Reviews for The White House

The average rating for The White House based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-02-18 00:00:00 Richard Garcia Sr. If they know anything about Ulysses S. Grant, most will probably have something to say about his alleged drinking. Often put up as "evidence" of that claim is Grant's resignation from the U.S. Army in 1854 after service on the West Coast. Charles G. Ellington has written a fine piece of research about Grant's years on the Pacific Coast. Using a variety of resources, the author makes a convincing case that Grant was a drinker but not a drunk, and that his resignation was a carefully-considered decision made for a variety of reasons on Grant' own timing. Chief among the reasons for Grant's resignation are that he missed his wife and children in Missouri, the youngest of which he had never seen. The mails were frightfully slow (sometimes the letters Grant received from his wife were more than 4 months old). Grant was, at heart, a family man, and his quality of life without them was substandard. Grant also remained a Lieutenant for 10 years, a brevet captain for five of them, and resigned from the U.S. Army the same day his promotion to captain was received (the promotion was already months old by the time Grant was officially notified). The slow promotion process, combined with expensive living conditions on the West Coast and the War Department's cancellation of pay differentials for those serving in the area to prevent Grant from bringing his family to live with him. Presaging problems from his later presidency, Grant trusted too many "friends" with his money and his business ventures on the coast all failed. In spite of this, Grant loved the Pacific Coast and considered making it his permanent home later in life, until his promotion to Lieutenant General, which required him to make his home in the east. Published during a time when Grant's reputation among historians was generally low, Ellington's work takes a fresh, positive look at a little-known and much-mythologized time in the general's life. I admire Grant, in many ways, and see a lot of value in studying his life. Ellington's book is not a military history as much as an evaluation of Grant's character as a young line officer. Grant was never on trial in an official, military sense, though his character was tried in Northern California. Ellington's research amply demonstrates that Grant the drunk was a myth and that drinking (which he did in reasonable amounts) had little or nothing to do with his resignation from the Army. This book is a delightful read, and leaves the reader with the sense that he knows Grant the person, and not just the accomplishments of Grant the soldier. For that reason alone, the book is well worth reading.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-10-06 00:00:00 Brooke Akins A tightly executed study on Grant's Pacific Coast years, with special focus on the allegations of alcoholism that originated from this time of Grant's life. Ellington argues that the story of Grant being drummed out of the service because he was drunk on duty is nothing more than rumor turned over a dozen times by various interested parties, idle or malicious. He asserts Grant's reasons for leaving the army are much simpler and much easier to prove: he missed his family, and had begun making plans to resign more than a year before he finally did so, as is amply demonstrated in his letters to his wife. A careful analysis of the confused testimony of various witnesses to his supposed drinking proves that few are contemporary, and none are corroborated. Or, as D. L. Thornbury wrote in 1923, "IN order to have actually committed all the breaches of sobriety credited to him by the stories I have personally heard, he would have had to live in Humboldt four years and do nothing else!"