Speed-Reading Book Nerd Reviews

Eliza Hamilton: The Extraordinary Life and Times of the Wife of Alexander Hamilton

By Tilar J. Mazzeo.

Well, this book didn't quite go as expected. I was genuinely trying to figure out if it was supposed to be straight up historical biography or a fictionalized version of the story or what. To some degree the author tells us stuff like how she thinks Eliza was thinking and that makes it seem more fictional. But also, well, she has a different opinion on the Reynolds Affair than others. I am really surprised this hasn't been being talked about all over the Hamilton fan world, actually. She says she started writing the book while the musical was becoming popular but hadn't gone full blast. 

This is a comprehensive book--it even features the post-Alexander years in more detail and follows up on their kids, which I haven't heard much about. There were a lot of soap opera dramas among the Schuyler relatives, which amused me. At one point there was a comment about how come all of the Schuyler girls are marrying dubious guys except for Eliza? (Though I dunno, the "patroon" guy Peggy married didn't sound too bad.) Later the author says that she thought the Schuyler sisters went after men like their dad-- risk takers and fortune hunters. There's more about how John "Carter" Church was seriously a scammer dude and he ran Angelica's life. Angelica comes off as a fashionable lady but maybe a bit less sharp than musical fans expect. 

Actual quote from Alexander in a letter to Lafayette: "I have been employed for the last ten months in rocking the cradle and studying the art of fleecing my neighbors." Whaaaaat? I can only sort of wonder if this is some kind of foreshadowing.

The main very surprising thing about this book is what the author proposes on page 156 about the Reynolds affair:

"But what if that familiar story is a fiction? What if it was nothing more than a desperate public spin on a far more complicated and troublesome private and political backstory? What if sex was a cover-up for power and money? That is what Alexander's political enemies believed, and it is what Maria Reynolds always insisted. What if it was all a story, and Eliza also knew it?" 

The author posits that Eliza's various male relatives were engaged in speculation and gambling--her dad, John Church, Stephen Van Rensselaer, their associates and friends, were all up to something, and Alexander may have been privy to information as Secretary of the Treasury to enable that. He was acting as Church's attorney/agent and executed some of these transactions. They all were involved in shady land deals as well. And Alexander's assistant secretary William Duer had to resign in disgrace after he was caught handing out favors and manipulating army supply contracts. Alexander then got Duer a job as governor of an investment group that Alexander founded, which was a terrible idea because Duer was a straight up crook and ran up the value of stock options. And Duer bragged that Alexander was giving him insider information. We're told Eliza was pressuring him to resign from the Treasury. Duer got up to more shit and scandals and I guess caused the Panic of 1792 and ended up in jail. We're told that James Reynolds got involved when Alexander asked him to buy some notes for his personal portfolio and when Reynolds got arrested, he offered up Alexander as being involved in speculation. When Maria Reynolds was interviewed, she said the men were involved in business, she'd burned a lot of their letters but saved a few that proved that Alexander was giving James money--and Maria was a third cousin to Eliza. 

The author assumes that Alexander told Eliza some of his issues-- "A man who intends to keep a secret from his wife doesn't invite his accusers to meet in his family living room on a Saturday evening." She posits that Alexander forged the letters from Maria and used them to embarrass his accusers to go away. We're told that Maria denied the affair and was shocked. We're told that James Monroe thought there was something fishy about the whole thing because the letters sounded like ones out of "Pamela" (i.e. soap opera-ish). The author herself definitely thinks it's fishy that Maria can spell difficult words correctly but sometimes misspelled easier words. The author thinks that Alexander and Eliza were more concerned with keeping him out of debtor's prison and never thought the affair would make the media. The author also says that Eliza burned the evidence. 

In other fun facts, we learn that calling someone a "rascal" translated into "He has no dick" (OF COURSE IT DOES) and that's why Phillp Hamilton went all nuts about wanting to duel with Eacker. Angelica Hamilton sounds like she was never too mentally stable in the first place even before her brother died, but that put her over the edge.

In the author's note, the author says that from what she can see in what letters Eliza allowed to survive is that it is hard to make sense of her reaction to the Reynolds "affair." She doesn't consider herself to be betrayed, she blames his enemies, they stay close. She did not kick him to the couch a la "Burn."

"Instead, if the story of the affair is true, she apparently clings to him, makes excuses, and insists to her dying day that he was an admirable husband.... What makes it hard to reconcile the life of Eliza Hamilton with her response to Alexander's infidelity is that we have to posit a personality change occurring suddenly in the summer of 1797. We have to believe that the affair crushed her spirit and turned her from a feisty child of the frontier to a victim of her own self-deception. We have to posit that Eliza simply could not handle the reality of Alexander's affair and would do anything to keep him. When he dies, in a duel fueled at least in part by the scandal, she carries on for decades insisting that Alexander has been maligned, idolizing him and insisting on his virtue. In short, when it comes to Alexander, Eliza begins to look a bit foolish."

However, since Eliza didn't act a fool after Alexander's death either... what if what doesn't fit here isn't Eliza's reaction, but the whole affair story? The author says she had trouble writing the book after the pamphlet story came out because it didn't fit with the woman she'd come to know. And that's when she started investigating the idea that it was all a story. Why didn't anyone check Maria's handwriting? How come the letters sound suspiciously like ones Eliza might write (she wasn't a good speller)? Maybe that's why Eliza burned her own letters, so nobody could compare. The author assumes that Eliza burned the evidence. 

The author does cite her sources if you want to check them yourself, and says that the liberties she took were instances in which she ended up extrapolating as to what went on when she could not find anything said by Eliza, which she calls historical triangulation. 

I kind of feel like I just don't know what to make of this. She makes a fairly compelling argument but as she admits, there's no 'smoking gun" to confirm any of this. I feel like a lot of this is based on personalities: that the guys were all into gambling and trying to make money, that Eliza didn't seem to give Alexander the cold shoulder IRL, the suspiciousness of iffy 1700's spelling. I think it's a reasonable theory but we'll never quite know for sure, so heck if I know. I do concur that it slightly bothered me that she'd posit stuff about Eliza and her reactions--if you're writing Eliza fanfiction then it doesn't matter,  but in a history book when we only know so much about how Eliza reacted due to her letter burnings, it bugged me.

Overall, I think I'm going with three and a half stars. I have some issues with it, but I do think that it's very comprehensive and the most comprehensive one I've read so far. 

Hope Never Dies

By Andrew Shaffer.

I liked this review:

"This is the kind of story where you don’t so much willingly suspend your disbelief as throw it out the window of a speeding muscle car, like oh, say, the Trans Am that Joe and Barack end up powering through the streets of Wilmington Delaware in the course of this case.

The scene of Obama rescuing Biden from a motorcycle gang by casually firing a sawed-off shotgun while lying about Seal Team 6 waiting in the wings was absolutely priceless."

