This is the book by the Chief Counsel for the re-investigation of the Kennedy assassination that the House launched in the late 1970s. Cromwell's structure is scattershot. He doesn't develop a linear understanding of his issues with the Warren Commission (and boy, does he have issues with the Warren Commission); rather, each chapter hits from a different, and in many cases, unrelated angle. Some of it is interesting enough. His take on Oliver Stone's JFK actually heightens the value of the film, while at the same time it demolishes its value as an historical artifact. The big finding from Cromwell's work was the identification of a shot as being fired from the direction of the grassy knoll. Cromwell used up to date techniques to examine sound pulled from a motorcycle cop's open mic. He uses this data to state that there was by definition a conspiracy. He does not exonerate Lee Harvey Oswald as the assassin. Nor does he offer an opinion as to the identity of the alleged second shooter. The soundcheck has been re-examined in the decades since the House investigation, and opinion remains divided (insofar as I can determine) over whether or not Cromwell's acoustic team were correct. Cromwell frequently laments the passage of time since November 22, 1963. Even in 1978, when his committee investigated, the intervening fifteen years had dried up witnesses, recollections or even a forensic trail. As he wrote in 1998, the problem was getting worse. Today, nearly 60 years later, the likely truth of the assassination will never be known. A fair read. The conspiracy theory is his most provocative conclusion, but it remains unproven.

 

