Book Notes on 'Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S Truman'

Book Notes and Review of 'The Patriots by Winston Groom'

## Impressions

I was let down by this book, but only by a little.

I started reading it on July 4, thinking I would learn the history of the Declaration of Independence and the early days of America. Aside from a brief mention of the paper signed by Mr. John Hancock, it wasn't what I was expecting at all.

Instead of a grand narrative of the political battlefields of 1776, it's a grand narrative of the actual battlefields of 1776, mainly, the first year Washington's rebel army faced off against the lobster backs.

The mistake was mine and mine alone. I should have read the description more, and not just the title. Once I understood the premise of the book, I was delighted to learn about the Revolutionary War.

People parade George Washington around as one of the best generals ever, but the first half of this book tells a very different picture. Was he a great general? Yes. But he was also indecisive and let his emotions get the best of him; he was constantly on the retreat from the British, and was always fighting Congress for more money and men, since he could really perform only as good as the soldiers he had.

Still, it was a miracle the American Revolution was a success, and without George Washington, who knows what would have happened?

From the last chapter:

> Especially for those men who had been with Washington and who knew what a close call it was at the beginning—how often circumstance, storms, contrary winds, the oddities of strengths of individual character had made the difference—the outcome seemed little short of a miracle.

---
## Notes

**There’s great reward in being able to see things as they are, and not be fooled by optimism**

David McCullough on what made George Washington a great commander during the early days of the Continental Army:

"In truth, the situation was worse than they realized, and no one perceived this as clearly as Washington. Seeing things as they were, and not as he wished them to be, was one of his salient strengths."

Later, McCullough writes:

“Seeing things as they were, not as he wished they were, was known to be one of Washington’s salient strengths…”

Once, during the Siege of Boston, Washington replied to a message from someone complaining about the situation, saying, "...we must bear up against them, and make the best of mankind as they are, since we cannot have them as we wish."

---

**In a position of power, respect is more valuable than likability or friendship**

Washington was “amiable” and “modest” during his time as commander, but he intentionally set himself above others. He advised his officers, “Be easy…but not too familiar, lest you subject yourself to a want of that respect, which is necessary to support a proper command.”

He wanted his soldiers to respect him more than like him; he was to be seen as their commanding officer, not a friend.

---

**Plan for the circumstances**

In the heat of battle in New York, Washington’s presence was requested in Philadelphia to consult with Congress. Meanwhile, arrangements were made “for fast horses to be held at ready intervals along the road, so that if necessary he could get back to New York with ‘utmost expedition.’”

---

**Appeal to the benefits (or fears) of winning (or losing) when trying to spurn action in someone**

Washington: “The hour is fast approaching, on which the honor and success of this army, and the safety of our bleeding country depend. Remember officers and soldiers that you are free men, fighting for the blessings of liberty—that slavery will be your portion, and that of your posterity, if you do no acquit yourselves like men.”

---

Sir George Otto Trevelyan wrote about the American Revolution: "It may be doubted whether so small a number of men ever employed so short a space of time with greater and more lasting effects upon the history of the world."

---

Abigail Adams: "Affliction is a good man's shining time."

---

David McCullough:

> He was not a brilliant strategist or tactician, not a gifted orator, not an intellectual. At several crucial moments he had shown marked indecisiveness. He had made serious mistakes in judgement. But experience had been his great teacher from boyhood, and in this his greatest test, he learned steadily from experience. Above all, Washington never forgot what was at stake and he never gave up.

---

## Books mentioned

- *Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company in Conversation*
- *The Journal of Major George Washington*
- *The Crisis*, Thomas Paine

1776

If, like me, you've long wondered how Germany—after the Treaty of Versailles—was able to amass a big enough army and enough weapons to invade Poland and France, and wage war on Britain, just a few short years later, this is how: 1. They ignored the treaty and 2. Hitler played Neville Chamberlain like a violin.

*The Gathering Storm* is Winston Churchill's account of those events, and these are my notes.

Churchill's rise to fame in pre-World War Two British government largely stems on the fact that, for years, he raised warnings about Germany's build up of arms and soldiers, France's diminishing arms and soldiers, and was trying to raise alarm bells. No one listened, until, of course, they had no choice but to.