So yeah, this is real life fanfiction in which Obama and Biden team up again...TO FIGHT CRIME!

I was conflicted about reading this. On the one hand, novelty item (also, it's published by Quirk Books). On the other hand, I generally find Biden to be really boring. I just can't get interested in Biden. I hope he doesn't run for president in the hordes because man, who gets excited about Biden? About the only thing I ever saw about Biden that made him kinda interesting was reading First In Line because of his cute little relationship with Obama. 

I found it at the library and didn't have to commit to buying it, so....let's give it a go.

This book is set in an ambiguous time, perhaps 2017, in which Biden is quietly sulking about having been friend-abandoned by Obama, who is out doing adventure sports and hanging with Bradley Cooper. Has Obama contacted him? Are they playing golf together? Not so much. So Biden is feeling very butthurt and that's a major theme in the book. 

Biden is also known as "Amtrak Joe" for his frequent riding of Amtrak in the past, and he's the sort of guy to make friends with the conductors. One night, Obama, his Secret Service guy Steve* and his dramatic cigarette show up in the yard one night to notify Biden that a conductor friend of his has just died on the tracks--and the police said he had Biden's address on him when he died. Finn the conductor seems to have gotten himself mixed up in something, and Biden, having nothing much else to do but contemplate Obama and wonder if he wants to run for president or not, decides to investigate. You'll never guess who comes along!

• oddly enough, Obama only travels with ONE security guy rather than two, come on.

The absurdity of two guys who really can't pass for being anonymous in public at bloody all is an amusing one, particularly the moments when they ditch Steve the Secret Service Agent every time Steve falls ill from say, eating Joe's breakfast. (I seriously wondered if Biden had poisoned his own food to get Steve and his wet-blanket-ness out of the way, but I guess he just got sick from eating real food.) If you want to read about Obama doing lock picking (on a car, I think) or smacking a dude in the head with a shotgun, here's your chance! Biden, on the other hand, picks the codename "Joe Tingler.," hurts his knee and gets a black eye. But he does head butt a guy! And his medal does pay off in the end, adorably. 

More touching is Biden's conflicted feelings about Obama's friend-disappearance, and Obama's eventual explanation about how he felt like he needed to drift off some, or maybe Biden wanted him to? Biden wonders if friends are for children and not something adults do. The two also wonder about their careers and whether or not they ever did any actual good, which is quite touching/sad. While actual conversation about how Trump is trashing their legacy and the entire world is kept to a super bare minimum and barely hedged at, you can feel their feelings and grief even in a relatively silly book like this one is being:

"What does your heart tell you?" "That I was put on this earth to serve, and by God that's what I've done. The question is, when is it enough?"
Barack took a deep breath, then exhaled. "It's never enough. I'd give away every dollar I have--and I practically do, some years--to fix what's wrong with our country. To fix what's wrong with the world." "But like you said, it's never enough," I said. "So why do we keep doing it?" "To make a difference," Barack said. "And have we?"
"Made a difference?" "Yeah," I said. "Have we made a difference?"
He closed his eyes. "I don't know, Joe. I just don't know."

Hell, even I want to tear up at that.

While the case itself is a bit weak, I wasn't expecting Agatha Christie, so that's fine. Overall it's done well enough and works with the issues of presidential/vice presidential crimefighting fairly well, I suppose. But you're really here for the silly lines, the buddy cop comedy, and the bro-ness of your favorite presidential relationship that you miss. And that works well. Like I said, I'm not super interested in Biden IRL, but the dad-joking, earnest-but-butthurt personality of Biden combined with the "even if you weren't black you'd be cool" natural chill and quiet badassery of Obama, makes it a fun read. 

Quote Corner (all quotes by fictional Biden unless said otherwise):

• Biden isn't threatened by his wife reading Harlequins on her e-reader. "See, your Uncle Joe had something those men would never have: a Presidential Medal of Freedom."
• Biden is the king of dad jokes: "She'd heard the joke before. I still got a kick out of it. The good jokes never get old."
• Another Biden joke: "A man had two sons. One went out to sea, and the other became vice president. Neither were heard from again."
• Biden compares a guy to being as thin as a railroad spike and then says, "The railroad spike I didn't know." This is awkward. 
• "I realized I didn't need a gun. I wanted a gun. Instead I pulled out my Presidential Medal of Freedom."
• Biden decides they need disguises. He puts on a hat that says "Kiss My Bass" and gets Obama a Phillies hat. After Obama points out that they will still draw attention and everyone's seen him in those sunglasses... "You're saying I need to take them off to disguise myself. How's that?" "You look like Joe Biden either way." 
• Joe watches a girl with waist length blonde hair and then wonders, "How do you think she uses the toilet?" 
• After Biden points out that the Geico Gecko is British rather than Australian like Obama thinks, Obama is all, "I just don't know about you sometimes, Joe. I just don't know."
• "Son of a butternut biscuit. We got bamboozled."
• "I'm not asking you to cover for me while I sneak Marilyn Monroe in the back door of the White House." -Obama to his Secret Service agent Steve. 
• "I'm so hungry I could eat the balls off a low-flying goose." 
• How's Steve taking it after being ditched? "Pretty well, all things considered. He did lose the forty-fourth president of the United States." -Obama
• Obama and Biden agree to tell their wives they had a sleepover, basically. Jill asks Biden what the guest room was like. Biden has no idea because he's never been to their DC house. "I stayed with Barack in the master bedroom. Michelle was out of town, and Barack didn't want to sleep alone." Jill is all, "I'm sure you did." 

Overall, I give it three and a half stars. If you're into the subject matter (Obama/Biden, dad jokes, trains, presidential badassery), you should enjoy this. 

Impeachment: An American History

By Jon Meacham, Timothy Naftali, Peter Baker and Jeffrey A. Engel.

"Any impeachment, however legitimate or not, however wise or not, rewrites the rules for the presidents who follow--until the next one comes along and rewrites them all over again." -Peter Baker 

Four historical scholars got together to write a chapter apiece on the few impeachments (or the uh, one that should have happened) and then finish up by analyzing how this could apply to Trump.

Andrew Johnson (chapter quotes by Jon Meacham) essentially just pissed off enough people to bring on the impeachment, with the inciting incident being his firing of Edwin Stanton when nobody else wanted him to fire the guy. 

"For his obstructionism, Johnson was eventually impeached (but not convicted) by a Republican majority in Congress that had come to see him as an impediment to the work of the nation. His impeachment illustrates a fundamental truth about the American system: The process of removing a president from office is as much political in nature as it is legal. Repubicans held overwhelming majorities in both chambers throughout Johnson's term... and many of them wanted Johnson out. After much searching they finally found a pretext for it in 1867-68: a purported violation of the uninterestingly titled Tenure of Office Act."

However, there were four separate attempts to get him impeached before the final one in 1868. 

