With charity for all

At the end of 1862, in the wake the Union victory at the Battle of Antietam, Abraham Lincoln took a bloody and ugly Civil War to a far higher level – he issued the Emancipation Proclamation.  In bold and ringing words it was declared;

That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free...

I first heard this recited at the end of one episode of Ken Burn’s excellent TV documentary on the Civil War, contrasting images of brutalised slaves and black Union soldiers, all against a rousing chorus of The Battle Hymn of the Republic.  It was an emotional moment.

Emotional indeed.  The only thing is that the proclamation itself, for all its nobility, was a wartime executive order, one based purely on the authority of the President.  It was not the law of the land and - without the sanction of Congress - it had no abiding legal validity.  In other words, those slaves forever free might just as quickly have been back in chains if the war had been brought to a quick conclusion and the President’s authority challenged by the courts.  Emancipation Proclamation or not, slavery was still the law of the land.

It was the movie Lincoln that brought this simple truth home to me, one that I had previously overlooked.  I’ve always admired Stephen Spielberg as a director, one of the great masters of the cinematic medium.  In Lincoln he has surpassed himself, just as Daniel Day-Lewis has in his depiction of the sixteenth President of the United States, at once full of folksy wisdom and political shrewdness of an unparalleled order.  The screenplay by Tony Kushner is a commendable reduction of Doris Kearns Godwin’s monumental The Team of Rivals: the Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln down to manageable cinematic size.

Lincoln is not a biopic, not a log cabin to White House odyssey.  It is, rather, a bold focus on a narrow window of Lincoln's  political life – the attempt in January, 1865 to get the House of Representatives to pass a Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, already approved by the Senate, abolishing slavery altogether. 

This is real touch and go stuff; for the House has previously rejected the measure and the War is drawing to a close.  It’s quite conceivable that the struggle could have ended with the status quo ante bellum, settling nothing at all but the Southern States continuing membership of the Union. 

Even without the Southern representatives in Congress the matter is not clear cut.  Even within the President’s own Republican Party the matter is not clear cut.  The Radical Republicans, headed by Thaddeus Stevens – a scorching performance by a bewigged Tommy Lee Jones – believe in the equality of all.  But the Conservative Republicans, headed by Preston Blair (Hal Holbrook), are content to leave slavery in place, if only the war can be brought to an end. 

Sniping from the sidelines is the Democratic opposition, headed by George H. Pendleton (Pete McRobbie) and Fernando Wood (Lee Pace).  Many of them are Confederate sympathisers; some of them are outright racists.  But so, too, are many on the Republican side, which forces Stevens to hold his oratorical fire on the issue of equality of the races during one crucial debate, simply to ensure that the Amendment stands a chance of passing. 

Overseeing it all is the President, the consummate ringmaster, well able to resort to high-minded rhetoric, political intrigue and wheeler-dealing as the occasion demands, even if it demands paying off opponents with promises of office.  All the balls are in the air.  Not only does he have to manage his party, his cabinet and Congress, he also has to manage his wife!  Here we have another great performance, Sally Field as the highly strung and borderline crazy Mary Todd Lincoln.  The scene between her and Stevens, whom she hated, at a White House reception positively sparks! 

Lincoln is my sort of move, an intelligent, well-crafted and highly literate depiction of one of the great crossroads in American history.  Although the President, to gain the support of the Conservative Republicans, has had to invite a Southern peace delegation north, unbeknown to Secretary of State William H. Seward (David Strathairn), he does his best to make sure that little progress is made, either in travels or in talks.  The truth is - something I had not previously considered -, until such time as the Fourteenth Amendment is passed, for the President the war had to go on.

I don’t want to give you the impression that Lincoln is a high school history lesson; it’s not. Despite the narrowness of focus it’s as exciting a piece of political drama and intrigue as I have ever seen.  There are also some wonderful comic moments, particularly those involving a team of none too scrupulous lobbyists, headed by James Spader as William Bilbo, on a mission to approach wavering Democrats with offers they can’t refuse!   

I really can’t praise Day-Lewis’ performance too highly, a statement I suspect is in danger of turning into a cliché.  I will be amazed if he is not recognised at the forthcoming Academy Awards, but the Academy has a track record of amazing me.  This is Lincoln as I imagine Lincoln, full of unaffected charm and cracker barrel wisdom, backed up by shrewdness, by an intellect as sharp as flint and by a natural ability to read and manage people. 

It should also be stressed that both director and actor have done an excellent job in chipping away at the legend to give us a wholly plausible human being.  Lincoln does not walk on water; he is shown as a tough political operator, as canny as they come; Honest Abe at one moment, Machiavellian Abe at the next.  The actor carries the man to perfection, even in the quiet, unassuming tones of his voice, quite a leap, since nobody alive has ever heard the real voice!

To manage a war, to manage a government, to manage a cabinet, to manage Congress, to manage all of this and the pressures of domestic life is the task of a Titan.  Lincoln captures something of the scale and sweep here, the narrowness of focus notwithstanding.  Spielberg handles his subject with masterful ease, eschewing some of the showmanship that he is noted for in past movies.  Even when we fast forward to April 1865 the end comes not, as one might have expected, in Ford’s Theatre, but another theatre altogether, where a show attended by Lincoln’s youngest son Tad (Gulliver McGrath) is interrupted with news of the President’s assassination.

The movie finishes with a flash back to the second inaugural address, those wonderful words by a man who really did have malice towards none and charity for all.  At this point my tears are liberally flowing.  I had to wait until the end of the credits before risking a public appearance.   

Grits Southern

For me Quentin Tarantino is a director of extremes; he pushes me to one extreme or the other. I loved Pulp Fiction, a clever, insightful black comedy, as much as I hated Inglorious Basterds, a juvenile and stupid travesty. I almost gave Django Unchained a miss because of my distaste for his bastardised view of Second World War history and because I’m really not that keen on the Western genre.

I was persuaded to go against my taste and my inclination. I am delighted to report that my taste and my inclination were wrong. Django Unchined is Tarantino unchained and he is quite brilliant. Set before the Civil War, this is a remodelling of the old Spagetti Western format as Grits Southern!

In some ways it has the same aim as Inglorious Basterds: it offers a retelling of history, a sort of retrospective revenge movie, with the victim in command. But this time it works. It’s far more than a childish pastiche. It’s a clever, wells-scripted, well-acted, well-scored and, at points, hilariously funny movie despite the darkness of the subject matter. I think this is possibly the most enjoyable pulp history that I have ever seen. It’s obvious that the director had great fun in making it, conveyed to the audience with consummate ease.

We are in the ante-bellum South, 1858, to be exact. The movie opens with chained slaves being escorted half-naked through a freezing Texan night, all bearing the marks of past whippings on their backs. The fate of one of them, Django (Jamie Foxx) is about to change for the better in the most unexpected way.

The party, headed by two slavers, comes across one Doctor King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), an itinerant German dentist who is really a bounty hunter. He needs Django because Django knows the identity of three men he is hunting, and what Doctor King Schultz wants he gets!