This first volume covers from the end of World War One, the signing of the Treaty of Versailles and what it was *supposed* to mean, Germany's eventual invasion of Poland, and Churchill's ascension to Prime Minister.

It is a very, very fun book to read. I'm quite looking forward to studying the next five volumes.
## Notes

**If you want to lead, you need the best information**

Churchill maintained relationships with people deep within the French and German governments. This "enabled me to form and maintain opinions which did not depend on what was published in the newspapers..."

---

In 1932, Churchill almost met Hitler in person. The meeting was cancelled after Churchill asked one of Hitler's confidants why he hated Jews. "How can any man help how he is born?" Writing about the cancellation, Churchill says, "Thus Hitler lost his only chance of meeting me."

Thought that was a cheeky way to write that.

---

**Disasters come fast. Though everything might look okay, decades can happen in minutes. Always be preparing; always be on the lookout.**

Churchill: "Wars come very suddenly"

---

Churchill had great faith in human's ability to do the impossible when circumstances demanded at. When the question was raised how Britain would defend against bombers, Churchill wrote:

> My experience is that in these matters, when the need is fully explained by military and political authorities, science is always able to provide something. We were told that it was impossible to grapple with submarines, but methods were found... Many things were adopted in the war which we were told were technically impossible, but **patience, perseverance, and, above all, the spur of necessity under war conditions, made men's brains act with greater vigour, and science responded to the demands...**

---

**Success isn't always about having the nicest equipment or fanciest tools, but rather using what you *do* have better than anyone else.**

Writing about the British radar system, Churchill admits the Germans "developed a technically efficient radar system which was in some respects ahead of our own." But also explains that the Germans were surprised by "the extent to which we had turned our discoveries into practical effect... **it was our operational efficiency rather than novelty of equipment that was the British achievement**."

---

**You never know when something seemingly bad will end up working out for your good.**

Churchill:

> How little can we foresee the consequences either of wise or unwise action, of virtue or of malice! Without this measureless and perpetual uncertainty, the drama of human life would be destroyed... This was not the first time—or indeed the last—that I have received a blessing in what was at the time a very effective disguise.

That reflection came after Churchill's realization that not being formally connected to Chamberlain's administration was actually a good thing. When things needed to change, Parliament needed someone unattached and completely new to the government. Churchill was able to be this person.

At first, he was upset at not being picked to serve with Chamberlain, but then, as his reflection shows, it was a "blessing in...a very effective disguise."

---

**If you fight when you don't have to, you won't have to fight when you're forced to**

From the beginning, Churchill was an advocate of war. Not because he was a bloodthirsty scoundrel, but because he saw what was happening in Germany and how eerily similar it was to the first war. Churchill wanted to do whatever it took to prevent another full-fledged war.

Churchill reflects on the failure of the British government to act earlier:

> Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival.

That description fits lots of things in life.

If you wait to prioritize your marriage until it's on the brink of failure, it will be a much harder battle to fight than if you would've prioritized date nights and intentionally loved your spouse from the outset.

If you wait to get your finances in order until you're on the brink of bankruptcy, it will be a much more difficult challenge than if you started budgeting when you first began working.

If you wait to start working out and eating right until you have your first heart attack, getting healthy will be much more difficult than if you started doing it thirty years ago.

---

> Statesmen are not called upon only to settle easy questions. These often settle themselves. It is where the balance quivers, and the proportions are veiled in mist, that the opportunity for world-saving decisions presents itself.

Translation: No one is made great sitting on the sidelines, coasting along, making easy decisions. Great men and women are formed through difficult circumstances.

---

Churchill on Vyacheslav Molotov:

> I have never seen a human being who more perfectly represented the modern conception of a robot.

