Summer reading

Summer Reading

Mark Tooley on July 30, 2021

Lest you’re curious, here are books I’m reading:

The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III, 2020, by Peter Baker, Susan Glasser.

James Baker was campaign manager for Presidents Ford, Reagan and GW Bush. He was Reagan’s chief of staff then Treasury Secretary. He was Bush’s Secretary of State during the collapse of Soviet communism and the Persian Gulf War. He had no training in economics or diplomacy yet excelled at pursuing and leveraging power. He was disdained by conservatives, who blocked his becoming Reagan’s National Security Advisor (where he likely would have prevented the Iran-Contra scandal), and who saw him as a country club establishment Republican. But he was deeply partisan and, unlike the Bushes, voted for Trump twice although he thinks him crazy. Baker believes in wielding power from the inside whatever the circumstances. He’s an active Episcopalian, attending the same large conservative Episcopal congregation in Houston favored by GW and Barbara Bush. Baker became more devout after the death of his first wife under the influence of his second wife. He relied on and recommended The Runners Bible. Baker was the consummate Mainline Protestant and Episcopalian who was comfortable with and savvy with authority. He and Bush were maybe the apogee and swan song of WASP statecraft with its post WWII brand of Christian Realism, both hard nosed and idealistic.

For the Body: Recovering a Theology of Gender, Sexuality, and the Human Body, 2020, Tim Tennent

Although United Methodism is dividing over sexuality there are few intellectual resources deeply explaining Christian teaching about the human body. Many Methodists mistakenly focus their debates over a few Bible verses, unaware of the wider biblical symphony about gender and sexuality starting with Genesis and ending with Revelation, explicated by 2000 years of Christian reflection and experience. Asbury Seminary President Tim Tennent, inspired by Pope John Paul II’s magisterial Theology of the Body, applies a Wesleyan twist to understanding God’s purposes for the human body, addressing homosexuality, transgenderism, abortion, pornography and other topics. Hopefully this book will be only the beginning of new Methodist scholarship on human body theology. Traditional Methodists will need this scholarship among other intellectual resources if Methodism is ever truly revived in America as a force for personal and social reform.

Paradise Lost: A Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 2017, David Brown

Fitzgerald, with wife Zelda at his side, is recalled as the chronicler of 1920s flappers and jazz age flamboyance, embodied in The Great Gatsby. But he was himself, in between intoxications, quiet, contemplative and even puritanical. He cherished and valorized his southern Maryland patrician paternal ancestry while less focused on his mother’s more hardscrabble Irish background. Scott attended a Catholic prep school and was mentored by a socially ambitious Catholic priest who had converted from High Church Anglicanism and who imagined Scott as America’s next great Catholic novelist. It was not a role Scott wanted, and he rejected going to Jesuit Georgetown University in favor of Princeton, preferring cultural identification with the WASP elite, although never entirely comfortable in their ranks. Religion haunted Scott’s imagination and writing although he himself ended as a lost soul seemingly without faith even as Zelda plunged into increasingly eccentric and intense spiritualities. Upon his marriage he had described Zelda as the only god he had left. He and Zelda as celebrities cavorted in Paris and New York cafe society with Ernest Hemingway, among others. Their marriage was plagued by mutual alcoholism and infidelities even amid ongoing devotion. Scott died at age 44 amid professional decline and his wife’s mental illness. But he would be posthumously celebrated as a chief voice for post WWI America.

Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval That Inspired America’s Founding Fathers, 2007, Michael Barone

The author wonderfully wields his skills as journalist and chronicler of contemporary American politics to recall how the Glorious Revolution of 1688 led to America’s Revolution and concept of liberty. Authoritarian overreach by King James II, who partly looked with admiration to King Louis XIV, who ruled autocratically without any French parliament, prompted much of British society to invite the invasion by Holland’s William of Orange and his wife Mary, who was James’s daughter. With support from James’ other daughter, future Queen Anne, nearly all the British military dissolved upon William’s arrival, including John Churchill, Winston’s ancestor, who flocked to the Dutch liberator. Under King William and Queen Mary, the British parliament affirmed a new Bill of Rights ratifying parliamentary supremacy over the monarchy and protecting individual liberties including religious toleration. Coming from the Dutch republic, William was accustomed to having to persuade in pursuit of consensus, and he led Britain into a new more democratic age. This new era included the resurgence of British banking and commerce, leading to capitalism and a globalizing economy. America’s Founding Fathers looked to the nearly bloodless Glorious Revolution of 1688 as the antecedent to their own quest to protect liberty and create a new political order. Amid so much focus today on the 1619 Project and its demonization of America, we need a 1688 Project, telling the story of parliamentary liberty’s emergence against arbitrary royalism, with profound implications for the whole world.