The director has managed to obtain superb performances from both Foxx, as the taciturn Django, and Waltz, as the dapper and loquacious Schultz. They are point and counter-point, a perfect harmony of contrasting parts. Although the dentist who is not a dentist disapproves of slavery, he only obtains Django’s release, in the first of the movies violent confrontations, for entirely cynical reasons. After all, like the slavers, he himself is involved, as he puts it, in “a flesh for cash business.” But his evolving relationship with Django takes him to a deeper level of humanity.

Their joint odyssey begins. Django is transformed from slave, to servant, to student, to business partner and finally to friend. Schultz gets himself with consummate ease into seemingly irretrievable situations – at one point he shoots a town sheriff at point blank range – and with consummate ease talks his way out again. After despatching the three hunted men on a plantation, the two are chased through the night by a large mounted group of proto-Klansmen. The scene itself is wholly superfluous, because it adds nothing to the action. No matter; it’s quite hilarious, Monty Python-style, with various members of the gang moaning and squabbling about the size of the eye holes in their hoods!

With the friendship between the two leads deepening, the action moves to a higher plain – the search for Django’s wife, a fellow slave named Broomhilda (Kerry Washington). It turns out that she is being held in a Mississippi plantation called Candyland, owned by one Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), whose rotten teeth are as rotten as his soul.

Candyland is anything but sweet. It’s a kind of slave hell made all the more hellish by a vicious white racist, an excellent performance by DiCaprio, an actor I’m used to seeing in more romantic and heroic roles. It’s a place where men are torn apart by dogs, where they are butchered and castrated; it’s a place where they engage in ‘Mandingo fighting’, viscious struggles to the death simply for the pleasure of their master. No sooner have they arrived than the visitors witness a fight in the big house, where the injured loser is dispatched with a hammer.

Here the director recreates slavery as a dreadful abomination, a sadistic crime against humanity. Of course it was an abomination, but rest easy you people who have been trying to discover in chat forums if ‘Mandingo fighting’ was real; it wasn’t. Southern slavers may have been callous but they weren’t stupid. Slaves, after all, cost money, a lot of money. Ironically it was only after the peculiar institution was abolished that some of the more dreadful Southern atrocities began. Slaves were an asset, an investment; free black people were not.

Candie is a racist and a white supremacist. So, too, is his butler Stephen, except he is as black as the night! In what was for me the most startling and unsettling performance of the whole movie, Samuel L. Jackson creates what can only be described as an Uncle Tom from hell. Blacker than black, his scary presence is as compelling as his stare is baleful, masterful in every regard. He haunts Candie like some dreadful familiar.

There is a wonderful ambiguity here that stops the movie turning into a simple white bad black good narrative. The greater monster, perhaps, is not Candie at all, loathsome as he is, but the malevolent Stephen, whose power and influence is based on the inhuman disregard for the suffering, torture, mutilation and murder of his own people. More than that; he is an active participant in their suffering. The death of Candie at the hand of Schultz is gratifying; the death of Stephen at the hand of Django more gratifying still.

If you know Tarantino you will know his fondness for lurid depictions of violence. In this regard Django Unchained does not disappoint. There is also the liberal use of the n word (Stephen is particularly adept), another feature of the Tarantino franchise. So, too, is playful anarchy and the big bang, none bigger than the destruction of Candie Land. Overall the transformations are stunning, none more stunning than the transformation of Foxx from a mono-syllabic victim into assertive folk hero. The apprentice has outlived and out-mastered the sorcerer.

Tarantino tells it like it was. Actually, no, he doesn’t, but he tells it how he would want it to be, in a vicarious and deeply satisfying manner. Who does not dream of that power, the power of the dream factory? Django Unchained is a powerful film, a mature piece of cinema created with a child-like lightness of touch. It’s a movie made by a man who knows movies, a man who manages to create art out of pulp.

Mordred Bids Farewell to Camelot

This is an article I wrote for the Daily Telegraph readers’ blog in August 2009, following the death of Senator Edward Kennedy.  It appeared under the heading Sir Mordred Reflects on the End of Camelot.  I was reminded of it in discussion yesterday, when I said that if I were to choose a point in post-war American history where the country took a turn for the worse it would be the Kennedy presidency.  I stands here as my testament on a tawdry dynasty. 

So, Edward Kennedy is dead, the last of the political dynasty launched into the world by the money and ruthless ambition of Joseph P. Kennedy, one-time ambassador to Britain.  I’ve been looking over some of the obituaries, the usual unctuous stuff, the predictably tiresome tributes from people who probably couldn’t stand him in life, the same old same old these events occasion.  I personally feel no great sorry, how can I for a dynasty with such roots, a dynasty which promised everything and achieved nothing; a dynasty of hypocrites, openly self-righteous but morally tainted; tainted in the case of Edward himself with the shadows of Chappaquiddick.  Mordred now offers his own brief reflection of the fall and fall of the House of Kennedy.

Not much remains to be said about Ambassador Kennedy’s war-time record,  his defeatism, his attempts to reach an ‘understanding’ between the United States and Germany, his assertion that democracy in England was ‘finished’ at the point when RAF pilots were fighting and dying to prove him wrong.  I enjoyed Robert Harris’ thriller Fatherland, where he offers an alternate history, one where Joseph is president in 1960 not his son John.  In this President Joseph is set to come to Europe to conclude a treaty with the Fuehrer.  It may very well have been so; yes, it may.

 As for the actual President Kennedy, a paragon of liberalism in the way that his father was a paragon of Catholic authoritarianism, was any presidency more disastrous for the long-term interests of America?  What did he achieve?  Much, much that was to do America little good.  He escalated the Vietnam War without understanding what it was all about.  He offered support to the Cuban freedom-fighters hoping to overthrow the Castro tyranny, and then abandoned them in the Bay of Pigs.  It’s still not fully understood that the Cuban Missile Crisis of the following year, his ‘finest hour’, was a direct consequence of this weakness and this treachery.  The fiasco also considerably strengthened Cuban Communism, which continues to poison Latin America to this day.  And where Big Brother Jack led Little Brother Bobby followed, a petty bully in the garb of Attorney-General.  

So on to Ted, the last of the ‘great’ senators and the clan’s weakest link.  I suppose he deserves the accolade of greatness simply for being around long enough, the Methuselah of the upper house.  And what a variety of super liberal and semi-socialist causes he embraced, making lots of sound and fury in the process that signified nothing.  Was it enough to wipe away the shame of Chappaquiddick, the shame of leaving a nineteen-year-old woman to drown while he made his escape, the shame of failing to report the incident for hours after?  For some it seems to have been, for Super Obama it seems to have been, but not for Mordred; no, never. 

There is other evidence of Ted’s turpitude beyond Chappaquiddick.  The older Kennedys’ extra-marital exploits escaped press scrutiny a little in the same fashion as royals did at the time, but Ted lived long enough to see the emergence of a much less deferential age.  His exploits were a dream for his Republican opponents.  In 1988 in a speech on the Regan administration’s secret deal to sell arms to Iran he asked rhetorically “Where was George Bush?”  The reply was made on bumper stickers across the land, “Dry, Sober and Home with his Wife.”

