RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.momentmag.com/book-review

Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures
by Adina Hoffman

The great French film director Jean-Luc Godard called Ben Hecht a “genius” who “invented 80 percent of what is used in Hollywood today.” Israeli leader Menachem Begin, speaking at Hecht’s packed funeral in Manhattan in 1964, said Hecht not only “wrote stories…he made history.” Yet most modern American Jews have likely never heard of Hecht, despite his eminence as a playwright, best-selling novelist and screenwriter of a host of Hollywood film classics, including Scarface, Twentieth Century, The Front Page, Gunga Din and Notorious.

Hecht was also a pivotal figure in American Jewish history—in bringing the Holocaust to the attention of the American public in real time during the height of World War II, and in aiding one of the most extreme of Zionist underground groups in its violent campaign against British forces in Palestine, thus helping create the conditions for the birth of Israel.

Adina Hoffman’s richly informative new biography is part of the Yale University Press’s acclaimed Jewish Lives series of short interpretative biographies covering a wide range of Jewish figures, from authors to philosophers to politicians to entertainers. Her book is a fine introduction to a seminal figure in American Jewish culture and Hollywood’s first century. But like a large and powerful man crammed into a suit three sizes too small, Ben Hecht’s life is simply too robust and complicated to be shoehorned into 220 pages of text. It’s not Hoffman’s fault: She was commissioned to write, in effect, a one-act play about a life that merits a four-hour opera and a six-part HBO series.

Hecht grew up in Racine, Wisconsin, where his parents, who had arrived from Belarus as teenagers, moved from the sweatshops of New York. After graduating from high school and lasting just three days at the University of Wisconsin, he escaped to Chicago, where he worked as a police reporter for the Chicago Daily News, wrote short stories and novels and hobnobbed with literary figures such as Carl Sandburg, Sherwood Anderson and Theodore Dreiser. He acquired the sandpaper lingo, flexible ethics and hard-liquor habits of the city newsrooms, learned how to write fast and facile prose, spent six months reporting on the toxic chaos of post-World War I Berlin and dumped his young, well-off, non-Jewish first wife for Rose Caylor, a novelist who stuck with him for the rest of his life despite his self-confessed tendency to sleep with every attractive woman he met.

http://thefederalist.com/2019/02/05/bureaucracy-wars-americans-control-government/
Expansion of federal agencies’ power over the last century has culminated in the rise of the Deep State, which is seeking to undermine presidential power.

Of all the domestic challenges America faces in government, the administrative state stands preeminent, not only in its size and scope, but in the threat it poses to liberty as such a formidable, fundamentally tyrannical institution. James Madison might as well have been describing the administrative state in Federalist 47, when he wrote: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

A new book, “Unmasking the Administrative State: The Crisis of American Politics in the Twenty-First Century,” by professors John Marini and Ken Masugi, explores the sprawling federal bureaucracy’s philosophical origins, chronicles its evolution, and provides a compelling argument that the Trump administration is attempting to curtail it. (Disclosure: The authors consulted with me for this book project and I received payment for my work.)

Marini and Masugi have played an outsized but underappreciated role in American political thought, focusing on the theory and practice of the mammoth, ever-ballooning, arguably unconstitutional––and certainly anti-constitutional––bureaucratic morass of which “Unmasking the Administrative State” serves an essential part.

https://quillette.com/2019/01/26/

In 1955, when a flushing toilet was still considered too offensive for the eyes of the movie-going public, it’s no surprise that a blackly comic novel about sex with children would cause a stir. Enter Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, the effusively written story of a 37-year-old literature professor who marries a widow in order to gain access to Lolita, her 12-year-old daughter. The star of Lolita is not Lolita herself, but Humbert Humbert, who hides his obsession with adolescent girls under a mask of tweedy old-world erudition. Humbert uses his position as narrator to lecture the reader on the many noble aspects of adult-on-child romance, and to extol his love for his adopted daughter/concubine. To many, Nabokov remains “the guy who wrote that book about pedophilia.”

Following its publication, Lolita was ignored, and then banned. Britain led the way, confiscating all copies of the novel entering the country, and France followed suit. Only months after its release did Lolita receive its first positive review from a respectable paper, the Sunday Times.

Responding to the Sunday Times, John Gordon, editor of the Sunday Express, spoke for Lolita’s moral critics: “Without doubt it is the filthiest book I have ever read. Sheer unrestrained pornography… Anyone who published it or sold it here would certainly go to prison. I am sure the Sunday Times would approve, even though it abhors censorship as much as I do.”