"In the story of Johnson and his showdown with the Republicans of the day, we can see how impeachment is a weapon of politics--and that any era can see how impeachment is a weapon of politics--and that any era can find itself amid a crisis over the removal of a president if the passions of the hour are ferocious enough." 

"For our purposes the essential lesson of the Johnson impeachment is how political passion and national division found expression in the attempt to remove a president while his term was still unfolding." The actual reasons for wanting to get rid of him--his bigotry, incompetence, etc.--weren't impeachable offenses, apparently. "Taken all in all, the Johnson case suggested that impeachment could be undertaken for reasons of political conflict but would be pursued only along more technical grounds."

Alas, we never quite got to see a Nixon impeachment, which makes Timothy Naftali a bit challenged in writing about it. What he points out is that "The impeachment process rests on the presumption that Congress can get what it needs to pass judgment on the chief executive. One of the discoveries of the Impeachment Summer of 1974 was that this process gets very difficult if the president uses his staff and the resources of the executive branch to actively subvert the process." As the evidence piled up though, "The Democrats and the Republicans thought that there was so little opposition they could get the whole thing over with in the House in two days." Naftali posits that Nixon would have most likely been impeached and convicted.

"Peter Rodino and John Doar had been essentially right about the preconditions for a successful presidential impeachment. There had to be a commonly accepted baseline of facts, an atmosphere of trust among the members of the House Judiciary Committee, and a disciplined commitment by the committee chair and the inquiry staff to bitpartisanship.." However, there had been evidence of Nixon's criminal behavior for eight months before and "yet there was no predictable way to ensure his removal." Getting his tapes before he could destroy them worked out, and both parties were willing to take risks to get him out if necessary.

As for Bill Clinton, Peter Baker mentions that Clinton had a point that other presidents had had affairs without having to tell everyone and a grand jury, but standards had changed since the most horny presidents. Baker thinks that Clinton's strategy of lying, stonewalling, and denying everything for months diminished the shock by the time he finally fessed up, so the political momentum never quite got far enough. People voted among party lines and well, there you go.

"When the dust settled, even some key Republicans concluded they had gone too far. No impeachment will succeed, they learned,, if it is not bipartisan." Also, the crime just didn't seem that bad at the time...though it did pave the way for say, Trump and his pussy-grabbing/porn star payoffs, etc. to get into office. 

"If the Andrew Johnson impeachment was judged by history to be illegitimate because it essentially litigated a policy dispute rather than a high crime and if the Richard Nixon scandal was judged to be clear-cut in meeting the standard for removing a president from office, then the Clinton episode fell somewhere in the murky middle. It was neither a slam-dunk obvious case that compelled conviction nor was it easy to dismiss out of hand. A president should not be allowed to violate the law, and yet there was no consensus that this particular violation was so egregious as to trigger the ultimate constitutional sanction. In the end, as the framers anticipated, impeachment is a political action, not a legal one. It is, in a sense, another campaign to be won."

Jeffrey A. Engel gets to write what we're all interested in these days. He notes that impeachment crises have sped up by comparison, and notes that Rudy Giuliani threatened that Hillary Clinton would be impeached within a year if elected--I sadly totally agree with that, btw. Engel notes that the threat of impeachment started really early in this case and is concerned with "voters and politicians seemingly so comfortable with invalidating elections." No safe honeymoon for Trump here, but I say, did he deserve one when he was committing various shit from day one? At least everyone else had to warm up to what they did. Engel doesn't think we're guaranteed to have democracy survive a fourth impeachment attempt, but then again, I'm not at all sure it'll survive without it either.

"The history of impeachments teaches us not only to be wary of going down that perilous road again, but each case additionally provides a useful insight should a fourth impeachment attempt case ever arise." 

We've had plenty of jerk presidents before--what made Andrew Johnson different? That he directly contradicted congressional will. What did we learn from it? That personal conviction trumped party allegiances in that case. "Johnson's case thus teaches that should a future president be impeached and come to trial over an issue whose adjudication requires direct reading and interpretation of the Constitution itself, we should expect senators to at least consider voting across party lines." 

Engel thinks that Naftali proves that Nixon could very well have survived and completed his entire term except that well, things didn't go that way. But once there was undeniable proof of his abuse of power... When support starts to go, it really starts to go. There was a "smoking gun" of his guilt. Proof matters. "Should a future president find him- or herself confronted by hard evidence of impeachable offenses--be they documents, tapes, bank records, or something else the general public can easily understand--the longer their record of denial the faster it will drag them down." But the evidence has to be irrefutable, BUT these days everything can be doctored, so what would be good enough to convince literally everyone? People trust Trump no matter what and just don't care. 

As for Clinton, he wasn't truly in danger, and party politics won out and all Democrats voted to keep him. 

"Only if a future impeachment case plays out like Johnson's, in which senators are called to consider their consciences as well as their constituents, and at the same time like Nixon's with conclusive evidence strong enough to justify lawmaker's breaking party discipline, should a president truly fear impeachment. Such scenarios might involve a president demonstrated to be under the sway of a foreign power, or who profited from his office, or who consciously overstepped the Constitution's constraints on executive power."  Engel thinks that it doesn't matter if crimes were committed, it matters if someone lied to win office in the first place, i.e. not disclosing that he didn't give a shit about the Constitution, this could get him convicted. 

However, since "we live in a tribal political environment unable to agree on basic facts, we are unlikely to generate the widespread moral outrage necessary to prompt senators to risk eviction by voting against their constituents or against their party. It would require a genuine constitutional crisis of the sort Johnson's opponents generated, coupled with a clear train of irrefutable evidence agreed upon by all sides such as sunk Nixon, and then frosted by a president's wild unpopularity, the very opposite of Clinton, for his judges in any impeachment trial to make their vote anything more than a referendum on the prior election's results." 

Sigh.

I think this is well done overall, if depressing as fuck. And I think adding a Nixon chapter is kind of a stretch but I can see why they did it. Overall I think I give it 3.5 stars. 

Fear: Trump in the White House

By Bob Woodward.

Finally got this at the library. 

This isn't quite as fun and dishy as say, other memoirs of the horrors of this administration. Mostly it just focuses on the policy decisions and how everything sucks every time Trump communicates. Clearly Bob got a lot of, to quote from the Source Notes in the back on every single chapter, "multiple deep background interviews with firsthand sources." Which is to say, a lot of the folks who left unhappy. It's pretty clear that say, Lindsay Graham, Steve Bannon, Rob Porter, Reince Priebus and Gary Cohn must have had a lot to say, whereas folks like Sean Spicer and Hope Hicks must not have contributed because they are barely mentioned in this shitshow. The author mentions that his assistant "made sure we built the story around specific scenes with specific dates, named participants and accounts of what happened."