The Gathering Storm

JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century

## **Impressions**

<InlineImage src={https://res.cloudinary.com/dde1q4ekv/image/upload/v1690152207/9780306826139_oy2vdd.jpg} />

Whenever I watch a political thriller on Netflix I think, "No way, none of this stuff actually happens." *[Crooked](https://bookshop.org/p/books/crooked-the-roaring-20s-tale-of-a-corrupt-attorney-general-a-crusading-senator-and-the-birth-of-the-american-political-scan-nathan-masters/18618188?ean=9780306826139)* proved me wrong. This is a remarkable narrative non-fiction book about politics, Senate investigations, and bribery charges (I promise Nathan Masters makes all of that interesting) that goes all the way up to the top of the executive branch.

This book is about power, money, and the realization that any political office is just held by an ordinary person tempted by both of those things. It also sets the stage for one of the 20th Century's most notorious lawmen: J. Edgar Hoover and the birth of his shoe-shined black-suit slick-hair FBI. Reading this book helped shed some light on why Hoover was so ruthless in his documentation and the discipline special agents had to follow. Maybe he realized that without those things, a “secret police force” would do the deeds of the highest bidder.

## **Notes**

- I know a book will be good when it has a page titled “A Note to Readers” with this warning:

> This is a work of nonfiction, with no invented details or dialogue. Anything between quotation marks comes directly from historical sources, including FBI case files, Department of Justice records, newspaper reports, memoirs, archival collections, and the 3,338-page transcript of the Hearing Before the Select Committee on Investigation of the Attorney General.
>
- “When public officials were in the pocket of powerful interests, the odds would always be stacked against the little guy.”
- “Where else but a courtroom would a soot-stained miner and the mighty Anaconda Company be treated as equals?”
- The FBI first started as, essentially, a secret police force: the Bureau of Investigation. It was created in 1908 by executive action and was acting as the Justice Department’s in-house detective agency. It was not authorized by Congress.
- William Burns was the head of the Bureau Investigation and John Edgar Hoover was his young deputy.
- President Harding was a master at delivering “sonorous and empty remarks. It was his trademark. He even had a name for it–**bloviating**.”
- Calvin Coolidge was nicknamed “Silent Cal.” “Coolidge hated small talk and, although he tolerated social events, favored his own company to that of others. He slept nine hours every night, napped two hours in the afternoon, and in his waking hours went long stretches of time without opening his mouth, even during official functions.” He was “the sly and laconic Yankee rustic, who was cleverer than he appeared,” wrote one observer.
- Harry Daugherty hitched his train to President Harding throughout his whole career. This proved favorable when Harding was elected president, but disastrous after he died. Sure, he’d spent his life helping Harding navigate the ins and outs of political circumstances but, other than that, he hadn’t really **done** anything. After Harding died, his time as a free rider was coming to an end. That’s the danger of hitching your life and career to the success of someone else’s train.
- Just because someone votes to do something, or says they will do something, doesn’t mean they actually will. Robert M. La Follette understood this when, after presenting enough evidence to get a unanimous Senate vote to authorize an inquiry by the Committee on Public Land and Surveys, no one actually did anything. After seven months, the committee hadn’t even had their first meeting yet. The Senators vote was more for show. If something ever ***did*** turn up that was evidence of foul play, they wanted to be able to look back on the vote and say, “Look, we voted for that to pass,” but that doesn’t mean they were incentivized, or willing, to actually do any real work. (51)
- After Senator Burton Wheeler made his first address to the floor, though it was unprecedented he did so being a junior Senator, some people helped out. Sen. William Borah of Idaho said, “Wheeler, there’s a chance for you to make a reputation for yourself…If you’re honest, and you’ve got ordinary intelligence and you’re willing to work.” “How do you figure that,” Wheeler replied. “So damn few want to work.”The bar for doing something great in life isn’t as high as you think. With some hard work and honest intelligence, you can go quite far.
- Wheeler was willing to go outside of the Senate norms to do things no junior senator had done before (crossing party lines) and found out he could do things better that way. Maybe that’s the lesson with bureaucracies, sure there are rules and stupid regulations people have to follow, but if you’re willing to work outside of those norms, respectively of course, you might actually get stuff done.
- “Public trust ultimately came down to nothing more than the private integrity of individuals…A Justice Department true to its name hinged on the honesty of one man.”**No matter how powerful the position someone may have, it's held by a human being. One who is tempted by power, love, money, and success just as much as anyone else is.**
- The Bureau of Investigation was initially created to be just an in-house detective agency for the Justice Department, created under Roosevelt. But when America entered the First World War, the Bureau, at the orders of President Wilson, doubled its detective force and increased its budget to nearly $2 million. Its new job entailed protecting the nation against enemies – foreign and domestic. By 1920, it had 579 sworn field agents assigned to headquarters all across the nation. By that time, it was a full-fledged domestic intelligence agency, doing just about all they can to gain access to and information about anyone who had left-leaning political philosophies.
- **When you embark on a mission, be crystal clear about what your goal is**. For Burton Wheeler, he didn’t want to convict Daughtery in a Court of Law, that would entail a whole other host of problems and resources, he just wanted him out as Attorney General because he was abusing his post. So, all Wheeler had to do was dig up and present evidence in a way that the court of public opinion would resonate with, so they would put enough pressure on Coolidge to get rid of this bad man. Knowing that was the goal, it made it easy for Wheeler to sort through evidence and know what to present, and how, to tell the best story.In the epilogue, the author writes, “Wheeler’s particular genius–which seems almost counterintuitive today–was to seek justice instead in the court of public opinion. There, unbound by the rules of the criminal justice system, his freewheeling investigation forced Daugherty’s retirement from public life and consigned America’s most corrupt attorney general to the judgement of history. For all his successes, Burton Wheeler couldn’t guarantee another Harry Daugherty or William J. Burns would never undermine justice again. But he did show that it was a fight worth undertaking.
- Harry Daugherty had been able to get away so long with his swindling because he had Jess Smith do all of the dirty work. “In matters of official business, Harry Daugherty met with no one but Jess Smith, who then worked out the details with other parties. Two-way meetings were the rule. Three-person conferences were forbidden: too many witnesses.”
- After Coolidge replaced Daugherty as Attorney General, Felix Frankfurter, a Harvard Law professor, cofounder of the American Civil Liberties Union, and former Justice Department lawyer, told Stone, “The key to [your] problem is, of course, men. **Everything is subordinate to personnel, for personnel determines the governing atmosphere and understanding from which all questions of administrative organization take shape.**”Stone appointed J. Edgar Hoover to the head of the Bureau of Investigation, and Hoover accepted on certain conditions: He said, that “The Bureau must be divorced from politics and not be a catch-all for political hacks. Appointments must be based on merit. Second, promotions will be made on proved ability and the Bureau will be responsible only to the Attorney General.”Stone: “I wouldn’t give it to you under any other conditions.”
- “Over these next few months, which would be so critical for the transforming the troubled agency into ‘the greatest detective force in the world,’ as [Hoover] described his goal to the press, the attorney general would personally supervise its major investigations, approve all hiring decisions, and, most importantly, steer the Bureau through a series of major policy changes.”**Doing something great requires actions that don’t scale.**


