RUTHFULLY YOURS

In 1881 America had three different presidents in one calendar year: Rutherford B. Hayes, James A. Garfield, and Chester A. Arthur.

Candice Millard’s books- on Churchill in the Boer War, on Theodore Roosevelt’s  exploration of the Amazon River, and on the Richard Burton and John Speke expedition to find the source of the Nile are all splendid, informative, and well written.  This book on James  Garfield  the 20th president of the United States who served from March 4, 1881 until his death on September 19, 1881 , two months after he was shot by an assassin is no exception.    rsk

James Abram Garfield was one of the most extraordinary men ever elected president. Born into abject poverty, he rose to become a wunderkind scholar, a Civil War hero, a renowned congressman, and a reluctant presidential candidate who took on the nation’s corrupt political establishment. But four months after Garfield’s inauguration in 1881, he was shot in the back by a deranged office-seeker named Charles Guiteau. Garfield survived the attack, but become the object of bitter, behind-the-scenes struggles for power—over his administration, over the nation’s future, and, hauntingly, over his medical care. Meticulously researched, epic in scope, and pulsating with an intimate human focus and high-velocity narrative drive, The Destiny of the Republic brings alive a forgotten chapter of U.S. history.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/indivisible-book-review-daniel-webster-one-and-inseparable-11668182673?mod=article_inline

On March 7, 1850, Daniel Webster rose on the floor of the U.S. Senate and thunderously declared his support for the Fugitive Slave Act—the linchpin of a package of measures known as the Compromise of 1850. He unsparingly blamed abolitionists for agitating public feeling and accused the North of failing to do its constitutional duty by returning escaped freedom-seekers to their owners. Calling for a strong law that would give the South what it wanted, he boomed: “Let us not be pigmies in a case that calls for men!”

The South, not surprisingly, loved Webster’s speech, but the opponents of slavery were appalled. Thirty years earlier, standing on Plymouth Rock on the bicentenary of the Pilgrims’ landing, Webster had denounced slavery as an “odious and abominable” disgrace to Christianity and civilized values. Although never an abolitionist, he had long declared himself an enemy of human bondage.

In the wake of Webster’s support for the Compromise of 1850, the abolitionist Theodore Parker likened Webster to Benedict Arnold, while Ralph Waldo Emerson, a longtime admirer, wrote: “The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan.” In this case, Webster’s effort to keep the country unified—in the face of bitter divisions that threatened to break it apart—led him away from his often-proclaimed concern for the enslaved. He defended his support for the Fugitive Slave Act as not only principled but imperative, given the exigencies of the time.

In “Indivisible,” Joel Richard Paul, a historian of the early republic and a law professor at the Hastings College in San Francisco, describes the extraordinary political ascent of the man who was known as the “Godlike Daniel” and widely hailed as America’s greatest orator. Webster’s career also serves as the armature for Mr. Paul’s analysis of the forces that shaped American nationalism during the first half of the 19th century.

https://www.realclearbooks.com/articles/2022/11/01/the_general_and_mrs_hemingway_862199.html

The following is an adapted excerpt from “Taking Berlin: The Bloody Race to Defeat the Third Reich” by Martin Dugard.

General James Gavin was a dangerous man.

Tall, powerful, charismatic. Abandoned by his parents at age two and adopted by a coal miner. Dropped out of school in eighth grade, enlisted in the army at seventeen, went on to graduate West Point and rise through the ranks, becoming a two-star general at just thirty-seven. Paratrooper with four combat jumps to his credit, including the Normandy D-Day invasion. The “Jumping General” was always in the lead C-47 and first man leaping out the door: thirteen-inch Randall knife strapped to his rig, .45 holstered on the right hip, and M-1 carbine wedged into his parachute harness.  He used each of these weapons with deadly precision.

But on October 15, 1944, General James Gavin met his match.

The last year of World War II saw combat on an epic scale, from D-Day in June, Market Garden in September, and the grizzly winter fighting of Hurtgen Forest and Battle of the Bulge. To the east, the Soviet Union’s massive and now often overlooked Operation Bagration decimated Nazi Germany. Every day of fighting was focused around the eventual capture of the Nazi German capital of Berlin and bringing the war to a close.

Gavin and the unicorn who would become his unlikely lover and confidante could lay claim to playing vital roles in these pivotal months – for better and worse.

The left has corrupted the U.S. legal system. Wielding the law as a weapon, arrogant judges and lawless prosecutors are intimidating, silencing, and even imprisoning Americans who stand in the way of their radical agenda. Their “enemies list” even includes parents who dare to speak up for their children at school board meetings.