The Note to Readers specifies:

"Interviews for this book were conducted under the journalist ground rule of "deep background." This means that all the information could be used but I would not say who provided it. The book is drawn from hundreds of hours of interviews with firsthand participants and witnesses to these events. Nearly all allowed me to tape-record our interviews so the story could be told with more precision. When I have attributed exact quotations, thoughts or conclusions to the participants, that information comes from the person, a colleague with direct knowledge, or from meeting notes, personal diaries, files and government or personal documents. President Trump declined to be interviews for this book."

Fun facts and quotes time!

As you've probably heard by now, this book starts with a prologue in which Gary Cohn, "top economic adviser in the White House," managed to save us all by hiding a piece of paper from Trump so he didn't sign it. That piece of paper being the one that would terminate our free trade with South Korea. "Got to protect the country." Or alternately, "It's not what we did for the country, it's what we saved him from doing."  Rob Porter "told an associate" that a third of his job was "trying to react to some of the really dangerous ideas that he had and try to give him reasons to believe that maybe they weren't such good ideas." 

After that fun excerpt, we move on to the start of the idea of Trump really running for president, and Bannon's reaction to the words "He's thinking of running for president." "Of what country?" Followed by "I don't have time to jerk off, dude." 

David Bossie, a conservative activist/Republican investigator, told Trump that he had to be pro-life but he's been very pro-choice. Trump changed immediately. When told he has a track record, he said, "That can be fixed." Also, Bossie pointed out there's a public record of when people vote and you've voted ONCE. Bossie tells Trump to start writing checks to congressmen and senators and write a policy book (HAHAHAHAHA). Bannon's reaction afterwards is "Zero chance. ... The fucker will not write one check," and "He'll never do a policy book. Give me a fucking break. First off, nobody will buy it. It was a waste of time except for the fact that it was insanely entertaining." 

Priebus tried to get Trump not to call Mexicans rapists and told him that "we've been working really hard to win over Hispanics." So that worked well. 

For all the crap about Scaramucci (not a source for this, I'm guessing) and Bannon's dick-sucking, Bannon later said, "I reached out and sucked Reince Priebus' dick on August 15 and told the establishment, we can't win without you." 

There is a term for going on all five Sunday morning talk shows: "the full Ginsburg" (after Monica Lewinsky's lawyer who did it in 1998). Poor ol' Giuliani achieved this dubious feat about the Access Hollywood tapes, and his reward from Trump was to be called a baby, by Trump. Was it really worth it, Rudy? Is it EVER? 

When interviewing for the national security adviser job, McMaster was told by Bannon to wear his uniform and not lecture Trump: Trump was the guy who never went to class, took a note or got a syllabus. "The night before the final, he comes in at midnight from the fraternity house, puts on a pot of coffee, takes your notes, memorizes as much as he can, walks in at 8 in the morning and gets a C. And that's good enough. He's going to be a billionaire." McMaster pretty much does the dead opposite--lectures Trump and shows up in a regular suit because he called around and was told it wouldn't be appropriate because he's retired. Trump's commentary on his outfit was "He's dressed like a beer salesman." The author snarks, "Bannon, noted for his terrible wardrobe, agreed." 

Dear lord, the ass kissing of Lindsay Graham. "Trump said he shouldn't have publicly given out Graham's cell phone number." "That was the highlight of my campaign," Graham joked. "What's your new number?" Trump asked." DON'T GIVE IT OUT, DON'T GIVE IT.... oh damn, you gave it out. You moron. Lindsay also refers to his buddy McCain as "A media whore like me." 

"Tweeting, that's the way I operate." -Trump

One of Sean Spicer's few mentions here is that he tried several times to get Mattis to go on Sunday talk shows. Mattis continued to say no and finally, "Sean, I've killed people for a living. If you call me again, I'm going to fucking send you to Afghanistan. Are we clear?" 

Cohn used to try to communicate to Trump that people want to leave manufacturing. "He realized he was being an asshole by rubbing it in because each month was basically the same, but he didn't care." 

"Several times Cohn just asked the president, "Why do you have these views?" "I just do," Trump replied. "I've had these views for 30 years." "That doesn't mean they're right," Cohn said. "I had the view for 15 years I could play professional football. It doesn't mean I was right." 

Meet Rob Porter, staff secretary, and what happened after he introduced himself to Trump: "It was clear Trump had no clue what that was or who Porter was. Jared told Trump that Porter was going to structure and order Trump's life. Trump looked at the two of them as if to say, What are you talking about? You're not doing anything like that. No one's going to do that. The president walked away without saying anything to find a TV screen." 

"Trump would go from A to G to L to Z. Or double back into D or S." 

More not-quite-commentary from Rob Porter: "But the hours of raging reminded Porter of what he had read about Nixon's final days in office--praying, pounding the carpet, talking to the pictures of past presidents on the walls." 

"I am the president. I can fire anybody that I want." -Trump

In chapter 21, we meet John Dowd, Trumps lawyer, who starts out as happy to get the gig. "It's no day at the beach," he's warned. "I think I've figured that out," Dowd said. OH YOU POOR SWEET SUMMER CHILD. YOU KNOW NOTHING, JOHN DOWD.

Here's an unattributed bit in which Trump "gave some private advice to a friend who had acknowledged some bad behavior towards women" (uh, Rob Porter, I assume): "You've got to deny, deny, deny and push back on these women. If you admit to anything and any culpability, then you're dead. That was a big mistake you made. You didn't come out guns blazing and just challenge them. You showed weakness. You've got to be strong. You've got to be aggressive. You've got to push back hard. You've got to deny anything that's said about you. Never admit." 

"Jared remained a mission Priebus failed to accomplish." 

Priebus's other mission: trying to shut off Trump's TV time. He called the presidential bedroom "the devil's workshop" and his favorite early morning/Sunday night TV times "the witching hour." All Priebus can do is make sure Trump doesn't get home until after 9 p.m. Sunday nights. 

On the transgender ban: Priebus lists the four options from "leave it alone" to "ban 'em all," pointing out that the last one increased their likelihood of being sued, and we want to walk you through it on paper." Trump supposedly agrees to talk about it at 10 a.m., but by 8:55 a.m. he's banning them all. 

I'm rolling my eyes at the start of chapter 25, in which we're told all of Rob Porter's high credentials, that he has a better resume than Gorsuch, and he reports that Trump called Priebus a little rat that just scurries around and can be ignored. 

"I go out and give a speech and it's covered by CNN and nobody's watching, nobody cares. I tweet something and it's my megaphone to the world." -Trump

Priebus called Trump's "bleeding from a facelilft" comments "going bananas." Trump was all, "I know what you are going to say. It's not presidential. And guess what? I know it. But I had to do it anyway." 

This book recaps the Priebus firing, and we find out that Kelly had "had to call his wife and explain that he had no choice but to accept after being offered one of the most important jobs in the world via tweet." 