Crooked: The Roaring '20s Tale of a Corrupt Attorney General, A Crusading Senator, And the Birth of the American Political Scandal

People who spend their time debating others online are throwing their precious hours of human existence into a pit they'll never retrieve them from. It's the most useless act someone can partake in, even more so than playing video games or watching *Rick and Morty*.

No one is going to change their mind on abortion, gun-control, or any other hot button topic because of a response written by User07373 on FaceBook or Twitter. I'm sorry, but it's just not going to happen.

Sadly, the same thing can be said about real life interactions as well, though just not as strongly. If you have a 1% chance of winning someone over online from a debate, you might have a 7% chance of winning someone over in real-life. It's not much, but it's honest work I guess.

The reason it's so hard to win people over is because the issues are so complex and nothing is black and white. Another reason, though, is that most people approach complex debates in a horrible way. Ribbonfarm, a popular blog on the "constructions in magical thinking", [writes this](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/06/25/portals-and-flags/):

> The point of complex debates is not to prove your side right and the other wrong. Smart people make this mistake most often, and end up losing before they ever get started. The point of complex debate is always seduction: winning-over rather than winning. You do this not through logic or even novel insight, but by demonstrating a more fertile way of thinking. One that promises to throw up an indefinitely extended stream of surprises within an ever-widening scope.