In this shocking new book, Senator Ted Cruz takes readers inside the justice system, showing how the wrong hands on the levers of power can strangle liberty, crush opposition, and wreck lives. The notion of a “Democratic” or “Republican” Department of Justice is outrageous. That institution should safeguard the Constitutional rights of all Americans. Justice Corrupted will equip patriots and lovers of liberty to hold their government accountable.

Today the Jewish population of the world is about 14.8 million, 0.2% of the 7.95 billion worldwide population and yet in discussing hate crimes and diversity we seem to count for nothing. As a reviewer describes it below, this book is essential reading for those concerned about this concerning fact…..rsk

Jews Don’t Count is a book for people who consider themselves on the right side of history. People fighting the good fight against homophobia, disablism, transphobia and, particularly, racism. People, possibly, like you.

It is the comedian and writer David Baddiel’s contention that one type of racism has been left out of this fight. In his unique combination of close reasoning, polemic, personal experience and jokes, Baddiel argues that those who think of themselves as on the right side of history have often ignored the history of anti-Semitism. He outlines why and how, in a time of intensely heightened awareness of minorities, Jews don’t count as a real minority: and why they should.

https://www.jihadwatch.org/2022/10/americas-troubled-middle-eastern-ivory-towers

“Since the earliest days of Americans’ engagement with the Middle East, U.S. officials have looked to Americans associated with the region’s universities to advance U.S. interests,” writes commentator and political veteran Pratik Chougule. His recent, intriguing book, American Universities in the Middle Fast and U.S. Foreign Policy: Intersections with American Interests, details how such policies “have yielded mixed results” amidst the greater Middle East’s conflicted politics.  

As Chougule discussed in a recent interview, his case studies of American universities established in the Middle East begin with nineteenth-century Christian missionaries. They saw American academic excellence as a means of introducing Muslim societies to the Bible. Such evangelicals founded in 1866 the Syrian Protestant College, forerunner to the American University of Beirut (AUB), and in 1919 the American University of Cairo (AUC).

Until World War II, the private universities AUB and AUC remained isolated American presences in the Middle East, but American government aloofness from the region changed dramatically during the Cold War. At AUB, the “U.S. government came to view the university as a strategic asset,” particularly as, among other reasons, AUB “administrators had developed close ties to regional governments with oil reserves,” Chougule observes. Meanwhile, since AUC’s founding president Charles Watson, “six of AUC’s eleven presidents previously served in the U.S. government in diplomatic and military roles.” By 1978, AUC was the “only America higher education institution to receive more than half of its funds” from the United States government, Chougule notes.  

Growing American interest in the Middle East came with a price, particularly given American support for the state of Israel, a deeply unpopular move at AUB, AUC, and in the wider region. “Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, AUB administrators expended political capital to lobby Washington against the Zionist movement,” Chougule writes. Similarly, AUC faculty members have endorsed university resolutions denouncing Egypt’s 1979 peace agreement with Israel, both in 1979 and 2008.

“Regional leaders had to pay a greater political price to welcome an American higher education presence in their countries” after American recognition of Israel in 1948, Chougule notes. Conflict with Israel often made campus peace impossible. “By the 1970s, protests related to the Arab-Israeli conflict overwhelmed AUB,” he observes.  

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-sassoons-book-review-hazards-of-fortune-11666360783?mod=article_inline

The Jewish makers of modern finance have not gone unchronicled. Bookshelves creak beneath Rothschild tomes. The Lehman brothers have their story in lights on Broadway, and the ancient union of Goldman and Sachs has just made headlines again with mass staff layoffs. There is plenty of life left in these oligarchies.

The founders liked to keep wealth within the family, or at least within their circle. Jacob Schiff, John Pierpont Morgan’s chief adversary, gave his daughter in marriage to a Warburg. When in 1878 Hannah de Rothschild, England’s richest heiress, broke ranks by marrying the Earl of Rosebery, a future prime minister, no male Rothschild attended her wedding. Upon Hannah’s early death, however, they reclaimed her body for burial in a Jewish cemetery. Such habits die hard.

Tales of the super-rich never cease to fascinate. Stephen Birmingham’s “Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York” (1967) spent dozens of weeks on the bestseller list. “The Lehman Trilogy” has been staged in 24 languages. It’s not just the rags-to-riches fable that keeps the audience engrossed. There is a much deeper curiosity in those who made mountains of money and somehow managed to keep it.

The present story is one of a family that lost it all.

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