The first edition of Lolita was printed by Olympia Press, a publishing house where the pornographic bumped elbows with the merely provocative. Nabokov was not the first serious writer to take refuge with the seedy publisher: William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, Samuel Beckett’s Molloy and Robert Kaufman’s exposé Inside Scientology all had their first editions at Olympia. The Olympia imprint, however, did little to improve Lolita’s credibility.

In the 2010s, as hand-wringing over the moral effects of art has grown fashionable once more, Lolita has been subjected to fresh scrutiny. In Russia, an ascendant religious Right has sought to discredit Nabokov as an un-Russian cosmopolitan and purveyor of deviance. The Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg has suffered particular abuse, ranging from graffiti accusing Nabokov of pedophilia to having vodka bottles containing Bible verses thrown through its windows.

http://thefederalist.com/2019/01/25/rediscovering-the-virtues-of-andrew-jackson/

Few Americans in the country’s history have received the polarized interpretations that President Andrew Jackson has. Once revered as the quintessential frontier hero, a statesman who saved rugged individualism from the corrupt forces of corporatists and government centralizers, Jackson has more recently been maligned as a brutal white supremacist who epitomized white, capitalist, and Southern bigotry in the 19th century.

On this point, there is an unlikely alliance between some conservatives and Marxists. Dinesh D’Souza attacks Jackson as an early “progressive Democrat” who ushered in the Democratic Party’s legacy of genocide. The neo-Marxist Howard Zinn, similarly, scorns him as a “slave owner,” a “killer of Indians,” and “the architect of the Trail of Tears.” Adding to the confusion, Jackson has been appropriated by rather unlikely allies, such as the government centralizers of the New Deal era, who argued that Jackson anticipated the New Deal’s concentration of power in the hands of the presidency for the purpose of fulfilling the will of the majority.

Against the facile misinterpretations and half-truths touted both by friends and foes of President Jackson, Bradley Birzer’s In Defense of Andrew Jackson offers a thoughtful, refreshing, and timely analysis of our hopelessly misunderstood seventh president. Birzer, a historian at Hillsdale College, paints a vivid portrait of Jackson as both a man and as a statesman.

He should be perceived, Birzer demonstrates, not as the ancestor of majoritarian New Deal democracy but as a principled defender of traditional American republicanism. Eloquently written and amply supported by historical evidence, In Defense of Andrew Jackson serves as a sorely needed reminder of the republican principles that inspired so many Americans in the 19th century—principles that Americans need desperately.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/02/11/churchill-walking-with-destiny-book-review/

Churchill: Walking with Destiny, by Andrew Roberts (Viking, 1,152 pp., $40)

We might ask ourselves which is worse — disdain for Winston Churchill or simple ignorance of this colossal figure and his place in history. Ignorance may be unsurprising in a period when, as a recent poll shows, many young people think Churchill a character from fiction. But the disdain can come only from minds corrupted by propaganda and laced with ingratitude for Western civilization and, just as much, for those who have sacrificed for its defense in those darker days before our own brilliantly flabby, righteous age arrived. The fact that astronaut Scott Kelly can be slapped down for tweeting a quote by Churchill (“In victory, magnanimity”) on grounds that the great man was so clearly a “racist” is regrettable enough. That the ill-schooled Kelly so quickly apologized to trolls tells us much about the desperately low tone of our culture these days.

So perhaps yet another biography of Churchill, one of the most written-up men of the last century — this is the 1,010th biography, Roberts notes — doesn’t need to justify itself after all. This is true most especially when the British historian Andrew Roberts writes it. Churchill’s world and its environs have been so richly and perspicaciously documented by Roberts for decades that the real oddity would be his reaching the end of a fruitful career as a historian of vast events and great men with no such tome to his credit.

And a tome any proper biography of Churchill must be. Little else can do justice to a man whose stupendous political journey lasted over 60 years and who died just past his 90th birthday. With nearly a thousand pages of chiseled prose, Roberts allows himself the room to lay out all the highlights and not a few sidelights of his subject’s long and varied life, following him from a benighted childhood and on to Harrow and Sandhurst, through military and journalistic triumphs and misadventures from Cuba to Sudan, India, and South Africa, and then by the age of 25 to Parliament, from which point the rest would be history. The result is a tour de force of scrupulous selection and astute appraisal, perhaps the best full-scale biography to date in a field where the competition has been crowded and stiff.

Support for Nazism in a post-World War I-weary America was far more extensive than previously realized. In his new book, Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States, Bradley W. Hart reveals the sizable network of Nazi sympathizers, spies and supporters in the US during the 1930s and early 1940s.