In other words, someone doesn't win a debate by having an absurd amount of evidence and reason, but rather painting a beautiful picture of a new way of thinking. Or as Ribbonfarm puts it, "turning it into a portal to a hidden universe of thought."

The opposite action to opening a portal is planting a flag, which most people do so on top of a pile of circumstantial evidence, weak reasoning, and ever-complicating opinions and facts.

So how does one start to paint this ever-beautiful picture? By letting go of winning:

> All it takes is giving up the desire to “win” and the innate openness to experience that allows you to signal a readiness for adventure without even being conscious of it.

The scary thing with this approach is that it requires someone to give up power and control. That becomes the real thing you're "debating against."

On Ribbonfarm's Portal and Flags

Book Review and Summary: Revolt of the Public

Below is a bit of a political ramble as I'm trying to understand the political system (and Americans in general) more and more. I've been doing a lot of thinking about this lately and am trying to come to terms with a philosophy. Below is what I think are the roots of something important. I'm scared to hit publish on this because I'm not sure what the response will be. If you disagree, agree, or have thoughts, [I'd love to hear them](https://twitter.com/daltonmabery). Just please keep them rational and kind.

---

## Political, what?
The last presidential election was the first one I was old enough to vote for. Before then, I wasn't much of a political person, and I'm still not, but I did want to educate myself a bit more on political parties and some common ideas before pledging my very important vote.

As I studied more and more, I could not understand the idea of a political parties. I find it very troublesome when anyone outsources their linking to someone else. Political parties, on the most basic level, seem to be exactly that. Someone has a few beliefs about something, looks at which party identifies with those beliefs the closest, and then assumes that identity. The practical next steps of this scenario is that the person who adopted this party based on a few things they actually believed now assumes they believe everything that party stands for, whether or not they've done the intellectual research to take a stand on that specific topic or not.

This kills any nuance in political conversations, and therefore ruins those fun family dinners around the holidays when people from opposing parties are forced to eat from the same turkey. And that's what bothers me. Someone on the left thinks everyone on the right are evil and someone on the right thinks everyone on the left are crazy. There is no nuance in political discussions.

The only ads I see during election season are bashing the opposer and not promoting the policies and ideas of the candidate the advertisement was made for. So now, instead of being influenced by what someone plans to do in office, people are influenced by whichever story they believe the most about the opposite person. This is not a good thing.

The biggest problem that I see nowadays is the lack of important, structured debate on important issues. When a culture lacks the ability to have mature conversations about hot-button topics, the only road that lies ahead leads to stupidity with a dash of ignorance.

I'm not arguing for one side or the other. I think people who are radical on both sides of the political spectrum are important to have in the American democracy, as long those people can keep an open mind, admit when they're wrong, and be honest about the fact that no one really knows the best path forward. We're all just taking bets and hoping we're in a better place in 100 years than we were 100 years ago. If we knew what the right answer is, I don't think we'd be arguing.

Political Parties. Interesting...

## Impressions
I didn't have many impressions before reading this book, other than being excited by the beautiful design and color theory. I also assumed it to be of some importance because Stripe Press was the publisher. I'm happy to say it did not disappoint.

I wrote about this in [my summary/review of this book](https://www.daltonmabery.com/essays/book-review-and-summary-revolt-of-the-public), but Gurri's writing helped me navigate the world as I see it today, which will be invaluable for navigating the world in the future. It combines geopolitics, social phenomena, and historical events into a cohesive narrative about the world. It also gave me language to talk about certain political situations.

## Key Learnings
Under conditions of scarcity, sources of information become authoritative. Increase the access to information and you decrease the authority of any one person on that topic.

There are two groups going head to head right now, The Public and The Authorities. **The Public**, from Walter Lippmann: "is not a fixed body of individuals. It is merely the persons who are interested in an affair and can affect it only be supporting or opposing the actors." Guru agrees with this, but thinks the public today has become an actor: "It is composed of amateurs, and it had fractured into vital communities, each clustered around an affair of interest to the group." **Authority** pertains to the source. We believe something because of who said it. At an individual level, this standing is achieved by a professionalization. The person in authority is trained in a certain way and has access to hidden knowledge. But at an institutional level, there is lasting authority. This authority doesn't waiver with people. They have a certain connection to monopoly conditions on their field. These are government, corporations, research institutes, foundations, and so on.

