated, it was found that softer clay--much easier for tunneling than rock--was located just a bit further down, and voilá!; London's deep tunnel system. I still remember being shocked as I descended the Westminster tube station: I bet we descended 10 or more stories below ground level. I felt like a miner. Albeit one who rides an escalator to work.)

Everything about the NY subway and its construction just intrigues the shit out of me: that it's transportation-related (I have a fetish, I guess); the railroad essence of it; the fact that it's underground; the fact that it's the most extensive such system in the world, serving a huge and dense population. And the icing on the nostalgia cake is that the museum exists in a bona fide station which has been abandoned (yet remains connected to the functioning subway system; warnings in the museum caution us that the third power rail beneath the display cars is active in the station. There's even a working train board--an actual artifact from the operational period of the station, not a facsimile display--that shows, with colored lights, the locations and movements of other subway trains in the area).

There are lots of elements of the subway system, tunnels and stations, which were once part of the active system and which are now no longer used (I remember years ago riding up front on a train and seeing out the front window many tracks peel off and disappear into the darkness). Several displays in the museum feature the City Hall station, mostly because it was one of the most opulent and beautifully-decorated of all the subway stations. The station still exists below City Hall--and trains still run on the tracks--but, the displays say matter-of-factly, it is "no longer used." I just have a pronounced soft spot for this subject matter.



As I looked into this a bit further, I of course found a bunch of web resources on the subject--particularly, Forgotten NY and NYCSubway.org. (In fact, the amount of information is so overwhelming that I can't seem to finish writing this post; I've been trying to write the same two pages now for a week, but I keep getting sucked into the information vortex.) Naturally, what produces in me a nostalgic ache spurs other people to action, and my favorite site here is from a fella named Joseph Brennan from Columbia University. He has a much more serious fetish about the NY subway than I do, and a considerably more-developed work ethic as well. In addition to his myriad other sites (his interests cut a REALLY broad swath), he has a site dedicated entirely to the abandoned stations of the New York City subway system. Not content to just list them, he includes an operational history of each station, plus diagrams of its location and from the original construction, plus, where available, present-day views. Absolutely fan-freakin'-tastic!

(He also has a long-term work-in-progress diagram of the NYC subway system on his site, a map which ties into a book I recently bought about subway diagrams of the world. More on this in a later post, but even the story of Mr. Brennan's diagram is interesting.)

This isn't a museum for everybody--my wife was profoundly grateful that she had something else going on and didn't have to accompany me--but it's a must-see for anyone with a yen for this stuff.

A Tour of Valhalla

I was reading a post a few days ago about people scuba diving in the cold mountain lakes of Austria, and specifically about the search by tourists for Nazi artifacts which were often found beautifully preserved in the muck at the bottom of some of these lakes. As certain of these places became known to divers, a cottage tourism industry was developing which authorities were eager to squelch. The writer talked about the community-wide dread with which these developments were being viewed: buses full of camera-snapping tourists capturing the thrilling discovery of more Nazi artifacts was just not what the idyllic little hamlets envisioned for their tourism plans; it reinforced a connection to a past which most locals wished would just go away.

I've only been once, briefly, to Germany, and it was a thousand years ago before I had any interest in history. When I was there I did not see anything historic, just a few quaint villages and a tourist spot or two. Later for a period I developed an intense interest in the Second World War, particularly Hitler's Germany and the fate of Europe. The question of how a country or a people moves on after something like the Third Reich is inevitable and captivating to me. To my mind, the rise and fall of Hitler is THE event of the 20th Century (if I had to pick one thing).

Bryan Singer's Valkyrie tells the story of the most nearly-successful of several indigenous plots to assassinate Hitler. Led by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, a group of senior officers and staff undertook to develop an intricate plan to step in and take control of the German government in the sudden vacuum left by Hitler's death--a death which Stauffenberg would personally undertake. The name Walküre, apart from being the name of a Wagner opera beloved by Hitler, was also the name of a secret Nazi contingency plan to use a reserve army to seize control of state functions in the wake of a war-related breakdown of government. Stauffenberg's plan was to kill Hitler with a suitcase bomb at a staff meeting and then utilize the legal framework of the Walküre plan to ensure that many people and departments--people not aware of the assassination plot--would follow the new government, rather than any of Hitler's hand-appointed successors. Like so many aspects of this story, this one is made even more fascinating for being true.