Am I speaking ill of the dead?  I suppose I must be, but so much ill was directed at me by poets down the ages; so please allow me some return.  Even so, while I welcome no one’s death, I do welcome the end of a shabby modern Camelot, a tawdry illusion so much worse in every way than the original; an illusion that served to poison America with the lie of liberalism and the lie of socialism.  And now my time is gone. 

The other Joads

Many people will be familiar with the story of the Joad family from John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath, the great epic of the Great Depression in America, or from the film of the same name directed by John Ford and starring Henry Fonda as Tom Joad.  Tom and his family are dirt poor ‘Okies’, who escape from Oklahoma’s ever expanding Dust Bowl, moving west to California in search of a better life.  Instead they are met with hostility and exploitation. 

The Joads were lucky.  There were other Joads, other poor Americans who tried to flee the Depression, going off in search of a better life, taking their families with them.  But these people did not go west; they went east; they went all the way to Stalin’s Russia.  There they met something worse than hostility and exploitation; there they met slavery and death. 

This is no fiction; this is a real American tragedy, a tragedy in which the hapless and the helpless were betrayed not just by their hosts but by their own government.  These are the forgotten Americans and this is a forgotten story.  At least it was until the appearance of The Forsaken.  From the Great Depression to the Gulags: Hope and Betrayal in Stalin’s Russia by Tim Tzouliadis.  

I’ve read several accounts of the impact of Stalin and Stalinism but this is possibly the most poignant.  This is the story of people lured east in what the author describes as the least heralded migration in American history.  They were lured away from their homes by lies and stupidity; the lies of Soviet propaganda and the stupidity of intellectuals like George Bernard Shaw, who swallowed the propaganda whole, seduced by the biggest Potemkin façade ever devised. 

They were deceived also by their own countrymen, by the likes of Walter Duranty, Moscow Bureau Chief of the New York Times, who wrote articles urging Americans to come to Russia.  For a man on the spot, Duranty’s understanding of Russia was abysmal and his ‘journalism’ biased enough to border on deception and fraud.  His reports earned him a Pulitzer Prize, which might give some insight into the true value of this benighted award.

To begin with things for the Joads were not too bad.  They found work in the new Ford factory on the banks of the Volga among other places.  They brought their own pastimes with them, playing baseball in Moscow’s Gorky Park.  It was the early 1930s, a period of relative calm in Soviet history.  People were generally welcoming.  Still, there were worrying signs.  The migrants were obliged to surrender their passports.  Most of them never saw them again.  Most of them were never to see America again.

History fell on Russia with the abruptness of an Arctic night.  The murder of Sergey Kirov, the Leningrad party chief, in December 1934 was the beginning of an epic tragedy.  As Russia moved by stages into the Great Terror, fear gripped the American community.  There was no more baseball.  All at once the American Embassy in Moscow was besieged to people wanting to go home.  They were met not with sympathy but indifference.  Those turned away were arrested in the street by the NKVD, the Soviet security police.  Whole families were rounded up and sent into the night and fog of the gulags. 

Tzouliadis tells his story with insight and vigour, leavened by an undercurrent of incredulity and anger.  It’s difficult not to feel anger at the fate of so many people who were effectively abandoned.  They were merely flotsam and jetsam on the sea of life, as one American diplomat put it, adding that “they are born, live and die, and their existence has probably no individual effect on any governing or supervising authority.”

They certainly had no effect on the despicable Joseph Davis, a multi-millionaire appointed as ambassador to Russia by President Roosevelt, on the basis of what qualification or talent is impossible to determine.  While he ignored the plight of the Americans in Moscow he fawned over Stalin, even taking the infamous Moscow show trails at face value, contrary to the opinion among the rest of the embassy staff.  While Americans were drawn in ever greater numbers into Soviet death camps, Davis descended into lugubrious lyricism over Stalin’s “exceedingly kind and gentle brown eyes”.

The blindness and betrayal goes on.  There is Henry Wallace, vice-president during Roosevelt’s third term in office, a Soviet stooge who but for fortune might have gone on to becomes President in his own right.  During the war he visited Magadan in the remote Kolyma district, the very centre of the Soviet system of mass labour and mass death.  In his blindness he saw nothing. 

Wallace was a fool.  Worse still is the case of the black singer Paul Robeson, who became aware just how bad the oppression was while continuing to laud Stalin.  Acutely aware of racial injustice in his own country, he was wilfully blind to murderous injustice in Soviet Russia.  His speeches and actions, as Tzouliadis says, had justified, and therefore contributed to, the crimes of Stalinism, and for that at least he was morally culpable.  After Davis he is the one character in the story that filled me with particular loathing. 

Thinking of the Joads, some lines from Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago comes to mind.  It’s about Lara, the great love of Zhivago’s life, whose fate sounds as an echo for all the martyred and brutalised children of the earth – “One day Lara went out and did not come back.  She must have been arrested in the street, as so often happened in those days, and she died or vanished somewhere, forgotten as a nameless number on a list that was later mislaid, in one of the innumerable mixed or women’s concentration camps in the north.”

There are some stories of survival in The Forsaken, none more remarkable than that Thomas Sgovio from Buffalo, New York, but most have left no trace at all, unlike Lara not even a name.  This important book does well to fill some of the silences of time

Love Lost and Won – an American Destiny

Westward Ho!

There is one invariable symptom of a nation entering into senescence and decline: it begins to place a negative value on the past.  Things that were once noble and good are re-examined and reappraised in the light of contemporary concerns.  Old certainties vanish as history is reinterpreted through the perspective of minorities, outsiders and victims; the losers are now the winners and the winners cover themselves in shame for past wrongs.  

With the almost complete dominance of Marxist and liberal thought through much of western academia, the process has advanced rapidly since the end of the Second World War.  Who would dare write poetry in praise of the British Empire; who would now write in the style of Rudyard Kipling, now that we are one with Nineveh and Tyre?  Lest we forget; at last we forget.

I do have a case in mind, not from British history, not from the history of the British Empire, but from the history of America.  If one were to ask what is it that defines modern America I'm sure people would answer in various ways.  For some it would be the principles of freedom and rugged self-determination dating from the Revolutionary War; for others it would be the Civil War, a cathartic moment that established a new birth of freedom; for still others it might be a more recent birth of freedom, following the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s.  

For me there is only one answer - Manifest Destiny, the history of the expansion into the West; the West itself, those plains, valleys and mountains where a new spirit was carved by courageous pioneers.  Here the old freedom was cast anew in determination, in suffering, in courage and in intrepid self-reliance.  One's destiny was in one's own hands.  There was no fallback. The price of failure was high; the price of success even higher.

But even here that process of guilt and re-evaluation has long been at work.  The history of the West began to be the history of the victims. For some those pioneers were no longer part of a great and noble enterprise but destroyers of an indigenous Eden. They came into the Red Garden; they made a desert and called it progress.

The expression of guilt took many forms, in printed and visual media.  In books we have Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, a classic of re-evaluation, and 500 Nations.  In films we have Dances with Wolves.  In documentaries we have How the West was Lost and The Way West.  Stephen Aron, writing a paper for the American Historical Association, said that in scholarly circles, "the West as America" quickly became synonymous with a "new western history"; detractors claimed this history had rewritten the past as a course in "failure studies." They were quite right of course.  A new mythology was created of the noble savage and the rapacious white man. Just remember those troglodytes in uniforms at the end of Costner's epic myth-making.  

