Reviews for Woodrow Wilson and Harry Truman: Mission and Power in American Foreign Policy

The average rating for Woodrow Wilson and Harry Truman: Mission and Power in American Foreign Policy based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-07-09 00:00:00 Rohan Raja Destiny gave Thomas R. Marshall a chance to be an agent for change, but not wanting to be seen as an interpreter he didn't take it. It also exposed a flaw in our Constitution that took decades after Marshall left this mortal coil to correct. Thomas Riley Marshall was born in Indiana in 1854 two years before the man with whom he served with as Vice President was born. He was Woodrow Wilson's Vice President for both of his terms in office. But before that he was an Indiana Democrat through and through. He ran a couple of times for local office a few times after graduating Wabash College and clerking in order to be a lawyer. He was engaged to a woman named Kate Hooper who died suddenly. This left Marshall a wreck of a human being. He was plagued by alcoholic demons for well over a decade until he met another woman Lois Kinsey who brought him out of it. She was almost 20 years younger than him, but it was true love. They married and legend has it they never spent more than two days apart. Marshall renewed his interest in politics and developed a relationship with Tom Taggart who was the Democratic boss of Indiana. The Hoosier state was at that time post Civil War a genuine two party state and both parties nominated candidates for Vice President and in one case President Benjamin Harrison in those years. Marshall turned several nominations for office until 1908 when he ran and won for Governor. He'd been stumping the state for Democratic candidates for years and his trial work always brought him publicity. He won even though the GOP carried the state for William Howard Taft for president. Marshall who had not always been liberal in his views gradually became more progressive and gave Indiana such an administration. He was like Lincoln who pardoned many a death sentence as president. Marshall kind of unofficially didn't believe in capital punishment. Come 1912 and Boss Taggart had his Indiana delegation pledged to Governor Marshall as a favorite son. The main contest was between Governor Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey and Speaker of the House Champ Clark. Wilson prevailed after multiple ballots and then the convention chose Marshall as his running mate. With Theodore Roosevelt as the Progressive candidate splitting the GOP vote with Taft, Woodrow Wilson came up the middle as the 28th president of the USA. He like so many others up to that point kept his Vice President at arm's length. Wilson could be a snob intellectually and had a low opinion of those who were not Ph'Ds like himself. A quality that was exponentially exacerbated after his 1919 stroke. For his part Marshall was content to do his constitutional duty and preside over the Senate. He entered Bartlett's Quotations when after a windy Senator gave a long oration of what this country needs. Marshall dryly observed that "what this country needs is a good 5 cent cigar". Marshall did loyally support Wilson's New Freedom reforms and his foreign policy up to and including our entry into World War 1. When peace came and the Senate balked at ratifying the treaty of Versailles Wilson went on a speaking tour across the country. In Pueblo, Colorado Wilson"had the first indications of the stroke to come that left him an invalid in the last two years of his administration. Author Bennett leaves no doubt that Marshall should have seized office. Wilson was in no condition to perform his duties and wife Edith though healthy even less so. Edith Wilson shared all her husband's opinions and prejudices and exacerbated them if anything. Marshall knew when to compromise and make a deal. History was the loser. Marshall lived for four more years after he left office dying in 1925. He's a likeable sort with no great pretensions about himself. The kind that make good leaders when destiny calls.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-10-24 00:00:00 Anthony Thomas I recently read Ronald C. White, Jr.'s excellent Lincoln's Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural, and was motivated to read more about Abraham Lincoln's other great speeches. That brought me to Gabor Boritt's 2006 history The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech That Nobody Knows. While interesting, I was expecting something more like White's work, which focuses on analysis of the speech with some info on the lead-up and reaction to the speech. Instead, Boritt devotes his book to the period between the Battle of Gettysburg and the time Lincoln takes the stage at Gettysburg and the time he gets of the stage and people start reacting to the speech. Of the speech itself, you might conceivably miss it if you blink. To be fair to Boritt, I learned a lot about the Battle of Gettysburg and what happened at Gettysburg between the battle and the dedication of the national cemetery. This is interesting stuff, and does a good job of giving you a context of Lincoln's speech. Boritt is also thorough in his analysis of the Gettysburg Address in American culture and how it vied with the Emancipation Proclamation as the single message of the martyred president. Unfortunately, there's very little analysis of Lincoln's actual Gettysburg address. Much more time is spent on how and when he wrote it than why he wrote what he wrote. It just seems odd to that Boritt left this entire topic unexplored when devoting so much effort to every other facet of the Gettysburg story. Boritt actually spends a lot more time talking about the content of other Gettysburg speech that nobody knows, the main oration from Edward Everett. You get a fair amount how and why Everett wrote the speech he wrote, and an entire appendix is dedicated to presenting Everett's speech in full. I actually appreciate this part of the book, as - while I had known Lincoln's speech was really a short message delivered after Everett's - I had known little of Everett's speech myself. It's actually a pretty good speech, if not in a class with Lincoln's. I listened to Tantor Media's unabridged 2006 production of The Gettysburg Gospel, as read by Michael Kramer. The production was solid, and Kramer's steady and straightforward narration fit the historical nature of the book well. The production runs approximately 10 hours. Overall, I learned quite a bit about every part of the Gettysburg story except Lincoln's speech. While I appreciate that, I feel like Boritt missed the mark by, I can only assume, taking for granted everyone coming to The Gettysburg Gospel already had a detailed knowledge of the actual Gettysburg Address itself and that he didn't need to directly address that topic himself. While Boritt's book is a solid background on the story of the speech, don't expect to learn much about why Lincoln gave the speech he did.