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The War of the World/ I Wish I'd Been There

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I Wish I'd Been There

Review by Geoffrey Wawro Byron Hollinshead has gathered some fine American historians to satisfy the craving that we all have when we read well-paced, engrossing history: “I wish I had been there.” I wish I could have felt the emotion and electricity in the air; I wish I could have watched the great man in action, or seen the scoundrel get his comeuppance. All great historians have this in common: they study and write history because they can feel it in their bones, and because they are curious about the past. Writing great history involves absorbing and reconstructing the ambiance of the past. The essays in this book do that. William Leuchtenburg places us in the White House in March 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson—a great American defined by his breathtaking contradictions—decides to force a show-down with Alabama Governor George Wallace on the issue of civil rights and segregation. Wallace took a hard racist line so as not to be “out-nigguhed”—as he put it—by opportunistic challengers. Johnson vowed to stop atrocities like the Selma violence and bring Alabama into line with the rest of the country, but without inciting “Civil War all over again” or “making a martyr of Wallace.” LBJ’s solution was to summon Wallace to that famous meeting in the White House, where he resolved to break “the runty little bastard.” He did, and Leuchtenburg’s depiction of it is thrilling. Johnson’s defeat of Wallace was witnessed and described by contemporaries. Some of the historians in this book use their knowledge of the era to reconstruct imagined meetings that certainly happened, but for which we have no published record. This too is an interesting exercise. Robert Dallek imagines one of the many meetings that John and Bobby Kennedy would have held on the subject of America’s deepening involvement in Vietnam. The “backgrounder” each historian provides to the “I wish I had been there” episode is often as good as the encounter itself. Dallek, a superb political biographer, expertly runs us through JFK’s performance in Cuba and elsewhere and his recorded pronouncements on Laos and Vietnam before launching into the imagined conclave with RFK. “Desirable” as U.S. aims are, Jack insists, “we lack the power to compel the outcome we’d prefer.” Is Dallek’s analysis colored by the world he sees around him today, where powerful America (again) hesitates to make long-term investments in faraway, alien societies? Kennedy grasped that essential American political trait; George W. Bush did not. Jay Winik places us beside Lincoln on the day he was shot. He was happy, and seemed to feel the dead weight of the long war sliding at last from his shoulders. He gave his best bodyguard the night off and went to the theater, where he was murdered. Winik recreates the panic that swept through America, as its wartime shepherd vanished in a flash, to be replaced by Andrew Johnson, “widely written off as a drunk and a buffoon.” I Wish I Had Been There reminds readers of the urgency and emotion of history. You will watch it unfold, and feel the weight and pressure of momentous decisions. 400 pages • 6 1/8" x 9 1/4" ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Byron Hollinshead is president of American Historical Publications, a producer of books in history for adults and for children. Previously, he was president of American Heritage Publishing Company and Oxford University Press, Inc. He was publisher of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. Hollinshead has been a consultant to several public television documentaries in history including, most recently, Freedom: A History of US, a sixteen-part series from Kunhardt Productions. Show...

The War of the World

Niall Ferguson—one of Time magazine's "100 Most Influential People"—examines what he calls the "Age of Hatred" and sets out to explain what went wrong with the 20th century. On a quest that takes him from the Siberian steppe to the plains of Poland, from the streets of Sarajevo to the beaches of Okinawa, Ferguson reveals an age turned upside down by economic volatility, multicultural communities torn apart by the irregularities of boom and bust, an era poisoned by the idea of irreconcilable racial differences, and a struggle between decaying old empires and predatory new states. Show...