America Against Itself: Moral vision and the Public Order, 1992, Richard John Neuhaus 

IRD celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, and so it’s appropriate to recall the legacy of one of its chief founders who wrote this book in defense of the American experiment and as a reflection on how 1960s activism, in which he was a key participant, went wrong. Neuhaus marched against the Vietnam War and for civil rights while he pastored a small Lutheran church in a poor New York black neighborhood. The idealism of “The Movement” went awry in the 1970s as its denizens embraced abortion rights and refused to critique communist conquered Indochina, ostracizing the author for his dissent. Born a Canadian, he always had special appreciation for American ideals and was horrified as 1960s idealism based on those principles morphed into hostility against them. He laments the rise of autonomous individualism as traditional Protestantism receded and connects it to the plight of the urban underclass, the unborn, and increasing indifference to vulnerable human life. He worries that nihilism was increasingly ascendant against altruism and the public good. If still alive today 30 years later, he would not be surprised by today’s cultural struggles and presumably would still be hopeful that Providence still offers a new direction for America.

Christianity, Diplomacy and War, 1953, Herbert Butterfield

The author was a British Methodist and a sort of intellectual counterpart to Reinhold Niebuhr as exponent of an English Christian Realism. This book was published by the U.S. Methodist publishing house, indicating a greater interest in public intellectual life then than now present in most Protestant publishing. He abjures excessive idealism and accepts the ongoing reality of conflict in the world while warning against “righteous” ideological wars that seek annihilation of adversaries deemed evil. He urges that defensive wars remain only exactly that so as to avoid WWI type conflagrations. And he commends the importance of forgiveness in domestic politic as well as global affairs, without which there can be no peace or accommodation. British domestic stability was only possible after the 1600s when political adversaries could forgive and coexist. He also argues that because Christians give ultimate allegiance only to their highest religious convictions they have room to compromise. “Hold to Christ,” he urged, “and the for the rest be totally uncommitted.”

The Director: My Years Assisting J. Edgar Hoover, 2021, Peter Letersky

The author worked directly for FBI Director Hoover as a young man in the 1960s alongside his longtime deputy Clyde Tolson and his secretary Helen Gandy. He dismisses claims that Hoover was gay or a cross dresser. Instead he portrays Hoover as ruthlessly efficient, gruff and, at least in the office, without visible emotion. Gandy told the author that even after 50 years Hoover had never called her by her first name. Believing a sniper outdoors during the 1968 riots, she threw herself in front of Hoover’s office window, only to be curtly told by Hoover, ungrateful that she was potentially risking her life, to return to her desk, which she did in tears. Later asked why she would risk her life for his, she explained her loyalty to the FBI was absolute and by extension also to its director. The author believes she loved him. In contrast, she despised Tolson, whom she believed a misogynist, and whom the author across two years, seeing Tolson as a feeble and grumpy old man, never heard speak. One of the author’s jobs was phoning all 11 deputy directors whenever Hoover entered or left the building. Some demanded they be phoned first. Gandy said none were qualified to replace him, and she explained Hoover wouldn’t retire at the end because he feared Nixon’s control over the FBI. Instead he died in office at age 77. The author attended the funeral at National Presbyterian Center sitting next to Tolson and Gandy, neither of whom showed any emotion. Gandy dutifully destroyed Hoover’s private files. As he left office, LBJ told Nixon: “He’s the only one you can put your complete trust in. He is a pillar of strength in a city of weak men.” The book is a portrait of unrivaled power and the inability to let go.

  1. Comment by Donald on July 31, 2021 at 7:02 am

    I’m adding the books on Baker and Hoover to my “Must Be Read” pile.

  2. Comment by L. Cary on July 31, 2021 at 9:53 am

    Donald,
    I’m not.

  3. Comment by Dan W on July 31, 2021 at 11:20 am

    I will definitely read the book on Baker. I always appreciated his viewpoint.

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