One of the great questions here--the question on everybody's mind ever since, the question the quaint Austrian villages so wish would go away--is how one of the greatest of Western cultures could descend en masse into the murderous madness so amply demonstrated (and carefully documented) by the Nazi government. And everything, it seems, is a question of degrees. While Hitler shrewdly demanded an oath of loyalty to himself personally from every member of every branch of the military, the Nazis were not able to win everyone's mind, despite an ingenious and comprehensive propaganda campaign designed to do exactly that. They could, with an extreme militarization of society, easily control the actions and behaviors of the people at large; but they had more trouble controlling the thoughts and feelings of those people. The question of degree comes from all of the officers of the various military branches, people who were at the time acting in an official capacity implementing Hitler's war plan. Perhaps every senior officer had their own ideas of how the war should have been waged, and many doubtless had their own thoughts about Hitler's grand vision for Germany. But people were carefully hand picked for promotion, and few made it to senior posts without demonstrating the right ideological bent. At the same time, these were also highly intelligent and capable people, and naturally some would recoil at the looming destruction of their beloved country. Even some of his most fervent supporters came to see Hitler as an evil, destructive force. Knowing Nazi culture, knowing that even whispering a discontent about Hitler was grounds for a death sentence--a sobering fact brutally demonstrated again and again--the rise of a plot to murder Hitler, a plot with powerful and important people in it, and one carefully planned and finely detailed, is a real accomplishment.

So there is a grim tug of war here: there were many in Germany--too little, too late, perhaps, but still--who disagreed with so much of what Hitler stood for, and their resistance is a beacon in the very darkest of times. But I can also imagine a frustration that the sins of the Third Reich refuse stubbornly to be scrubbed away. God, another Nazi movie?!

For my part, I am absolutely taken with the period and the story. The natty uniforms and the brilliant use of standards and symbols and pomp and circumstance, the unrelenting propaganda, the mass rallies theatrically staged, the irrepressible German quest for technical perfection; it's all magnetic, and made the more mesmerizing for its underpinning of brutality and malevolence. So I hardly think one could pick a more momentous story than this one, a small but significant sub-subplot of one of human history's darkest moments, a story of great courage and suspense.

And from these raw materials director Bryan Singer has given us a brilliant film for history buffs and adventure film fans alike, a treat for anyone who likes a cracking good story. His fantastic attention to detail whisks us right back to 1944 Germany. The film is perfectly paced, showing both the quiet contemplation of the men who were putting their lives on the line for their principles and also the acrimonious planning meetings with the inevitable clash of egos and the near-mayhem that followed the bombing of Hitler and the attempted takeover of the organs of state.

Singer is teamed up again here with his writing partner from 1994's brilliant The Usual Suspects (one of my top 20), Christopher McQuarrie (this time also joined by Nathan Alexander), giving a terse and tightly-focused script. Singer has also again employed cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel, with whom he has worked on several films. While the film feels authentically of the period, Singer and Sigel accomplish this differently than Steven Soderberg's The Good German (2006), which sought to duplicate the look and feel of period newsreel footage with the use of period monochrome camera equipment. Valkyrie achieves its authenticity more conventionally, with sets and props and costumes--with attention to detail. (I'm fascinated at this question of whether the audience gains more by telling a story by carefully antiquing it to match the audience's limited information, or by bringing that antique story into a more modern idiom. Does it vary from story to story or audience to audience? Or is there no single answer?)

The last question for this movie is one of casting, a topic of which there has been much discussion. Singer has assembled an impressive cast: Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson, Terence Stamp, even, unexpectedly, Eddie Izzard (who acquits himself quite ably). The one question mark seems to be... the star of the film, Tom Cruise. Cruise seems to be a love-him-or-hate-him kind of actor, and he certainly has found himself in the deep end of the sanity pool lately with his voodoo chants and tabloid antics. But he has made some admirable films, and he has a certain facility, so I don't think he is an absurd choice. But at the very least he represents a serious chink in Singer's carefully-constructed illusion. As the lone American in a sea of British actors, his voice is pointedly different from that of every other person on screen. Some have found this jarring, even declaring that it ruins the movie for them. I didn't find his voice / accent nearly that intrusive, but it took a few minutes to settle into it. (If one wants to get all fussy about it, why are Brits OK? And is it OK to have Americans--or Brits--using a German accent? Why not use German actors and subtitles?) It's a fair question as to whether they shouldn't have found a Brit for the role--or alternatively used an all-American cast. And it's a fair question as to whether Cruise has enough star power left to pull folks into the theater where, say, Ewan McGregor would not (that is, after all, the primary reason to cast Cruise in the first place, no?). A couple in the party that attended the movie with me felt that Cruise simply didn't have the gravitas for the role, that he wasn't believable as a Colonel in the Nazi army--he still seems a mite too youthful. And I've read several reviews of his wooden and outclassed acting, but I think these criticisms are wide of the mark. I think he found his character in his own way, and it seemed a fine performance to me, even if he would not have been my first choice for the role. Personally, I don't at all feel that Cruise ruined the movie; but I think Singer could have made a slightly better movie without him.