But there have been some who have made a valiant attempt to redress the balance.  I had occasion recently to recall the work of Ken Burns, the documentary film maker, whose visual history of the Civil War achieved viewing figures undreamed of for this kind of show.  He also made The West, a series in eight parts covering various aspects of a compelling story.  The task he set himself was straightforward: "For too long we celebrated a lily-white version of the West: sturdy pioneers fighting savage Native Americans," but of late "we have subscribed to a history in which the European contribution was entirely bankrupt and everything Native Americans did was perfect."

The West was broadcast here when I was in high school.  I loved it; I simply loved it. The whole thing was absolutely fascinating. How I identified with those pioneers and trail blazers, the men and women who opened up the West under the most trying conditions imaginable.  

What I loved most of all was Love!  It was touched on in episode eight, and became a leitmotiv for the whole series; it was the story of one John Love, a pioneer of Scottish descent, who, along with Ethel Waxham, his wife, established a ranch in a remote Wyoming valley. The drama of this couple’s lives was told, and movingly told, by actors reading from their correspondence.

It's heart-breaking and exhilarating at one and the same time.  They faced adversity hard upon adversity.  On one occasion a flood ruined all the improvements they had made on their Wyoming ranch.  With natural disaster came a human one, with the bank foreclosing on a loan that they had taken out to raise sheep.  Nothing daunted, John simply wrote in wry humour that it was a case of Love's labour lost, an allusion to Shakespeare’s play of the same name.  

But they rebuilt, time and time and time again, against all adversity.  Neither of them lost the taste for what Ethel called the "ranchiest of ranchy life."  It was a tale, their son later said, of all the "survivors" who stuck it out. It was a theme Burns picked up on, as Aron said in review, serving the Loves as a tribute to the grit of westerners, to the persevering spirit that allowed so many, if not to triumph over adversity, then at least to battle it to a stalemate.

That for me is the spirit of America. Life is struggle and the most important thing is to not necessarily to triumph but just to fight, fight and fight again. No state, no welfare, no handouts, just a spirit of marvellous and wonderful independence. John Love and Ethel Waxham stand for me as symbols of all that is noble in the American past, all that is noble in the frontier spirit, all that is noble in those pathfinders and trail blazers.  Their destiny was manifest; their destiny was their own.  It is an American destiny.  

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

An Never Ending Story

Robert Caro, an American author, has not long published The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson.  It’s an exhaustive biography of the former president, but it’s also exhausting; for this is volume four and it’s not finished yet.  It may, in the end, take Caro longer to write the life than Johnson to live it.  For goodness sake, The Passage to Power just takes him over the threshold of the Whitehouse! 

I love biography, the more detailed the better but there seems to be a certain lack of authorial or editorial discipline here.  It’s now ten years since The Master of the Senate, the previous volume, was published and thirty since the project began.  According to an interview I read in Prospect, a political monthly, Caro “writes fast”; it’s the research that takes up the time.  He is to be commended for his thoroughness, but there are limits, even to the most meticulous research.  Is this, I ask myself, the real-life Book of Sand, a candidate for inclusion in Jorge Luis Borges Library of Babel? 

Writing in Prospect, Sam Tanenhaus says;

Caro is not prolific, but he is prodigious.  The books keep coming, heavy volumes, densely written and meticulously sourced.  The latest, at just over 700 pages, is of medium length for him.  It explores, or excavates, six years in Johnson’s life, 1958-1964 – covering his exit from the Senate, his miserable, deflating years as vice president, and his sudden elevation to the presidency, following the assassination of John F Kennedy.  During five of those years Johnson did, more or less, nothing.

What; does the author take 700 pages to tell us that his subject, more or less, did nothing?!  I’m beginning to feel a little guilty as I write.  I have no desire to talk down this work, a work that I have not read, a work that is unlikely ever to be surpassed, assuming its ever finished (my goodness, Vietnam, the Great Society, race, riots and rebellion are still to come!) but I simply could not resist passing comment on the observation about five years of, more or less, nothing! 

Even Tanenhaus, who clearly admires Caro for his industry, is aware of an inflationary tendency – “Had he written Waiting for Godot it would be longer than Wagner’s Ring, yet with its own idiosyncratic magnificence.”  Just imagine waiting for Godot for hour after hour after hour after hour.  There is only so much the human spirit can stand, even when there is idiosyncratic magnificence! 

Will I ever approach this monument?  Possibly not; there are too many other things to engage me and reading is for life, not life for reading.  Besides, I’m not sure I want to follow the Book of the Life of Johnson, at least in such detail, idiosyncratic magnificence or not.  There is a tragic quality to a man more controlled by events than controlling, a man who inherited a war and lost it; a man who launched massive welfare programmes which had a lasting and negative impact on American society.  But when it comes to tragedy I’m far more intrigued by Herbert Hoover and Richard Nixon than Lyndon Johnson, the wheeler, dealer and failure from Texas.  

1812 and all that

What great event in history happened in 1812?  I put this question at the weekend to people I know, all history alumni, mostly English though there were also a couple of Germans in the group.  It was by way of experiment, you see.  Almost everyone gave the answer I expected – it was the year that Napoleon invaded Russia (one mentioned the Battle of Salamanca in the Peninsular War!)  If I had asked a wider audience, people with a reasonable grasp of history, I’m reasonably certain that I would get the same answer.

Now, if I change the audience, if I put the same question to Americans and Canadians I think it reasonable to assume that the majority would answer differently; the Americans almost certainly would.  For 1812 was the year that America went to war with Great Britain.  It’s a conflict that is remembered in The Star Spangled Banner, the American national anthem.  That the young nation survived a war with a great imperial power was a source of pride.  It’s also the source of one or two national myths.

In England it really is the forgotten war, one which made little impact then or later.  It’s different for the Canadians, who, in resisting American invasion, found their own particular pride which was later to blossom into nationhood.  I’m not sure if they are planning to mark the bicentenary of the outbreak of the war, which falls next month, but Americans probably shall, if only to remember the Burning of Washington and the ‘rocket’s red glare’, as Old Glory fluttered above Baltimore’s Fort McHenry. 

It was America that declared war on Great Britain on 18 June, beginning a struggle that was to last for over two years.  American grievances were genuine enough, principally caused by British interference with commercial shipping, an essential part of the total economic blockade of France.  Stung by this and other issues, including the impressment of seamen who claimed to be American citizens, Congress declared war on the urging of President James Madison. 

It’s was really all a bit of a gamble.  Madison calculated that Britain would be fully preoccupied with the war in Europe.  After all, most of the army was fully engaged in the Peninsular War; most of the navy was blockading the coast of Europe.  Now with Napoleon about to enter Russia there could be no better time to attack, with land campaigns against the Canadian provinces and naval attacks on British shipping in the West Indies and North Atlantic.  But he had gone to war with an army scarcely fit to fight, evidenced by the fiasco that followed the invasion of Canada.  The tiny American navy performed creditably in single ship actions, but beyond boosting morale these had no lasting effect. 