"As a general rule, in relations with Trump, the closer you were, the further away you got. You started with 100 points. You couldn't get more. Kelly had started with 100 points in his jar, and they'd gone down. Being close to Trump, especially in the chief of staff role, meant going down in points. It meant you paid." 

"Because when you put a snake and a rat and a falcon and a rabbit and a shark and a seal in a zoo without walls, things start getting nasty and bloody. That's what happens." -Priebus. 

Rob Porter reports that he spent hours working on a nice speech for Trump to give about Charlottesville, Trump gives it and gets praise, Porter reports that he felt like it was a moment of victory, he had served the president well, this made the endless hours of nonstop work worth it... and then after the news makes it sound like he admitted he did something wrong, he chews out Porter because "I didn't do anything wrong in the first place." Porter later reports that Trump thought "Little Rocket Man" was his best nickname yet and Porter was all, "It is funny, and it certainly seems to have gotten under Kim's skin," but what's the endgame here? 

Pence isn't mentioned much. "As usual, Pence was staying out of the way. He didn't want to be tweeted about or called an idiot. If he were advising Pence, Cohn would have had him do exactly that--stay out of it." 

Kelly: "He's an idiot. It's pointless to try to convince him of anything. He's gone off the rails. We're in crazytown. I don't even know why any of us are here. This is the worst job I've ever had." That said, he did make it longer than Priebus. 

Bannon's advice to Trump: "Cut the fucking thing off" (about Trump's 8 hours of TV a day) and "Go play some slap and tickle with Melania." 

Lindsay Graham continues to suck it up, but not the 100% of sucking up that Trump is demanding, apparently. Graham supposedly said, "Why would you want me to tell you you're right when I think you're wrong? Presidents need people that can tell them the truth as they see it. It's up to you to see if I'm full of shit." 

Trump's lawyer Dowd reports that "It was quite a sight seeing the president of the United States fuming like some aggrieved Shakespearean king." 

After Cohn quits: "He's never been wrong yet. He's 71. He's not going to admit he's wrong, ever." 

Dowd reports about his talking with Mueller about the possibility of Mueller talking to Trump. Dowd and Jay Sekulow role-play in front of him. "Jay, how many times did he say I don't know when we talked to him?" "Oh, a dozen, twenty."  ... "Bob, here's my point. You're asking me to sit next to a president who'll get to the third question, screw it up and thereafter, because I'm going to counsel him, he just doesn't know and he doesn't remember. So he's going to say he doesn't remember 20 times..... And the reason he doesn't remember is very simple. One, these facts and these events are of little moment in his life." Woodward then snarks, "Most had taken place early in his presidency." 

The end of the book features Dowd quitting. "He could not say what he knew was true: "You're a fucking liar." That was the problem." Dowd gives him a giant speech about how he feels like he failed as his lawyer because he was unable to persuade Trump to take his advice. "And if I go and sit with you and let you do something that I think is bad for you and will get you in further trouble, then I ought to lose my license." The very last words of the book are, in fact, "You're a fucking liar."

Four stars. It's not quite as much fun dish, but it sure sounds like Certain People let it all hang out here, and it sounds like Woodward was as comprehensive as he could get with who he could get. 

Full Disclosure

By Stormy Daniels.

"For all I've lost, I deserve the chance to defend myself and state all the facts." 

Here I am, embarking on a bunch of political books, starting with the one by the porn star! Huzzah! This is fun to carry around in public--either nobody's noticed or they don't care these days. Anyway, turns out Stormy Daniels is a good writer (in addition to being a porn star/dancer, she directs, writes, and acts in Judd Apatow movies), and she's snarky and entertaining. I'd hang out with her. 

Life started out rather crap for young Stormy--her dad abandoned her, her mother was a shitty parent and someone should have called child welfare, Stormy got sexually abused and her mother told her to lie to the cops, etc. She tried to fend off the child abuser from going after her best friend--sad story. She learned that going to adults for help wasn't going to do her any good and because she came from trailer trash, nobody would believe her anyway. When the cops came to ask, her mother said the cops would take her away if she said anything. Later on when a boy grabbed her ass and Stormy fought him off, her mother yelled at a teacher "You just taught my daughter that it's okay to be sexually assaulted." Uh... but you knew I was..."If anyone had tried to teach me that I needed to be 'okay' with being raped, it was her." She also got a beat-up old horse named Jade as a kid--her stepfather paid for it--and she managed to rehabilitate her horse and have many happy years with her. Awwwwwwww. 

Stormy's mom sounds pretty godawful. There is a "Christmas Tree Incident" in which her mom (in January) stripped naked, screaming, and then fell into the Christmas tree. Stormy moved out the next morning. When Stormy was so ill that her boyfriend contacted her mother, the mother said she hoped Stormy dies. 

She worked her way out of there via stripping at age 17. During her first 30 minutes of the job, she watched a lady's tampon string stick out of her G-string and then some fucker decided to light it on fire. She managed to pull off her boot and beat the guy with it. "He lit my vagina on fire!" She was pretty happy in her first job at Cinnamon's (until security failed her), she even mentions a coworker who'd bring baby ducks to work and have them sit in a kiddie pool. AWWWWWWW. Later she got to hang out with the band Pantera when she offered them a ride when their cab never showed.

Later, Stormy got a film career in LA. She points out that if you watch people actually filming porn, it will ruin it for you forever because in between filming everyone breaks character, relaxes with the dildos within, and talks about the weather. She shocked her boyfriend that got her into the business when she proved she could write, and then direct. She later was in a few Judd Apatow movies, pulled a prank on Seth Rogen, and it made the DVD extras. 

For those of you wanting to get to the Trump action, it's in chapter three, which is pretty well recapped here (along with a lot of the rest of the book, go read it). "Okay, so did you just skip to this chapter? Quick recap for those just joining us: my life is a lot more interesting than an encounter with Donald Trump. But I get it. Still, of all the people who I had sex with, why couldn't the world obsess over one of the hot ones?" 

Anyway: you've probably read it by now: but she met him in Lake Tahoe in 2006, she got asked to dinner by him, she eventually agreed to do it but didn't think he was asking her as an escort because he was one of the few straight men who didn't immediately stare at her tits and seemed impressed that she was a director, and she wanted to avoid having dinner with a coworker who'd cheated with her ex. When she came in, he was in his black silk pajamas and she chewed him out, called him Hugh Hefner and told him to put some clothes on. After that astounding beginning, they slightly hit it off by talking about business, but he never offered any food. She did, in fact, spank him with his own magazine (I guess this is what happens when a girl is hungry and bored) and then he said she reminded him of his daughter, as someone to be reckoned with. (Which is to say, she said it didn't seem sexual at the time.) He offered to get her on The Apprentice, which did intrigue her. He said he could get her on and showed a photo of his wife and baby son and said they have separate bedrooms. He said his hair was his trademark when she asked about it. But after she goes to the bathroom, he's stripped down and she's all oh fuck, I didn't think this was going to happen. She was mad at herself for not figuring it out and...I guess figured she was obligated to go through with it. She did not enjoy it. She did not do much of anything. You've probably already read the penis comments.