Gurri's thesis is that a revolution in the nature and content of communication ended the top-down control elites exerted on the public during the industrial age. This is only true though, if we can show that information can actually influence the arrangement of power and create real-life effects and those effects have to be big enough to create a real crisis of authority.

We are, what Gurri calls, *homo informaticus* (HI), or information man. HI is literate and has access to newspapers, radio, movies, and TV. This is a new threat to the regime, because the public "with a longer reach may gain access to information that subverts its story of legitimacy." That story of legitimacy is currently the only thing holding the "public" to obeying/following the authorities power. The regime would try to control this new form of media, and can do so to a current extent, but the sheer volume of channels prohibits it from doing so completely. "As messages and images proliferate, it becomes progressively hard to determine exactly what their relationship is to the regime's justifying story."
This new channel of information broadens HI's field of vision to think about different worldviews. No longer is there one idea or opinion. "When judging his government, HI can then do so in light of alternative possibilities–different views of the same policy or event, different values invoked for an action or inaction, different performance by other governments, real or imagined." Since HI can't absorb *all* of the new information, he has to be selective. So he picks and chooses, as do other members of the public, who they listen to, what they watch, and inevitably, what they believe. Since all information has to either be mediated or recieved directly, the mass media mediators no longer can persuade the public to think one way about the regime.

The two groups came to a head in 2011, a period Gurri refers to as the "Phase Change." Most of the people, in each of the phase change events of 2011 were young, middle class, educated. "Sectarian ideals propelled them into politics." Neither, did any of the movements insist in a new way of governing, new policies or plans to move forward. They made no demands, but felt free to accuse.

Though the Occupy Wall Street movements didn't have large numbers compared to Tel Aviv or Egypt, it somehow tipped the scales for the public to distrust government institutions and with it, democracy. Their message was that the 1% tyrannized the other 99%, who was supposedly part of the march, but they didn't actually represent that 99%, only a small subset of people within that 99%. Somehow though, their message became interpreted as: "This is how the American public is feeling."

Thanks to the information sphere, the public sees their unmet expectations daily of the Center-based institutions. The public uses that information to attack the legitimacy of the institutions. Sometimes they're right in attacking the corruption, but other times they go to far. This all stems from the fact that the Center can't say "we don't know" and they're too busy making sure "bad science" from amateur's doesn't spread. This supposed confidence of certainty is received by the public as legit, until it isn't and they say something that isn't true or something happens that they said wasn't going to, because inevitably it will because they can't be certain of every little thing.

For a government to fail, two things must occur:

1. First some empirical event must occur that is perceived as a failure.
2. Second, The relationship between the government and the governed must somehow be ruptured. Trust must be broken for failure to have lasting consequences.

If the industrial age hierarchies of contemporary democracy are suffering a crisis of authority (they are), and if the public is on the move and expecting impossibilities (yes), then all things being equal, the system will continue to bleed away legitimacy–and there will be those who argue it should be put out of its misery. Gurri explains the road we're on leads to nihilism. The Nihilist heard George W. Bush say the war in Iraq was about weapons of mass destruction, but none were found there. He heard Obama say unemployment would be capped, only for millions to lose their job. But he doesn't see these as failures. He assumes the government are liars and cheaters. Without his digital devices, the nihilist would be nothing. Instead, he is overly informed about those few odd topics that obsess him, "and he produces a torrent of hard-core negations posted about about the world around him."

## Quotes
"When proof for and against approaches infinity, a cloud of suspicion about cherry-picking data will hang over authoritative judgement."

"Even the simplest human events constitute complex systems ruled by nonlinearities. Within such systems, teasing out a single episode and proclaiming it the prime mover makes as much sense as picking a grain of sand and calling it 'the beach'."

"The anxiety to control information in those who already controlled the guns should alert us that political power may be less "hard""

"Propaganda was the totalitarian's admission that his power wasn't total."