So far as Britain was concerned the war was no more than a little local inconvenience.  As Andrew Lambert writes in a recent article in the BBC History Magazine (When Washington Burned), the government had one central war aim: to make the Americans leave Canada alone.  Canadian garrisons were reinforced but no troops at all were withdrawn from Wellington’s army in Spain.  Above all, there was absolutely no intention of challenging American sovereignty, and to describe the struggle as ‘second American War of Independence', as some were wont to do, is a huge exaggeration.   It might, with greater accuracy, be described as the War of Canadian National Integrity. 

None of this was new to me.  I was surprised, though, to learn of a mood of hysteria and hyperbole that gripped at least one prominent figure in American public life – former president Thomas Jefferson.  A letter of his was quoted – with admiration - recently on Blog Catalogue.  Dated 28 June 1812, when nothing significant had as yet happened, he wrote;

Our present enemy... may burn New York, indeed, by her ships and congreve rockets, in which case we must burn the city of London by hired incendiaries, of which her starving manufacturers will furnish abundance. A people in such desperation as to demand of their government aut parcem, aut furcam, either bread or the gallows, will not reject the same alternative when offered by a foreign hand. Hunger will make them brave every risk for bread.

New York was untouched, though British forces did attack and burn parts of Washington, including the White House, in August, 1813, in retaliation for a previous burning of the town of York, now Toronto.  Contrary to Jefferson’s expectations London survived intact, untroubled by fictitious gangs of starving insurgents. 

I said earlier that Madison’s actions were a gamble.  But there is more to this than the military imbalance involved.  There was also a political gamble, one which exposed the latent tensions in the American system of government, tensions left over from the formation of the Union that were not fully resolved until the Civil War. 

You see, his Democratic Republican Party did not have the confidence of the nation as a whole.  He represented the sectional interest of the states of the South and the West, committed to expansionism.  Opposition to the war was strongest in New England, where the states enjoyed good commercial relations with Britain.  There was even talk of secession as the war progressed.  Trade with the enemy, moreover, continued, as the British blockade was relaxed on this section of the Atlantic coast.  Wellington’s army continued to be fed with American grain. 

For generations after American historians celebrated the War of 1812 as a ‘victory’, though such a view is only tenable if one adheres to the second War of Independence thesis.  The truth is the whole thing was a glorious stalemate, one which crippled the American economy and stored up unresolved political problems.  By the time Napoleon abdicated in April 1814 the British blockade was acting like an anaconda, strangling trade, government revenue and domestic consumption.  By October of the same year America was bankrupt. 

The war was finally concluded officially by the Treaty of Ghent, signed in December 1814, though the embers continued to burn for some weeks after.  There were no victors and there were no losers (setting the Western tribes to one side).  It was a case of status quo antebellum – just the way we were.  So, yes, while Americans sing that their flag is still there it’s as well to remember that it was never England’s intention to take it away.

Brokeback Bureau

I waited an age for one biopic only to have two come along at once! Well, almost at once. It’s not long since I saw Meryl Streep playing Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, a stunning performance in a less than stunning film. Now I’ve seen Leonardo DiCaprio, one of my favourite actors, play J. Edgar Hoover in J. Edgar, a stunning performance in a less than stunning film.

Hoover, the long standing Director – Dictator might be a better word - of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, is in many ways an even more controversial figure than Thatcher. A man of impeccable moral stature, the self-appointed guardian of all that was good in American life, he had no scruples at all in subverting civil liberties in pursuit of his particular ends. At his funeral then President Nixon said that he was;

…one of the giants…He personified integrity, he personified honour, he personified principle, he personified courage, he personified discipline, he personified dedication, he personified loyalty, he personified patriotism.

Oh, but how are the mighty fallen. He also, according to his many detractors, personified venality and corruption, a message that his been relentless hammered ever since, to the point where his legacy, his very real contribution to fighting crime and subversion using the latest techniques, has been obscured under a mountain of superfluous and vicious tittle-tattle.

J. Edgar, directed by Clint Eastwood and based on a script by Dustin Lance Black, goes some way towards rehabilitation. It paints a more nuanced portrait of a complex and driven man. Still, it does not avoid the old canards, the wholly unproven contention that Hoover was a closet homosexual and cross-dresser.

That the old queen never came out is clearly the fault of his mother, a commanding performance by Judi Dench, who tells him that she’d rather have a dead son than a daffodil for a son. A life of frustrated sexual tension lies ahead, touched on in Hoover’s relationship with Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer), his long-standing deputy at the FBI.

My criticism here is that Hoover’s sexual preferences, whatever they were, are not that material to the story of his life and times. His principle relationship was not with Tolson or with Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts), his life-long secretary and confidant, but with the FBI, the organisation which he created virtually single-handed, or rather shaped into a tough, modern crime fighting force out of the old amateurish and bumbling Bureau of Investigation in the Justice Department.

I admire Eastwood as a director; I hugely admired movies as diverse as Gran Torino and Million Dollar Baby. But I have to say that there is a falling off with J. Edgar, signs that he is no longer quite in command of the medium as he once was. The pace is uneven and too much of the story is taken for granted, particularly over the kidnapping and death of the infant son of Charles Lindberg, the aviator, a defining moment in the history of crime in America.

Incidentally, speaking of aviators, DiCaprio seems to slightly reprise his depiction of Howard Hughes in The Aviator. Like Hughes his Hoover uses a handkerchief to clean his hands after he greets someone, another hint, presumably, of deep-seated personal neurosis.

On a more technical point it was a huge mistake to allow actors playing their young selves also to play their old selves, caked under ever more grotesque and ridiculous layers of rubber, to the point where they resemble puppets. This was an error avoided in The Iron Lady, where the young Margaret and the old Margaret are entirely different people. As J. Edgar cuts back and forward between the present and the past a considerable amount of time must have been spent in donning and discarding prosthetics!

It's a thoughtful film, though perhaps not thoughtful enough. Even so, setting the central performances to one side, it’s also a plodding and ponderous one, coming close to its subject, then skipping away. After some two hours I was no closer to understanding the real Hoover than I was at the outset.

The thing I found most frustrating was the failure to draw parallels between the Red Scare that swept America after the First World War, touched upon in detail, and more modern concerns and threats. The central question about Hoover’s career surely must the extent to which it is legitimate to subordinate civil liberties to national security in times of emergency, not his chaste and asexual personal affairs. Director and writer are to be commended for humanising the man, but, as another reviewer writes, they have in the process created a kind of bureaucratic version of Brokeback Mountain.

American Whispers

I went to see The Help yesterday, the day it premiered in London. I imagine there is little point in saying this, but for those who have not seen it, or not heard of it (well, there might be a few!), it’s a comedy drama set in the segregated South of the sixties, based on Kathyrn Stockett’s novel of the same name.

It’s my kind of movie, one that deals with serious and interesting themes in an adult way, one that has a serious and interesting story to tell, one that’s so much more a shallow fest of special effects or tiresome thrills. I would have gone to see it at some point though perhaps not quite so soon, perhaps not with the same sense of curious urgency. Why, then, did I go with the premiere crowd? Simply because of an article in the Sunday Telegraph, one headed The Film Dividing America, written by Philip Sherwell. I’m going to come to that a tad later but first let me give you a straightforward review.

