Finished!

So last night I stayed up very late to finish Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals, her excellent multi-biography of Abraham Lincoln and his war cabinet. I am very sad that Abraham Lincoln has left my life.

But, the book has me thinking about a lot of things...


One of them is James Mann's equally excellent chronicle of George Bush's war cabinet, Rise of the Vulcans. Could DKG's book be read as an implicit rebuke of W's management style? It details the way in which Lincoln assembled not only his three main rivals for the 1860 presidential nomination, but also a group of men with a wide range of viewpoints about the issues of the day; i.e., the Republican coalition of the time. Mann's book details the balancing act between Colin Powell, on the one hand, and the "neo-cons" (Wolfowitz, Cheney, etc., etc.) on the other hand. Condi Rice gets a lot of blame for being unable to smooth over this friction, but so does Bush. Lincoln managed, through a coolness of temper and a political sensitivity that no one alive today seems to possess, to balance these competing interests and harness the full potential of each of his cabinet officers. Maybe Bush isn't as much of a "decider" as he thinks he is. OR perhaps the problem was that there wasn't enough balance - there was just Powell vs. EVERYONE ELSE.

Another is the self-made man, something that I like to think I can identify with. But, moreover, I've been reading quite a few presidential biographies lately, and some of the best have come from very little (Lincoln and Truman, in particular). Ever Roosevelt, who never wanted for money, nearly lost his life to polio. And he had a messed up family, to boot.

And there's more - much more - on Lincoln. To come. Promise. Especially about rhetoric. And using stories to illustrate points.

If nothing else, read Team of Rivals. It's worth all 750 pages.

On Saturday night I went to see Iron Man, which was pretty good. Like Transformers, which was basically an ad for the US military and the automobile industry, there was a certain amount of weird post-9/11 jingoism in it, but Robert Downey, Jr. is (as always) really amazing. The friend who went with me said it was a movie for neo-cons, which might be true. At the very least the lothario-like Jeff Bridges was a parody of hawkish neo-con-ness.