She did not have sex with him again, but heard from him occasionally (including the time when they watched Shark Week and Hillary called while it was on) until she found out that supposedly Roma Downey wouldn't allow her to be on The Apprentice. Since that's all she was interested in from the Donald, that was it for her. At the time, she just figured it was along the lines of an anecdote.

"A lot of people say I should run for president someday. They want me to run because I can afford it. Who would want to? This is way more fun." -Donald Trump while watching Shark Week.

Stormy meeting her third husband (she had a few short marriages before that she mentions in passing, including one drunk Vegas elopement after 2 weeks and the second husband being a pain to get rid of) is kind of funny because he's in a band called Hollywood Undead she kept hearing about a lot and being asked to direct a video for. Except she hated their music and wasn't too into the idea. But as they keep recurring, she's all "The universe just keeps trying to make this happen." Eventually she meets Glen the drummer, they hit it off, and he becomes #3. 

At one point she ran for office--not seriously--when she was talked into running against Louisiana's David Vitter. A guy started a web campaign to draft her for office, which bragged that she was president of her 4-H club. As a fellow 4-Her, I seriously wonder if that's something they want to admit to now. Anyway, when she called the web campaign guy (Brian Walsh) to complain, he explained that he wanted someone to go up against that bigot, so she thought it was worth fighting back about. She was hoping someone serious would run in her place. And then Brian Welsh's car got blown up and Stormy herself got into some legal trouble when she and her estranged second husband got into a fight and he called the cops. She pointed out when she quit that most people can't win a Senate race without a ton of money.

Stormy did not tell Glen that she had sex with Donald. It didn't even occur to her when they were dating. However, she was shocked to hear that ladies would grab his dick in real life. But when he said he wanted a kid, she said he had to do porn first. She was absolutely serious because otherwise what if they broke up and then he tried to use that against her? "That is so fucked up, Stormy, but you're kind of a genius." She was serious, and he did some. She even insisted he do it with some other woman so that wouldn't be cited as a just-husband-and-wife thing, which she refers to as "I was sex-trafficking my husband." 

The Donald story almost came out and Stormy was being told to sell her story...and then got ghosted about it. Then later on you-know-who actually ran for president.and she was being bugged to sell her story again...or call Gloria Allred. Meanwhile her "gay dad" friends are bugging her to say something to stop his election and she's all "I don't think his supporters would care." Then a lawyer friend of hers tells her that she might unexpectedly die if she doesn't come forward. "The only way to keep your family safe is for your story to be out there. You want it so they can't blow up your house or cut your brake lines." She got threatened in a parking lot. She's introduced to lawyer Keith Davidson, who unbeknownst to her was contacted by Michael Cohen. She signed a nondisclosure agreement outside by the trunk of a car, hoping this would all blow over and Trump wouldn't go after her. Of course, she never got paid for it. When Trump won, her "gay dads' disowned her. And then in January of 2018, the news leaks and nothing will ever be normal again.

Her husband found out that she lied about it to him. Awkward as hell. At one point she was worried about him being suicidal, as he was having a whopping depression bout after their daughter's birth, and she said she was afraid that her daughter would have to live with "When my mom told my dad what she did, he killed himself." Nowadays she has fans, but she also has to homeschool her kid and she can't go home to see said kid and they have to meet up in random other cities to avoid paparazzi. When she signed the bullshit statement, she signed her name "wrong" so people would know something was wrong, which came up on Jimmy Kimmel. It was awkward because she couldn't say anything. 

When she gets to finally meeting Michael Avenatti, it's almost set up as a love affair. She even mentions that Michael "fell in love with me as a client" because she owns who she is and isn't afraid to acknowledge it. Wow, have things changed since publication. I guess they are still together though?

After the 60 Minutes interview, as the death threats started and her husband was getting mad at her again for not mentioning the time when she was threatened in the parking lot, she has her one remaining friend film her saying goodbye to her family, who to contact about her life insurance policy, how to deal with the horses, and then don't mention this until after she's killed. She's even bet on her own murder in a celebrity deathpool. "I need it to be funny or else my daughter isn't going to grow up with a mother." 

Stormy's opinion on Michael Cohen: "He's a complete fucking moron. The world would not know anything about me without him constantly getting in his own way." 

Nowadays, Stormy is doing live shows, where she meets a lot of supporters who have high hopes for her. "They tell me they need me to save the world. It's a burden to take in all this energy, but I know it's what I am supposed to be doing. There were so many times the universe took care of me--times where I should not have done well, shouldn't have gotten out of a situation, or shouldn't have risen above because no on helped me. You've seen this time and again in these pages: the universe takes my hand and says, "I got you." And I think it wants its payback." 

She also got to go on her favorite show, Saturday Night Live, which was thrilling and said that was the best thing that ever happened to her except for having a baby. "What do I do now? Should I like, buy a puppy or something?" 

In the epilogue, she mentions getting arrested and Glen leaving her--as in emptied the bank account, ran away with their daughter and filed a restraining order against her. But he's dropped the restraining order and they will share custody. Oy. To be honest, I wasn't thinking that Glen was a peach throughout this, but yikes. But I guess that proves something: always tell your husband you slept with a creepy celebrity, lest he be surprised by the media later. 

"Where does my story go from here? I can't say I know, but I'm excited to see what comes next. I can look back on a life more full and certainly more interesting than I, as a little girl back in Baton Rouge just trying to survive and spend time with my horses, ever thought it would be. This most recent chapter has been quite the adventure, with ups and downs, new friendships formed, and old relationships lost. But as exciting and trying as things are right now, I know it won't always be like this. As a friend of mine keeps reminding me, nothing lasts forever."

The end. 

Other than her big fuckups of not telling her third husband certain things (though to be fair, dude doesn't sound like a total peach in some respects from the getgo to me, or at least he kinda yellow-flagged me), overall she sounds pretty smart, and god knows women have been flummoxed enough and scared enough by men to well, go along with that or else fear the consequences. And look what happened with that.  I admire someone who saved herself and is fighting back. She plays the long game, which I really admire. 

I hope things go well for her in the future. Four stars. 

Another excellent review of the book can be found here. 