To begin I should say that I haven’t read the novel, so I have no standard for comparison, though I understand from comments elsewhere that the book is better, which is most often the case.

What I can say is that I thought The Help was a good movie, a lovely combination of melodrama and human interest with some sparkling comic touches. It’s not a great movie; the script is a little too flabby for that, and Tate Taylor’s direction a little less disciplined than it should be. But, my goodness, some of the performances are gold, none more so than that of Octavia Spencer as Minny Jackson, a black maid with attitude before people knew what attitude was!

It’s the ideal chick flick, my ideal chick flick, and not simply because the action is mostly set in a female world! I was beguiled by so much I saw. Yes, it’s mawkish; yes, it’s manipulative (all the best movies are); yes, it covers so much unpleasantness with a gloss of sugary sweetness. But I don’t care. The movie aims for the emotions and it’s right on target, inducing tears and laughs by turns. I cried, I laughed; it hit my target.

I saw it and I understood it as a perspective movie (hold that in mind; it has an important bearing on what I intend to say later), looking at a particular issue, the racism of the unregenerate South, from a particular set of social and interpersonal relations: that between black maids and their white mistresses.

To my mind the characters recreated some memorable figures from the storehouse of American culture. Minny, for me, was a more contemporary version of Mammy, the housemaid from Gone with the Wind. Eugenia ‘Skeeter’ Phelen, played by Emma Stone, another sparking performance, is a grown up Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird, and not just because she serves in the role of a narrator; she has the same intelligent detachment from the world around her.

Skeeter is both part of the privileged white society of Jackson, Mississippi, and yet outside of it, alienated by its callousness, including the callousness of her own mother, responsible for the dismissal of a much-loved maid. She perceives the racism that others do not, the hypocrisy and the cruelty that her contemporaries do not, all married, comfortably housed and wholly reliant on exploited black labour. She is most uncomfortable with the truly awful Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard - the character was awful; her depiction was excellent!), the Wicked Witch of the South, who’s Home Help Sanitation Initiative brings segregation into the home and workplace in the most degrading and humiliating manner.

It’s Skeeter’s alienation from the comfortable world of her upbringing, when the greatest influences, the nurturers and the carers, were the black housemaids, that leads to a new project: she, as a writer, will allow the submerged maids, the underpaid and exploited ‘help’ to speak for themselves.

From tiny voices a roaring storm grows. With some initial reluctance, the maids, headed by Minny, tell Skeeter their various stories, a stream that feeds into the wider consciousness of the day, increasingly shaped by the growing Civil Rights movement. The Help is a superbly acted and emotionally effective movie, an indictment of the old Jim Crow laws of the South, which still manages to be full of simple human warmth that overcomes even the deepest social and racial divides.

But it’s the movie that’s dividing America, so says the Telegraph. I actually think that’s a gross exaggeration. The American reviews I’ve read, both positive and negative, show no deep fractures that I can detect. There are highly critical voices mentioned in the article. There is Wendell Pierce, the star of The Wire and Treme, who has described it as “passive segregation lite that was painful to watch”, that it is a passive version of “the terror of the South.” Then there is Max Gordon, a New York-based writer, who said that it ignored the real heroes of the era by ignoring the real horrors. “This is not the South of lynchings and beatings”, he told the Telegraph reporter, “it’s the comfortable Holywood take of the civil rights era.”

He’s quite right, of course: it’s not the South of lynchings and beatings, but neither is it Mississippi Burning. As I said above, it’s a perspective movie, a view of the past from a particular angle, of unequal and abusive power relations, which was surely far more typical of the times than lynchings and beatings.

The black actors, headed by Spencer, have come out in defence of the movie, criticising the laughable forms of political correctness, based on the assumption that there is only one way of looking at past injustice. I myself see the criticism as a form of maximalism – the insistence that only the big picture will do, that all history has to be gathered in an instant, that there are no small stories to be told. But there are, thank goodness, and there always will be, stories on a simple human level, stories that make for compelling cinema. I think that change does begin with a whisper, not a shout.

The War of Northern Greed

It’s October, 1861. In American the Civil War has been underway for some months, really just the overture to what was to become a tragedy of epic proportions. That same month a German exile living in London summed up the situation as he saw it – “The war between the North and the South is a tariff war. The war is, further, not for any principle, does not touch the question of slavery and in fact turns on Northern lust for sovereignty,”

A few months later similar sentiments were to be found in the words of another writer, an Englishman of impeccable liberal credentials – “The Northern onslaught upon slavery is no more than a piece of specious humbug disguised to conceal its desire for economic control of the United States.” He goes on to say "...Union means so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means the loss of the same millions to the North. The love of money is the root of this as of many other evils... The quarrel between the North and South is, as it stands, solely a fiscal quarrel."

Who were these men? Karl Marx was the first and Charles Dickens the second, not people one would expect to have very much in common, the prophet of world revolution and the prophet of moral reform, the one a hard-nosed theorist and the other a bourgeois sentimentalist. But they were both, in their individual ways, absolutely right: the War Between the States had nothing to with slavery or any other great issue of principle.

But myths die hard if they die at all. I open the latest issue of the BBC History Magazine. There is an article by Paul Cartledge, professor of Greek Culture at Cambridge, on slavery in Classical Athens (Democrats and Slaves). He offers this view in his preamble – “One hundred and fifty years ago…the northern and southern States of the (dis)United States went to war in large part over these very issues.”

I think that’s the answer one would get from most people, even those who are only vaguely aware of the details - that it was all about human bondage, all about the virtuous North and the wicked South.

I watched, and enjoyed, Ken Burns' television documentary about the Civil War a while ago. I remember the episode, soon after the Battle of Antietam, when parts of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation were read, all very moving, cut with images of a black people as slaves and then black people as soldiers in the Union Army, all against a rousing chorus of the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Yes, it was great television…and wholly misleading history.

It was good to see a corrective to the mythology in History Today, where Tim Stanley writes on the North-South Divide in the Contrarian section of the magazine. It’s a return to first principles, a return to the Victorian view of Marx and Dickens. This was not a war about morality; it was a war about naked self-interest. Slavery was certainly an issue between the States but it was far from being the most significant; no, that rested on the altogether more mundane issue of revenues and taxes, which had been poisoning relations for years.

We are dealing with two economies – the rural economy of the South and the nascent industrial economy of the North. But it’s more than that. Northern industrialisation was effectively built on Southern backs; built, it also has to be said, on the backs of Southern slaves. To protect domestic industry from foreign competition, Congress imposed crippling import taxes, which hit the South particular hard because it had to buy the machinery it needed from abroad.

In the 1850s, in the wake of an economic downturn, Congress increased duties from fifteen to thirty-seven percent. In a mood of outrage Southerners began to consider the virtues of secession. An alarmist editorial then appeared in the Chicago Daily Times. If the South left the Union;

…in one single blow, our foreign commerce must be reduced to less than half of what it is now. Our coastwise trade would pass into other hands. One half of our shipping would lie idle at our wharves. We should lose our trade with the South, with all its immense profits.

