Showing posts with label Jefferson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jefferson. Show all posts

Saturday, April 2, 2022

The Five People I Would Love To Have Dinner With

Marie Curie after receiving the first of two Nobel Prizes

 A friend keeps a changing list of the five people she wants to have dinner with. It would be a one-time dinner party. The guests can be contemporary or from any time past. 

I like the idea and decided to make my own version. I get to pick the dinner venue and get to say at what age my guest joins the party. Even if they are living, I want to say at what age they are at dinner. At dinner, everyone is fluent in English, or maybe everyone is fluent in French, but no translators: we understand each other.

Also, I added a sixth guest whom I know is on the top of the guest list of the majority of the current world. 

 1.  Marie Curie at age 52. By the time Marie Curie was 52 years old, World War I had ended and she had achieved things no one thought possible.  In 1903 at age 34 she received the Nobel Prize in Physics for pioneering research in radiation. Eight years later she received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of radium. She was the only person ever to win two Nobel Prizes in science. When World War I broke out she organized mobile x-ray labs that saved as many as a million lives of wounded soldiers. I want to talk to her when that terrible war is over.

2. Theodor Herzl at age 38. He is called the founder of Israel, yet he died more than 40 years before Israel became a country in 1948.  Herzl was the founder of modern Zionism and inspired Jews around the world to see the possibility of a Jewish homeland after 2,000 years of exile. In 1898 he went to Jerusalem at the same time as the Kaiser of Germany went to petition the Kaiser for support for a Jewish homeland. I want to talk to him after that trip.

3. John F. Kennedy at age 44. With nuclear threats by Russia in the air, I want to talk to JFK after he faced down the Soviet Union in the Cuban Missile Crisis. The world was on the brink of nuclear war, and Kennedy brought the confrontation to a peaceful conclusion.  Nikita Krushchev was out of power within two years after losing to Kennedy.  There is a lot to love in what JFK did. 

4.  Alexis de Tocqueville at age 30. In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville began a nine-month journey in America. He was 26. In 1835, when he was 30, the first volume of his Democracy in America was published.  This 900-page book is the single best work ever published on politics in the United States of America, maybe the best book about America, period. Abridged versions omit the heart-rending descriptions of slavery and the treatment of the First Americans. When I read it again, I will read the translation by Harvey Mansfield. His lectures on Tocqueville are wonderful.

5.  Thomas Jefferson at age 33. In his biography of Thomas Jefferson, Jon Meacham describes a man who in  addition to all of his other qualities was a wonderful dinner guest. He would stop at a rural tavern and eat with whomever was at the table. One man wrote he only found out much later that the man who was curious about everything and everyone was also the man who wrote The Declaration of Independence.  In 1776 when he wrote the founding document of America, Jefferson was 33. In his draft, Jefferson called for the abolition of slavery in the new nation. The Continental Congress removed the passage.  I would like to have Jefferson at dinner before he became the 3rd President of the U.S.  In a famous toast at a White House dinner in honor of 49 Nobel Prize winners, President John F. Kennedy said, 

I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” 

6. Volodymyr Zelenskyy this month. Courage is always admirable and the center of the universe on the subject of courage is the President and people of Ukraine.  At the beginning of 2022, Volodymyr Zelensky was the unpopular President of a poor country. Now he is Winston S. Churchill in Eastern Europe, the spokesperson for Democracy, the leader of the nation fought the Russian army to a standstill against every prediction. Zelenskyy is 44 years old. May he live to be 100.

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Where with the dinner take place?  At Maison Fournaise. I wrote about this restaurant earlier this week. It is a victim of COVID, but it can come back for this dinner.  We will eat on the porch where Renoir painted "The Boating Party."



Sunday, February 20, 2022

1776 by David McCullough: Book 9 of 2022

 

I bought this book more than a year ago. A friend who teaches literature said he has read this book every couple of years for more than a decade.  He has read several books by David McCullough and 1776 is his favorite.  

I just finished a biography of Thomas Jefferson and decided now was the time to read about the most fateful year in American history.  The book is even better than my friend Ray led me to believe.  The story is riveting from end to end, and the end is the best. The drama of the battles for Trenton and Princeton kept me reading intently right to the final paragraph.  

The events of the year provide an arc that would make a good movie script.  The first battle of 1776 is the highest moment for America. The long seige of Boston ends when Washington puts a battery of cannon atop Dorchester Heights in one night without the British knowing what was happening.  In the evening the Heights are empty, in the morning nearly two dozen guns are emplaced behind revetments dragged up the hill by two thousand men.  

Within days the British are on the way to Halifax in defeat.

The triumph is followed by a long string of defeats in late summer in New York ending with the loss of Fort Washington with nearly 3,000 Americans captured. Several times in those campaigns, the British stopped just short of wiping out the American Army. As the year ended the bedraggled Americans were at a small fraction of the strength they started the year with. Lord Howe, the British commander decided to end the campaign and finish Washington off in the spring. 

The year almost ends with the Americans in total defeat. Then the night after Christmas, Washington personally led an attack in a blizzard across the Delaware River. The Americans defeated the 1,500 Hessians in Trenton, killing or capturing a thousand with five hundred fleeing. 