Quote Corner:

• "And no, I do not think she should have married old Professor Bhaer. (Sorry if that is a spoiler, but if you narrowed your next read down to this one or Little Women, you need to examine your life choices."
• On how some gay men like to come to see her to be witnesses to history: "This is the first time we ever paid to get into a strip club--that has a vagina." 
• On losing her virginity and having it go really well: "I was blessed and cursed that I had an orgasm. It sounds good, but do you know how hard it was to find a boy to do that for the next fifteen years?"
• On making friends with a girl wearing a shirt that showed a row of cats walking behind with their tails up: "I'm sorry, is that a line of cat buttholes on your shirt?" "I guess so." "Okay, we're going to be friends. Because you really need one." 
• "Finally, I went fully blonde, and it's amazing what blond hair and big boobs instantly do,, by the way. Everyone thinks you're stupid, but they sure want you around." 
• "You're ruining my vision!" I yelled. Oh gosh, that sentence haunted me for years. "Don't ruin her vision" became a running joke in the company." 
• ,On directing: “I was twenty-two years old, and I had the epiphany that so many people go through life never having that moment where you can say, “This is it. This is what I was born to do.” And I’ve been drunk with power ever since.”
• At one point she goes to Glen's apartment and finds nothing but a giant hot pink paper mache squid that his roommate is making when she's high. 
• "Though I do remember a time when I was heavily pregnant and on the floor .as Glen raised a leg over me so I could shave his taint before a scene. "Is this rock bottom?" I said aloud, genuinely asking the universe." 
• While in labor: "IF I HAVE THIS BABY IN A POPCORN BOWL IN A MINIVAN... I WORKED SO HARD TO GET OUT OF LOUISIANA. YOU ARE NOT GOING TO DRAG ME BACK TO MY ROOTS." 
• "The morning of February 13, I was up early sipping coffee in my mug with Elsa from Frozen on it, just checking my messages to see who was calling me a whore that day. You know, just a working mom starting her day." 
• "When someone tweeting asking me if I was worried I was going to go to hell from taking so many dicks, I had some fun. "Does heaven have a maximum dick-taking number? More importantly, does hell have a minimum? Just want to make sure my quota is on track."
• "Pretty sure dumb whores go to hell," some guy named Scott wrote. "Glad I'm a smart one," I responded. 
• I liked the response from a female fan: "Whether you're an adult film star or a teacher or whatever, if you're a woman, you'll be called a whore one day. Let's not let that lame insult affect us." 
• Stormy likes Judge Kimba Wood, who worked at the Playboy Casino for six days. "Hey, if you don't want to be a Playboy bunny, be a federal judge. American women deserve to have choices." 
• Stormy is Daenerys and her bodyguards are her dragons. After she made a joke about them having a big food bill to feed them, "My dragons hated that and made me feel guilty about it for weeks!" 

First Dads: Parenting and Politics from George Washington Barack Obama

By Joshua Kindall.

"Don't you think it handicaps a boy to be the son of a man like my father?" -Theodore Roosevelt Jr.

I started reading this book a while back, then postponed reading it to get some library books out the door, then finished reading it but didn't have time to write it up before I went on "vacation" (see previous review as to how that went), so let's see if I remember much to review it before the end of the year.

The author categorizes presidential dads into the following categories:

• Preoccupied: dads who really just don't have much time for the kids. 
• Playful Pals: he's your dad, he's your buddy, and he's got plenty of time for you, never mind his work!
• Double-Dealing Dads: The shittiest, lying, neglectful, crappy ones.
• Tiger Dads: Otherwise known as "their kids could never do anything right."
• The Grief-Stricken: presidents who lost children and became basically non-functional after that, leading to them having crappy presidencies.
• The Nurturers: actual good dads. 

The author notes that generally speaking, the children of presidents haven't fared well in life and "somehow seem cursed." Early deaths, psychiatric problems, divorces and suicides abound. 

Preoccupied dads: FDR, Van Buren, Polk, Taylor, Hoover, Carter, Reagan, LBJ,  Taft, Nixon, George H.W. Bush, Clinton, You end up feeling very sad for FDR's horde of kids, some of whom helped him in his work, presumably because that way they could actually see him. The kids had "three" fathers--dad before polio, dad after polio, and the president, but he couldn't do emotional intimacy with anyone. One of his vice presidents, Henry Wallace, said "He doesn't know any man and no man knows him. Even his own family doesn't know anything about him." (Such an Aquarian, I have to say.) His sons in particular didn't fare well, his daughter Anna fared the best of the lot, probably because she worked with him. LBJ's kids were used to being ignored and Luci in particular was all, "If I ever do anything great, it'll be because I'm the President's daughter." Carter admitted he was obsessed with his career so his wife handled all the kid stuff, to the point where his son Jack told him that "I think the way you treated me as a child almost ruined my life." After that, they only spoke through letters for a few years. 

Playful pals: Grant and Theodore Roosevelt were just big ol' kids with their kids, along with Buchanan, Arthur and George W. Bush. This might provide kids who are together (for example, the Bush twins) or just spoiled brats like Alan Arthur. Most of the Grant kids never amounted to much--to quote Jesse Grant, "I'm a splendid loafer and with a good cigar I can stare at the wall contentedly for hours." T.R. was enthusiastic with the little ones--less so with his oldest daughter that he left with his sister to raise for years after her birth (to be fair, her mother died and he was crushed by that for years), so she always felt disconnected from everyone else once she was taken back in when he got remarried. Note that Alice was the most flamboyant and infamous of the kids (and the most fun) and she'd smoke in public, gamble and speed, and pull out her pet snake from her purse to scare people. When her dad told her he couldn't smoke under his roof, she'd smoke ON the roof, and started the "Race Suicide Club" to protest his love of large families. T.R.'s other daughter was the anti-Alice, meek and mild. As for his sons, well, if dad loves war, what does that mean for you? They're obligated to do it and one of them died in war. Then there's Wilson, who was apparently a much more fun dude in private when singing to the kids. 

Double-dealing dads: A lot of this focuses on the womanizing presidents. The author decided to not say as much about Thomas Jefferson drama and gives more focus to Tyler and his hordes of kids, including whichever ones he produced with slaves. Supposedly he claimed he fathered 52 slave children, and he disinherited his first crop of seven white children with his first wife. Cleveland and Harding had illegitimate kids they weren't interested in. LBJ and Fillmore are mentioned here, and Benjamin Harrison also pulled a Tyler in marrying a much younger woman (ditto Cleveland). The author says, "Double-dealing dads tend to house two or more contradictory identities within. In Tyler's case, a smooth socialite, an angry rebel, an upstanding family man, and a depressed loner as well as both a prig and a Lothario all somehow managed to coexist with one other." Cleveland had two named personalities, "Grover the Good" and "Big Steve" (OF COURSE THE BAD ONE IS NAMED STEVE), and Harding referred to his penis as "Jerry." Cleveland wasn't that into his legitimate kids, or kids in general. Harding claimed he would "rather have kiddies than anything else in the world" (note that he and his legit wife had no kids together and he didn't like his "good-for-nothing drunken stepson"), but uh...he wasn't actually into that. 