Not a word about the morality of trading with the Slave Empire, not a word about the morality of slavery. Secession meant war, but war less for the preservation of the Union as a great political principle, more for the preservation of the economic dominance of the North.

For the South the election of Lincoln in 1860 was the final confirmation of all of its fears, not because the Great Liberator was a threat to their ‘peculiar institution’ – he wasn’t – but because the ‘black’ Republicans represented a coalition of interests inimical to the whole Southern way of life. That year the outcome of the presidential election, as Stanley puts it, was interpreted in the South as a Northern coup d'état.

For almost two years the North fought to reimpose its hegemony without giving any thought to the question of slavery. The Republican Party was opposed to slavery but it was not abolitionist; and, yes, there is a very big difference. When Abraham Lincoln greeted Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the mawkish Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as “the little lady who started this big war” it was nothing but the worst kind of political hyperbole and cant.

The Emancipation Proclamation, for all its high-minded rhetoric, was even more hyperbole and cant. It only freed slaves in areas beyond Union control. It did not free them in the Border States or those areas under Northern occupation. Even William H. Steward, Lincoln’s Secretary of State, remarked on the obvious hypocrisy – “We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free.”

Slavery is a great moral evil but let’s not be confused about the issues here: the Civil War was about Northern greed more than Southern iniquity.

Bloodless Drama

The assassination of Abraham Lincoln in April, 1865 immediately conjures up one name – John Wilkes Booth. But there were others involved, or implicated, in the conspiracy that led to this seminal event in American history. They included one woman, Mary Surratt.

I confess I had never heard of her, not until I saw The Conspirator, a historical drama directed by Robert Redford. Surratt ran a boarding house in Washington in which Booth and a group of Confederate sympathisers, including John Surratt, her son, met first to plan the kidnapping and then the murder of Lincoln along with other members of the Federal government.

Surratt was caught up in the sweep that followed the assassination in Ford’s Theatre, though her son escaped. She was eventually convicted and hanged in July 1865 as a co-conspirator, though the question just exactly how much she knew, how culpable she was, remains open, and Redford makes no attempt at closure. One of the highlights of the movie is Robin Wright’s depiction of Surratt, a perfect study in stoic ambiguity. Clearly I can’t speak with any authority on her innocence or guilt though it would seem obvious that she stood trial for her son, whose guilt was the greater. The irony is that when he was eventually caught, at a time when the initial panic and outrage had died away, he was released after a mistrial.

This is a good story which should have made for compelling cinema. Sadly it did not. I thought the script plodding and the general treatment stuffily didactic. There is simply no emotional engagement, rather odd considering the potential here. Because I’m so keen on history and courtroom drama this movie should have worked for me on so many levels. It was all the more disappointing that it did not. There was loving attention to detail, certainly, in creating the general atmosphere of the America of the 1860s but the overall effect was like a heavy pudding – bland and stodgy.

There are good performances by a first class cast. Wright, as I have said, excels as Surratt, James McAvoy is good as Fredrick Aiken, her idealistic defence counsel, slow to accept that his client has any defence at all, and Kevin Kline was superb as Edwin Stanton, the Secretary for War, who seems to have taken control of the government in the wake of Lincoln’s murder, pursuing the conspirators with a single-minded determination. But even this could not lift The Conspirator above the mundane.

The movie, in its heavy-handed manner, comes with a serious point. The trial of Surratt and the others, conducted by a military tribunal, did not just trample their constitutional rights – it ground them into the dust. If the war had been fought, to use Lincoln’s words, for a new birth of freedom this was most certainly not it. Even Aiken’s attempts to obtain a writ of habeas corpus and have Surratt tried by a civil court were frustrated by edict of President Andrew Johnson.

One would have to be blind to miss the subliminal message (Kline even bears a strong resemblance to former vice-president Dick Cheney!), that no matter how great the emergency we stamp on civil liberties, on the legal principles established by Magna Carta, at great peril. Yes, all very important, if only it could have conveyed in a fashion that feels a little less worthy, a little less like a movie made for TV. Where, oh where, was the stardust? The Conspirator is not full-blooded; it’s anaemic.

The Lost Cause

In Edinburgh there is a memorial to the Scots who fought in the Union Army during the American Civil War. You will find it in the Old Calton Burial Ground, just across from the spot where David Hume, the leading thinker of the Scottish Enlightenment, happens to be interred.

It’s quite an impressive piece of work. There, at the top of a plinth, stands Abraham Lincoln in splendid isolation. At the bottom there is another statue, that of a freed slave, holding up his hands in supplication and gratitude, now a rather unfashionable nineteenth century motif. On the east face the monument carries the following inscription – “In memory of Scottish American soldiers. To preserve the jewel of liberty in the framework of peace – Abraham Lincoln.” Yes, it’s impressive, an impressive contribution to a post-bellum mythology.

We have not long passed the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War, with the attack in April 1861 on Fort Sumter in Charleston harbour. To mark the occasion there was an article in one of my history periodicals by Doctor Thomas E Sebrell, a specialist on the subject.

It was particularly good because it corrected several misconceptions that I had, the chief among which was that the residual sympathy for the Confederacy amongst the British manufacturing and ruling class was finally eclipsed by Lincoln’s 1862 Emancipation Proclamation, which made intervention on behalf of the South all but impossible. The fact is that this was another ‘wrong move’ on the part of Lincoln, one in a series.

Let me begin by saying that Britain had long been in the front of the campaign against international slavery. The slave trade was abolished by Parliament in the early part of the century and slavery itself abolished throughout the Empire in the late 1830s. During the secession crisis following Lincoln’s election as President in November, 1860 any latent sympathy for the emerging Confederacy was effectively submerged by its adherence to the ‘peculiar institution.’ This changed when Lincoln announced that his chief objective was to preserve the Union, not to end slavery.

There were excellent domestic reasons for this: he did not want to alienate the border slave states, particularly Kentucky, of vital strategic importance to the Union cause, but in doing so he lost the moral high ground in Europe. In a letter to Lord Palmerston, the British Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, the Foreign Secretary, said that the North aimed not at liberation but at conquest. Suspicion of Lincoln was compounded after the introduction of a naval blockade against the South, which starved British manufactures of vital cotton supplies.

It was tricky time. Lincoln may have gained Kentucky but he risked the intervention of a powerful naval adversary on behalf of the South, an intervention that was likely to carry widespread popular appeal in Britain after the Trent, a British mail packet sailing from Southampton to Cuba, was intercepted by a Union vessel on the high seas and two Confederate diplomats effectively kidnapped. Queen Victoria was even moved to write in her diary of the Yankees that “They are such ruffians.” When Prince Albert saw Palmerston and Russell’s letter demanding the release of the diplomats he remarked that this means war.

It was thanks to the Prince’s diplomatic rewording of this bristling missive, and the prompt action of Washington in releasing the Confederates, that there was no war. But sympathy for the South continued on the upswing. By December 1863 the Southern Independence Association, formed in Manchester with the intention of forcing Parliament to recognise the government of Jefferson Davis, had chapters in almost fifty cities and towns across Britain and Ireland. In Parliament over seventy MPs were known to favour the South in contrast with only seventeen for the North.