Using newly available archives, Hart, an assistant professor at California State University, Fresno, reveals how key figures in US government, business, academia and the priesthood – along with German Americans – aspired to bring Nazi ideology to the US and keep the country out of World War II. Hart pores through unsealed archives and personal papers to tell the story of Hitler’s domestic advocates. Prominent isolationist groups – the German American Bund, the Friends of the New Germany, the Silver Legion and the America First Committee – politicians, corporations and universities, plus leaders such as industrialist Henry Ford, famed aviator Charles Lindbergh and celebrity priest Father Charles Coughlin, endeavored to advance Nazi ideology and cultivate support for the Third Reich in America. These individuals and entities not only pushed for isolationism and neutrality, they also distributed German propaganda, some with assistance from the German Embassy in Washington and German agents within the US.

Between 1933 and 1935, the Friends of New Germany – with an armed wing that engaged in brawls and painted swastikas on Manhattan synagogues – recruited 5,000 members, established two newspapers, and founded branches in five cities. After US authorities targeted the group’s leader for deportation, the group’s prominence was replaced by the German American Bund, with members largely drawn from recent German immigrants.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/book-review-leaders-myth-and-reality-stanley-mcchrystal/

In the new Leaders: Myth and Reality, history outshines theory despite the best efforts of McChrystal and his co-authors.

Leadership is the religion of America’s ambitious. Middle managers, hedge-fund executives, and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs alike make pilgrimage to conferences and peruse the bestselling breviaries on the subject. This month, high-school seniors who submitted college applications await judgment from admissions committees evaluating their “leadership experience.”

This societal obsession is not new. During the 19th century, sales of Plutarch’s Lives — the classic second-century study of great men — trailed only those of the Bible. And for all its misuse as a concept, leadership remains a desirable skill today, especially in wartime, for reasons Plutarch understood well. Describing the life of the Greek general Eumenes, he wrote: “As soon as the soldiers saw him they saluted him in their Macedonian dialect, and took up their shields, and striking them with their pikes, gave a great shout; inviting the enemy to come on, for now they had a leader.”

Few Americans today have led troops into battle. Fewer still have fought in multiple wars. During his 35-year career, U.S. Army general Stanley McChrystal led multinational forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, earning multiple times three medals — the Defense Distinguished Service Medal (twice), the Defense Superior Service Medal (twice), and the Legion of Merit (thrice) — that most soldiers never once receive. Four decades after he began fighting America’s wars, he remains active in American public life. He runs a leadership-advisory firm, frequents cable talk shows, teaches at Yale, and publishes books. In his latest, Leaders: Myth and Reality, he and coauthors Jason Mangone and Jeff Eggers turn to the study of leadership.

With Mangone and Eggers, themselves veterans (of the Marine Corps and Navy, respectively), McChrystal takes up the study of 13 deceased leaders. Adopting Plutarch’s style, they pair leaders for comparison: Maximilien Robespierre and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi are the Zealots, Martin Luther and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. are the Reformers, and so on.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/code-name-lise-review-the-wars-most-decorated-woman-11547245771

In October 1942, Odette Sansom, a housewife turned British spy, was holed up on Gibraltar waiting for passage to Nazi-occupied France to begin her mission. She had left her three daughters at a convent school in England, a decision so painful, she later said, that it paled in comparison to Nazi torture. She had endured training, learning to shoot, detonate explosives, encode messages and navigate by compass at night. She had tried and failed four times to get to France. At last she was just a boat ride away, but the Polish seaman charged with taking her refused.

She was a woman, he said. France was no place for her. Would she like to go dancing with him in Gibraltar instead?
Code Name: Lise

By Larry Loftis
Gallery, 360 pages, $27

Sansom was relentless. She would get there even if she had to swim, she told him. He commented that she would look good in a bathing suit. In the end, she did the only thing she could—she got him so drunk that he gave in.

Odette Sansom, née Brailly, would go on to become the most decorated woman of World War II—a member of the Order of the British Empire, a Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur, and the first woman awarded the George Cross, an award for “acts of the greatest heroism.” Her story was first told in print in 1949, followed by a film re-enactment the next year that made her a national heroine. It has been retold many times since. In “Code Name: Lise,” Larry Loftis tells it again for a new generation, reweaving the usual account of her wartime activities into a kind of nonfiction thriller.

It is a story that is inherently thrilling. “Shortly after ten the mist began to dissipate,” Mr. Loftis begins, “leaving them partially exposed.” He then flashes back to give a glimpse of Sansom’s childhood. Born in Amiens, France, she grew up visiting her father’s grave every Sunday with her brother and grandparents. A war hero, he had been killed in action when she was 6. When war returns, her grandfather said, it will be your duty to do as well as your father did.