Perhaps the best book I have ever read about Mr. Jefferson. I am a product of the University of Virginia, which Gordon-Reed and her co-author Peter Onuf argue was the practical expression of his vision of the Republic. It was to provide citizens who were educated in the American ideals of liberty and community membership. Gordon-Reed argues convincingly that Thomas Jefferson viewed the family as the foundation for the Republic. The book's title comes from a self-description used by Jefferson himself in a letter setting out his retirement aims at Monticello. There he hoped to function at the apex of his family, both legal (his surviving children by Martha Wayles), illegal (his children by Martha's half-sister, the enslaved Sally Hemings) and slaves. Jefferson wrote the letter after his resignation as Secretary of State in Washington's administration. For a brief time he was in residence at Monticello, but after less than two years he was back as Vice President to John Adams, followed by two terms as President. It wasn't until 1809 that Jefferson was able to withdraw fully from public life. He spent the last 17 years of his life managing his plantation (poorly), hosting hundreds if not thousands of visitors (very well indeed) and enjoying the love of his surviving daughter Martha and her family, who came to live at Monticello after financial reverses. His grandchildren by both Martha and Maria, who died in childbirth in 1804, were sources of delight and interest. After an abortive attempt to end the estrangement with John and Abigail Adams following Maria's death and a sympathy note from Abigail, the two old comrades mended fences in 1813, beginning an epistolary relationship that is one of the glories of American political theory. Gordon-Reed and Onuf attempted to deal with Jefferson in a novel way. How did he see himself, as opposed to how he was viewed by others? Thus the book is structured in terms of fundamental questions as opposed to linear biography. Jefferson's love of music, for example, illustrates a fundamental aspect of how he viewed relationships. The extended period in Paris changed his concept of self-presentation in terms of the affect of his manners. While he was robustly insular in terms of his nation vis a vis European society, Jefferson used the manners of the ancien regime to distance people from his inner life through a display of courtliness and self-control remarked upon by all who encountered him. Jefferson's sensual appetites for food and wine were also notable, and while his clothes became somewhat eccentric in old age (he dressed for comfort and not to be modish), his clothing materials were always fine. The quintessential man of the people was also a lifelong aristocrat. Gordon-Reed is the chief proponent of Jefferson's second family, denied by historians as late as Joseph Ellis until she demonstrated 25 years ago that he was the only possible candidate as the father of Sally Hemings' children. The Monticello site itself accepted it 20 years ago after tests confirmed male Jefferson DNA in the Eston Hemings line. The claim is still disputed by outliers, one can only imagine why, but the fact that Jefferson maintained a not unusual master/slave relationship with Hemings for 37 years is the central dichotomy after his role as a slaveholder in the paradox that was Jefferson the man. We cannot know the emotional relationship between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, but of course she was not technically free to refuse him. One doubts, however, that his temperament was that of a rapist. His son Madison, who wrote a memoir in 1873, describes a semi-remote figure but certainly not an abusive one to his mother, sister and brothers. Harriet and Beverly, the oldest, were allowed to leave Monticello in their late teens and sent north to freedom. Eston and Madison were freed at Jefferson's death, along with Sally's brother --- the only slave who escaped the wholesale dispersal as the Randolphs attempted to clear Monticello's debt. Martha Randolp gave her aunt Sally "her time", a notion that functionally translated to freedom for her father's companion. She was certainly regarded as such by the resident of Charlottesville, where she and her sons lived until Sally's own death in 1836. Again, Gordon-Reed and Onuf make a convincing argument that Jefferson needed to feel loved. Make of that what you will. What are we to make of a man who decried slavery in the Declaration of Independence and Notes on the State of Virginia and yet kept them for the rest of his life? How can we forgive a man who kept his own children in servitude? Gordon-Reed are less interested in that than trying to understand how he reconciled these things internally, and they propose a way in which Jefferson could convince himself that his world view was consistent. It is the major achievement of the book that they succeed. By doing so they enable us to retain Jefferson as a Founding Father par excellence, but also a recognizable, flawed human being. Race is the central issue in American history. As I write this review the United States is in agony after the murder of George Floyd. Such brutality toward African Americans dates back to 1619 when they were forcibly brought to Virginia. We have not yet solved the systemic racism problem that besets American society, and Jefferson certainly has nothing to offer from his personal life that will assist. And yet . . . Jefferson himself wished to be remembered for the University of Virginia and the Declaration of Independence. In the summer of 2017, UVA students and alumni --- and the better part of our nation --- were horrified by the tiki torch Nazis who descended upon Mr. Jefferson's university to bleat hate, engage in murderous violence and defile the Grounds by their presence. Students linked arms around the statue of Jefferson in front of the Rotunda to protect it from the mob. Faculty, staff and students staged a peaceful counter-protest on the Lawn itself to repudiate white supremacists. The University, his legacy, has evolved over its life to represent the ideals of Jefferson articulated in the Declaration. It has embodied them in ways that he personally could not. If Jefferson survives, he does so in the same way that his University and the United States launched by the Declaration do . . . as a work in progress, with emphasis on the word "progress." Highly recommend.

 

A brief history of the transition from the ancient world to the early medieval. Nixey never fails to hold interest. She has an eye for telling anecdotes that illustrate the larger collapse of classical learning in the face of Christian bullying, either the purely intellectual fulminations of an Augustine or the brutal physical attacks of roaming mobs of "monks." Her outrage over the enormous loss of art and books is palpable. Nixey estimates that 90% of classical books were destroyed, an incalculable loss to western civilization. She provides an antidote to the bromide that the monks saved civilization, correctly pointing out that the books that were saved hardly illustrated the breadth of learning that were hallmarks of Greek and Roman civilization. Nor does she idealize classical philosophers. But she makes excellent points about the tolerance extended to Christians throughout most of the pre-Constantinian empire. Roman officials were usually exasperated by them as much as anything. Nixey demolishes a great deal of the martyr hagiography that the early Church used to fuel its expansion.

I would have liked more discussion about the rapidity of Christian expansion. Nixey assumes that many of the conversions were the result of a populace cowed by the violence directed at temples. Fair enough, but at the same time it still leaves a religious belief system that lasted millennia evaporating in roughly three centuries.

Highly recommended as a bracing correction of the traditional view of Christianity's rise. However, it is too short to provide in-depth analysis. It will leave the interested reader leafing through her bibliography, which I suspect was the goal of this book.