Palmerston was only waiting for the right moment, either to offering mediation with a view to recognising the Confederacy, or taking such action unilaterally. Robert E. Lee’s retreat from Maryland after the Battle of Antietam in September, 1862 stayed his hand, but then came another dangerous moment for the Union. The Emancipation Proclamation, issued by Lincoln in the wake of Antietam, was widely condemned in Britain, not celebrated.

Remember, Lincoln had not abolished slavery, merely ‘freed’ the slaves who were held in those states beyond Union control. That is to say, in both the Border States and those areas of the Confederacy under the occupation of Union troops slavery remained firmly in place. Russell branded the act as a hypocritical and an illegal violation of the American constitution, which turned slavery itself into a “reward for loyalty.”

So slavery and declining sympathy for the Southern cause had nothing to do with the British reluctance to intervene. The real reason was, as Sebrell argues, quite simple; technical innovations in naval warfare, the introduction of both sides in the conflict of ironclads, had, by the summer of 1863, made the British Navy, hitherto the most powerful in the world, obsolete. A test was carried out on HMS Warrior, the most technically advanced the Royal Navy had, a huge ship itself partially ironclad, to see if it could withstand an onslaught by the squat and ugly little vessels whose prototype was the Monitor. Palmerston was told that every round from the sea monsters had penetrated the Warrior’s iron plates with ease. At that moment it was the Union, not the British, who ruled the waves. At that moment the Confederate cause in Britain was lost.

In the end all that survived was a certain nostalgia, evidenced by the free-standing statue of General Thomas ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, put up in Capitol Square in Richmond, Virginia in 1875, with funds provided by his English admirers, a reminder the politics were not quite as simple as the Lincoln statue in Edinburgh would suggest.

Midnight President

There is no justice; life is just so unfair. I know that, you know that, but sometimes it frustrates me so, looking at things from a historical perspective. I wrote recently about Richard Nixon, a man I consider to be one of the most intelligent presidents that America has ever had, inspirational and imaginative. Yet his presidency was systematically destroyed on the flimsiest basis of all.

Now, I turn to Bill Clinton, one of the worst, a man who degraded the office – literally – of president, a chief executive tainted by moral depravity, a proven liar who still managed to survive two full terms in office. He’s a Democrat and I generally find Democrats no more appealing than the British Labour Party, but as a representative of this socialist party he represents the nadir, worse even that that priapic hypocrite JFK, and that really is something.

He’s now pushing on a bit; I guess I should try to be a little more charitable to ex-President Clinton, who, in his dotage, has taken to remembering the good old times in Times Square, remembering just how ‘romantic’ it was before New York’s most famous thoroughfare was cleaned up.

Those where the days alright, the days of Clinton’s youth, the days of pimps, hookers and druggies; a fascinating time. There he was up from Arkansas, a kind of political version of the Midnight Cowboy, watching as a prostitute approached a man in a grey flannel suit, loving the downbeat seediness of it all.

Seediness, yes, that was the leitmotiv of the whole Clinton presidency, a man who turned the Oval Office into his own version of Times Square, a place of blue dresses and stains, a place where he did not have sex with that woman, another insight into this man’s topsy-turvy world. It’s such a pity that he did not invite Dustin Hoffman to join his administration, just to complete the picture, in the guise of Enrico “Ratso” Rizzo, of course, perhaps as Secretary of State.

I shall finish with a Clinton joke, one told to me by a good friend of mine from Georgia. It goes like this:-

Hilary –sadly – has died and gone to heaven. There she is in Saint Peter’s office, the man at his desk. Behind him, reaching out to infinity are clocks, clocks and clocks.

“What are they for?”, she asks.

“Well, Saint Peter replies, “for every human soul there is a clock, set at twelve noon at birth. The hands only ever move if a person tells a lie. See, here is Mother Teresa’s, still at twelve; she’s never told a lie in her life. There is George Washington’s, standing at five after; he’s hardly ever told a lie.”

“Where’s Bill’s clock?,” she asks.

“Oh, that’s in Jesus' office; he’s using it as a fan.”

The man who never quit

I recently said in discussion that Richard Nixon was a great and troubled man whose story could only have been written by Shakespeare. I am certainly no Shakespeare, so you need not expect The Tragedy of King Richard I any time soon! But I admire Nixon as a man and as a politician, along with Ronald Reagan the most outstanding president, in my estimation, of the post-war years.

Are you surprised? How can anyone admire Tricky Dickey, Watergate man, the only president to be forced out of office under threat of impeachment? It can’t be denied there is a lot to deplore in aspects of his career, something of the night, something of Caesare Borgia in a character which often verged on the unscrupulous. In the end, as he himself admitted, he let his country down. Still, he was a man of outstanding intellect and ability, a man of vision and imagination, a man courageous enough to make the bold moves, the moves that make history; a man who rose and fell and rose again, time after time.

Who would have believed that Nixon, who made an early reputation as a red baiter, would be the president to normalise relations with Mao’s China? Because of this he now stands in the same pantheon as Don Giovanni and Falstaff, the only chief executive ever to have inspired an opera!

There is indeed something of the Shakespearean prototype about him - a tragic hero, flawed as all such figures are, flawed in such a way that brought about his own downfall. Consider, though, what he achieved in the area of foreign policy alone, not just opening relations with China but at the same time managing a balancing act with the Soviet Union, which included an important strategic arms limitation treaty, the first major thaw in the Cold War.

He brought American involvement in the war in South-East Asia to an end, though it was to lead to the extinction of the Republic of Vietnam two years later, something he said would not have happened if he had remained in office. It was certainly through his prompt action that Israel was able to recover from its early reverses in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

There is also much in his domestic programme to admire, the way in which he was able to bring America back from the economic and social chaos of the latter part of the Johnson presidency, the closest, perhaps, the country came to tearing itself apart since the early 1860s. In the end it was all for nothing; all for Watergate, that stupid, unnecessary burglary, followed by an even more stupid and inept cover-up that saw the Nixon presidency die by slow and humiliating degrees.

Yes, it would need someone with the talent of Shakespeare to capture the full irony of Nixon’s fate, but Oliver Stone made a credible attempt in Nixon, the 1995 biopic starring Anthony Hopkins. Here we see the man, a life beset with uncertainty and paranoia, with feelings of rejection, but always, always that drive that was to take him from a log cabin, well, a California grocery store, to the Whitehouse. The climb was hard, the fall harder – “To be outdone by a third rate burglary is a fate of biblical proportions.” It is indeed.

What followed was the presidency reduced to its nadir, through the Ford and Carter years, only recovering with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. By this time Nixon had also made his own recovery, showing, even in retirement, that he had lost none of the drive that had taken him so far in life. As a writer and elder statesman he was to gain many new admirers. His television interview with David Frost, the subject of Frost Nixon, a wholly engrossing movie, became the most watched encounter of its kind in broadcast history.

Iago, Hamlet, Macbeth – Nixon managed to combine elements of all three in his own complex and flawed personality. “A man is not finished when he is defeated. He is finished when he quits”, he once said. Nixon never quit. Is there any better accolade, any better obituary?