But the story is much bigger than just this question, and Singer has done a wonderful job placing the drama before us. I was disconcerted at how few women are in the picture--as, perhaps, there were few women in key roles in the assassination plot. It's an awfully masculine movie. That's my caveat.

Grade: A- / B+

An Unalloyed Substance

Trolling a bookstore in Minneapolis a good 20 years ago, I found a then-recently-released book called Lincoln On Democracy. Edited by New York Governor Mario Cuomo, the book was a collection of Lincoln's speeches and writings about subjects related to democratic self-government, and it also included several essays about Lincoln by other writers. The book had been compiled as a kind of textbook for a delegation of Poles who were gathering in New York to make plans to steer their fledgling democracy. With his humble background and his unshakable faith in the wisdom of the American populace, Lincoln is considered by many to be our greatest democrat, and he became Chapter One of the assistance we would give an aspiring democracy.

That collection was my real introduction to Abraham Lincoln, and it hit me like a thunderbolt; it remains the most moving book I have ever read. I knew of Lincoln, of course, but only the elementary school platitudes and dusty summaries. His speeches and writings were a revelation, showing a gentle spirit and a kind of universal fatherly love and a force of inarguable logic that I had never encountered before. (In a spasm of enthusiasm, I loaned the book to someone and never saw it again--thus teaching me both that my enthusiasm was not due to a quirk in my personality and also never to loan books I care about.) From this introduction, I was eager to learn more, and that book led to Carl Sandburg's great biography, and thence, in an attempt to understand the context from which so many of the speeches and letters sprang, to Shelby Foot's epic three volume history of the Civil War (which, by the way, looks daunting but reads like a gripping novel).

It's sobering to find a single person entwined in the narrative of great historical movements in such a seminal way as we find with Lincoln and the Civil War--indeed, his election as President caused seven states to immediately secede from the union (talk about giving a guy a complex). For most of us--for me, certainly, life is not like this. Hitler is similarly fascinating, though the natures--and legacies--of Hitler and Lincoln are found at opposite poles of the human experience. History is full of fascinating figures, of course, (though I remember an admonishment of a friend a couple decades ago that individuals really had little to do with the broad strokes of history) but for me Lincoln towers above them all, and I find myself almost powerless ever since to pass over any book about the man that I see in the bookstore.

Here's one I'm so glad I didn't try to resist: Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. Goodwin is the author of numerous books, and a Pulitzer Prize winner for 1995's No Ordinary Time about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. She was featured quite prominently in Ken Burns' 1990 PBS documentary on the Civil War and is now a frequent commentator on one of the major TV news stations.

This book is simply magnificent. She has the great advantage, of course, of having picked as her subject this rarest of persons in the rarest of circumstances. Almost every detail of the story intrigues us: the glorious enigma of Lincoln himself, with his improbable origins, his unique nature and his tragic and poetic end; the heart-rending drama of secession and civil war, which is both grand and sweeping and moving with its rules and protocols and chaos, and also of utter moment on an individual scale, with vast numbers of dead and wounded, with families torn apart and friends made mortal enemies; the personalities of the other key players in our country's greatest drama, intelligent and able and articulate men and women with strong opinions and ideas--men like the gallant and kind and noble Robert E. Lee, and the crusty and utilitarian U. S. Grant and his partner W. T. Sherman, and women like the devoted but unstable Mary Lincoln and the enterprising Kate Chase. It's a story that just doesn't get old for me; it's more gripping than any fiction. Especially as fleshed out by Goodwin, who has combed through a huge amount of material--the usual sources, of course, but also a mountain of private letters and diaries and other works by the ancillary players in the story. This approach gives us a palpable sense of the key players in the drama, and makes the history come vividly alive for us.