Along with the great drama of the story, is real insight into the character of the leaders, particularly George Washington.  The man who would become the first American President did not do everything right, be he carried himself with dignity in every situation. He was tireless and showed confidence in the worst situations.  And at the very worst times, as in the attack on Trenton, Washington was at the front of the attack and the perilous river crossing.  

The heroes of the story were young men. Washington was the old man of the Army at 44 years old.  Thomas Jefferson was 33 when the Declaration of Independence he wrote was read across the new nation.  Nathaniel Greene, one of Washington's best field commanders was also 33.  Colonel Henry Knox, the hero of the victory in Boston, was 25 when the British fled his guns.  One of his battery captains was Alexander Hamilton who was either 19 or 21 depending on when he was actually born, there is some doubt.  James Madison was 25 in 1776. John Adams who kept the Continental Congress focused on supporting the war had just turned 40.  

The founders of America were young men of great physical courage who fought for an ideal that has become a beacon of democracy to the world.   

In two years, I will re-read this book along with my friend Ray.

First eight books of 2022:


The Life of the Mind
by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen


Friday, February 4, 2022

Book 7 of 2022: Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

 

In a famous toast at a White House dinner in honor of 49 Nobel Prize winners, President John F. Kennedy said, 

I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” 

I started this book last year and finished it last week.  I am reading The Federalist Papers along with this biography and have reached Federalist 24. After the insurrection on January 6 of last year, I wanted to read about the beginning of democracy in America as the end of democracy approaches.  

The journey has been delightful.  I knew much more about the Revolutionary War than about the politics that led to the nation founded after that war.  

Most importantly, I now can see how much Thomas Jefferson did to preserve our democracy at its beginning.  It seems strange from this far remove to see the strife in the first years of America.  Jefferson's arch rival in George Washington's cabinet was Alexander Hamilton. Jefferson saw the royalist sympathies of Hamilton and was worried he would lead America into either subservience to the English crown or in establishment of an American monarchy.  

At the moment of America's beginning in 1776, it was Jefferson, age 33, who wrote the first draft of the Declaration of Independence--a document so well and forcefully written it largely survived the debate and editing of the Continental Congress.  Although the most significant passage that did not survive debate was a resolution to end slavery with the founding of the new nation. Jefferson would try again after the war, but once the new Constitution was adopted in 1787, he never again made a serious effort to end slavery.  

Jefferson was the third President of the United States, following Washington and John Adams. Jefferson spent a lot of time in France and saw our relationship with France as crucial to maintaining independence.  In 1803, he knew that Napoleon was striving for dominance in Europe and would be ready part with territory in America. In the greatest land deal in the history of the world, Jefferson made the Louisiana purchase, pushing Congress hard to close the deal before the French changed their minds.  Jefferson acquired the vast territory for four cents per acre, a total of $15 million.  The United States of America immediately stretched to the Pacific Ocean. 

Jefferson was far from perfect, as are we all. Jon Meacham's book is clear on his flaws.  He wrote the words that inspired independence for America, he struggled to keep America from falling into monarchy or tyranny. He led America in a way that set it on a course to remain free, if imperfect. 

During his presidency, Jefferson did everything he could to keep the United States out of war. He believed that when a republic goes to war the forces of tyranny become more dangerous. The history of the Roman Republic said this clearly. The road to eventual tyranny was paved with wars. 

Certainly in the past half century, the line from the lies that kept us in the Vietnam War, followed by the Gulf War leaving Saddam Hussein in power, the War in Afghanistan, and the Iraq War all contributed to America electing a President ready to overthrow the government to stay in power.  

Jefferson kept the forces of monarchy from gaining control in the first years of the new American government.  I hope there is still time to keep those who want to establish a Mar-A-Lago monarchy from taking power.  Jefferson, alone at dinner in the White House, was smart enough to find a way to do that. 

First six books of 2022:

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen


Thursday, March 2, 2017

The Jefferson Library and the Fall of Rome




Inside the Library of Congress is the Jefferson Library--the 4,929 books Thomas Jefferson owned and read during his long life. His library includes books in English, French, Italian, Latin, Ancient Greek and Hebrew that I saw.

As I scanned the titles, I thought of the brave and brilliant men who founded America: Jefferson was a Colonel in the Virginia Militia and served in the Revolutionary Army. George Washington was the Commander in Chief of the colonial armies and our first President.

The greatest leaders of the Rome were also brilliant and brave men, notably Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus and the philosopher-king Marcus Aurelius, maybe the greatest of all.

Many historians place the fall of Rome in 476 A.D. when the last Roman emperor, Romulus, disappears from the historical record.  But parts of the empire held together for another century under the rule of illiterate barbarians. The empire that was once ruled by Marcus Aurelius who wrote philosophy during his campaigns on the frontiers of the Roman Empire, was finally ruled by men who could not read.

The thousand-year Roman empire existed for another century under the barbarian emperors. In just over two centuries America has descended from a man of letters to a man of twitter.

I hope we last another century.


Not So Supreme: A Conference about the Constitution, the Courts and Justice

Hannah Arendt At the end of the first week in March, I went to a conference at Bard College titled: Between Power and Authority: Arendt on t...