Hail to the Chief

Indeed, this is her angle. Obviously, a single field can be plowed only so many different ways, and this book covers the same ground as any exploration of Lincoln's presidency. But Goodwin's novel idea is to focus on Lincoln's interaction with his Cabinet, three members of which were his rivals for the 1860 Republican nomination for president--Salmon Chase, William Seward and Edward Bates. All three were eminent statesmen, and all were better positioned and (so they thought) better suited for the office of President than Lincoln; indeed, his capturing of the nomination was considered a long shot by almost everybody, though Lincoln himself worked carefully and with keen political savvy to prepare the ground for this outcome. Compounding one of history's great surprises, after beating them out for the nomination Lincoln then brought all three rivals into the highest positions of his Cabinet--Chase as Secretary of the Treasury, Seward as the Secretary of State, and Bates as Attorney General. These men, plus Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, and War Secretary Edwin M. Stanton, were Lincoln's closest advisers and confidants during this singular time in history. I can't imagine a better way to reveal Lincoln's real character than to witness how he dealt with these men to make policy during a civil war.

William Henry Seward, Secretary of State

Much of Lincoln's interaction with his Cabinet was well-documented, and the Cabinet members all either kept diaries or voluminous correspondence, so that both their public and private reflections--about Lincoln and themselves and each other--are available to us. With these, and the diaries and letters of their spouses and children and courtiers and so on, Goodwin puts us right in the beehive for the duration. And it's amid the backdrop of the age's ablest statesmen that we're able to see Lincoln's true stature.

Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury

I spoke a bit in a previous post about the almost universal underestimation of Lincoln that prevailed at the time of his nomination and election and on into the first three years or so of his first term as President. Coupled with his goodly nature, the vitriol of others toward him gives him a Jesus-like pathos. With a really astounding consistency Lincoln was considered an idiot, an illiterate, a backwoods unsophisticated man wholly unequal to the tasks he faced and the office he held. Because he was little known at first outside Illinois and Indiana, there were few people connected with the halls of power in the East who had firsthand knowledge to counter the tide of hysterical invention; thus, the disparaging opinion of Lincoln was widely held by the ablest men of his time, including (at least at first) the men whom he beat out for the Republican nomination. With his lack of high society graces, much prized by most of those in official Washington, it took people a long time to take the man's measure. Some, like Chase and McClellan, who were blinded by their own ambition, never fully did. And it's the strength of history's judgment of Lincoln that causes the failure of these men to acknowledge his greatness to be a blight on their own characters and legacies.

Edward Bates, Attorney General

There seems no better way to champion a person than to see his enemies turned first into friends and thence into strong advocates. The serious and blustery Edwin M. Stanton, Lincoln's War Secretary, makes for a good example, beginning his service believing that Lincoln was not up to his task and ending up with a loyalty that nearly killed him when he chose to continue serving through precarious ill health rather than abandon his chief. Likewise Secretary of State Seward, who by all accounts had every right to expect the nomination and election for himself; he became Lincoln's closest friend, and an eloquent advocate of his boss.

Edwin M. Stanton, Secretary of War

I'm awed by the unexpected combination in Lincoln of an easy, genial nature coupled with an iron and dogged confidence in his own judgment. Even without executive experience or firsthand knowledge of foreign affairs--at least part of the rationale for dismissing him as beneath his office--he displayed great political acumen, usually reading a situation far better than the more experienced men he installed beneath him (something I think about with our present-day politics). In the beginning, his cabinet members--many of whom seemed at first to think they would just run the government from their second-tier posts--were shocked to find their advice carefully considered and then discarded for the President's own counsel. But Lincoln deeply loved this country and understood fully its founding principles and mechanisms; and so he was very careful to grasp and protect the prerogatives of the office of which, he knew, he was but a brief occupant. This self-reliance and internal compass seemed to exist in a man almost entirely without vanity or self-importance. (How often the very opposite prevailed: mediocre men asserting their own greatness.) He never once boasted of his accomplishments or gloated in triumph nor took anyone else to task for having advocated what he knew to be a wrong policy. He absorbed numerous volleys fired against his person, so often from those close to him who were tasked with assisting him, and yet he never fired back, even when it might have been devastatingly satisfying to do so. This seems the rarest of characters to be found in politics.

Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy

I go on and on about Lincoln's character. But it is the seminal thing that emerges from every history of the period. There is nothing new in human conflict, and little of interest to me in the military maneuvers that characterized the war. An extreme trial like this always brings out the very best and the very worst of people; heroism and bravery and valor lived side by side with cowardice and treachery and treason and debauchery. But, to me, Lincoln stands as a singularity when the dust has settled. I don't know of a similar example in history. It's not his faith in the ultimate wisdom of the people--the core of his democratic fervor--that moves me, even if it's a big part of his character. (In fact, I'm not at all sure that I share any of that faith, especially lately.) But his ultimate faith in other people is yet another manifestation of that larger thing, that overriding "Lincoln-ness" that marked his whole personality. It goes hand-in-glove with his never taking offense at the personal snubs he suffered; with his refusal to give as good as he got; with his never failing to answer an angry, accusatory letter with a kind and understanding one; with his loving forbearance of a wife who was high maintenance perhaps to the point of mental illness; with his refusal to take credit for any happy occurrence, and his never failing to accept blame for bad things, regardless of who was actually responsible.

Mary Todd Lincoln

The other striking and unavoidable thing with which the book reacquaints us is the fierce intractability of slavery. That's not surprising, of course, since the issue brutally tore the country in two. But having been born a hundred years after the conflict, nothing in my lifetime even gets close to the deep trauma of this subject. To return to antebellum times and listen to the speeches and read the letters and editorials of the time is to be gripped with a panic at how insoluble the issue was. A knot forms in the pit of one's stomach as we read of the events bringing us closer and closer to our very nation falling apart in such a way that only the sacrifice of thousands and thousands of lives might possibly put things together again.

Robert E. Lee

I remember being truly shocked at the passions aroused by the tabloid murder trial of O. J. Simpson. I wasn't surprised (so much as disappointed) by the fanatical public interest in a subject matter of no importance to any of us, but I was depressed and mortified to think that the race of an observer clearly appeared to play a role in how they perceived justice before the law. I'm sure there were white people who were peremptorily convinced of Simpson's guilt because of their own racism--a thing I deplored absolutely. But I was quite unprepared for the huge number of blacks who, it seemed to me, felt that Simpson's guilt or innocence was a function of racial reckoning. To me this was like carefully measuring a thing scientifically and then throwing the data out and declaring the answer you always wanted; what was the point of even having laws and trials in that case? And yet a lot of people clearly saw the situation differently than I.

Ulysses S. Grant

In the same vein, having lived my whole life in Northern states, it is inconceivable to me how people could fail to see the wrong of slavery, much less to the point of being willing to kill for it. I know, of course, that once underway much of the fighting involved a sense of outrage at territorial violation (Shelby Foote tells of a captured Southern soldier being asked why he was fighting; he replied "We're fighting because you're down here."), and also at the Southerners' sense that they were being denied their rights of self-determination. I don't mean to pass these things off to one side. But both of those wrongs were a direct result of an insistence upon maintaining an economic system which was universally known to be wrong--indeed, even the Southerners themselves abolished slavery during the course of the war.

William Tecumseh Sherman

The first seven states' secession could be seen coming like an out-of-control freight train careening down the mountain. Lincoln's election, even when he was on record as saying he had neither the inclination nor, he believed, the authority to interfere with slavery where it already existed, was taken as the straw that breaks the back. It seems insufficient that I scratch my head in wonder at their motivation when they found no mystery in the dilemma whatsoever. For the principles they saw being violated they were willing to send their sons into battle. I don't know in how much stronger a flavor conviction comes.

The final irony is the realization that after all the turmoil and bloodshed and death, the war did not change the minds of others. At least it certainly did not in the "conquered" South. A century of brutal Jim Crow laws followed the war, and it seems clear that the war forced the country back into territorial integrity but left many minds unchanged.

Though the war per se is not Goodwin's focus, all this seems to connect the distant events of the 1860s with our present day. In any case, we have descended in an unbroken line from those days to these, from those people to the nation we are today. The 1860s are distant enough to seem antique, and the customs and manners of people are markedly different from today. But it's not so far back that we cannot connect, and the period represents a singular watershed for us.

I've refrained from putting in my favorite quotes, as I find it almost impossible to cull anything out (lest this too-long post become nearly as long as her book itself). I simply cannot give a higher recommendation to a book than to this one. It's a must-read.