Tiger dads: Of course the Adamses are here--they're like, the poster children for this. Only one son per generation seems to have dealt well with tiger parenting and the rest all die of alcoholism. Poor Nabby Adams end up with a shitty husband instead of a good one because of her dad approving/disapproving of the wrong dudes. This book also suggests that Charles Adams was gay (he did hang out with Baron von Steuben) and got disowned. John Eisenhower sounds like he had less of a bad time by comparison, but he did grow up frightened of his dad. 

Grief-stricken dads: Pierce and Coolidge basically lost interest in the job once their kids died and are considered some of the least effective presidents ever. William Henry Harrison is mentioned here since he lost five adult kids and died a month in. George H.W. Bush is mentioned here, along with JFK. FDR never spoke of his dead second kid. McKinley lost his kids and his wife was in a bad state from that--but unlike Pierce and Coolidge, he wasn't incapacitated by it. 

Nurturers: Hayes, Obama, and Truman fall into this category. George Washington was good with all of his stepkids and stepgrandkids, Madison is cited for that as well. Monroe did well with his kids, as did Garfield and Ford. 

The final chapter is an epilogue called "Presidential Choices," about kids knowing they had to share their dads with the world. It wonders if maybe the preoccupied dads make the best presidents (if not dads)...well, if they were all like FDR. He thinks nurturing dads are the safer bet, and less impulsive. Playful dads may have issues laying down rules in the job as well as at home and stern dads don't connect well with people. Americans typically want both a caring family man and a hard-charging dynamo who gets things done. 

Overall I enjoyed reading this and it was comprehensive and covered its subject matter well, especially when juggling all those dudes and figuring out who to focus on (lord knows I didn't know that much dirt on Tyler before). So, four stars.

Leadership In Turbulent Times

By Doris Kearns Goodwin:

"If there is not the war, you don't get the great general; if there is not a great occasion, you don't get the great statesman; if Lincoln had lived in times of peace, no one would have known his name now." --Theodore Roosevelt.

The idea behind this one is to cover four presidents (Lincoln, both Roosevelts and Lyndon Johnson) who had good starts, went through personal adversity/Bad Shit happening, and then pulled out of it to demonstrate extraordinary leadership in troubled times once they became president. As the author admits in the foreword, even though she's written four books on these men already and thought she knew them well (and she worked for LBJ!), as she viewed them through a leadership prism, she felt as if she was meeting them anew. They do seem to proceed from each other in certain ways, especially with the last three because they actually knew their predecessors and learned from them. 

I am going to TRY to write a shorter review because trying to write long reviews of presidential books bogged even ME down. 

Essentially, she has sections of the book. Part One is "Ambition and the Recognition of Leadership" and covers the early lives of the four and their upbringings and their interest in politics before things went wrong for them personally. Part Two, "Adversity and Growth" is when each man had to deal with terrible things. Lincoln's horrible depression after (temporarily) breaking up with Mary Todd, Theodore Roosevelt losing his wife and mother at the same time, Franklin Roosevelt coming down with polio, and ... Lyndon lost an election. I'll be honest: that last one does not compare as much as the others, but you gotta work with what life gives you and she points out that it really crushed him for years until he had a heart attack. Anyway, she covers how they all pulled out of the skids in their own ways there.

As for Part Three, "The Leader and the Times: How They Led" is when all four got into office and how they dealt with things. Lincoln is dubbed "transformational" when coming up with the Emancipation Proclamation. Theodore is dubbed "crisis management" for dealing with the coal strike (I'll be honest, kinda not my favorite to unravel that drama). Franklin gets "turnaround leadership" for doing the Hundred Days of whopping change upon getting into office and having to figure out how to deal with the Great Depression, which I found very admirable. And Lyndon gets "visionary leadership" for by god getting the Civil Rights Act into law. For those of you wonder uh...what happened to Lyndon after that...good question, and since the author was literally working with him at the time, she can tell you that what went wrong after that was that essentially, he had to go from being "visionary" and going after positive things he wanted to playing defense on a total train wreck situation. Basically, he was working against his own talents. 

There is an epilogue wrapping up all of their deaths, and the Lyndon one is particularly good, for obvious reasons. 

Overall, I really liked this. It kind of felt "sampler platter" compared to reading anything else of hers I've read so far (i.e. a lot shorter!), but I think that's probably good for more political reading noobs, and she had good focus and points on what she was covering here. I recommend it if you're into presidents (which I am, even though I am not into leadership), because the profiles of how they dealt with hard situations is very interesting and educational to read about. Yeah, that just sounds like I wrote a fifth grade book report, but it's still accurate. This is a cool book and I recommend it (also very fifth grade!), four stars. 

Born Trump: Inside America's First Family

By Emily Jane Fox.

This one's a biography of the Trump kids (minus Barron, who is mentioned as being born but that's about it--oh, and he's named after Donald's go-to alias). It starts out with the inauguration and well, the usual stuff I've kind of read before. I think I mostly just noticed that Tiffany wasn't noticed in a particular store like Chelsea had been when she went in, and also when she spilled coffee nobody (including her security detail) helped her get it. Her security detail was, guess what, playing a game on his phone. It doesn't really get to the past biographical details until about chapter 4, which is where I felt like I was getting into it.

The book covers Donald's various marriages and dramas, and features the memorable quote about how Donald didn't want to have a Don Jr. because "What if he's a loser?" HAH HAH. I did not know that Ivanka is really named Ivana and Ivanka is a nickname (see below). Life sounds like it was pretty good for the first three until Donald started having his affair with Marla. Marla and Ivana got into it in a restaurant in Aspen in front of the kids and everyone else. The kids were 11, 8, and 5. I kind of feel sorry for Don Jr. because his birthday is December 31 and it sounds like his parents were usually exploding around that time. The three became tabloid stars and hell, even poor Eric was hearing about it in kindergarten. Marla and Donald sounded incompatible other than boning pretty much the entire time and he kinda had to be dragged into getting married to her. He'd "run his socks under water" when he claimed to be golfing instead of screwing, so Marla knew darned well to go along every time he said he'd go golfing. She was a hippie, he was all about his steak. Donald was more into marrying Melania at the time, though their marital issues are given short shrift by comparison. 

The author dubs the Trump kids "mini-Voltrons" in chapter 5, and refers to them as such in the chapter headings. Donald wanted five kids "because with five, then I will know that one will be guaranteed to turn out like me." The reference to his kids as mini-Voltrons comes from Michael Cohen because as far as he's concerned, each kid got one of his traits. Ivanka works the meia, Don Jr. is the angry one, Eric builds. "Tiffany and Barron weren't initially categorized in the same way, though it is clear that both had Donald's guy-on-the-outside-looking-in passed down to them."

Ivanka--Voltron Number One: The Media Mastermind (along with Jared):

• Ivanka gets the most chapter time (along with Jared) and in general comes off the best of the lot, even now. About the worst anecdote about her is that when a Trump employee casually informs Ivanka that he saw a postcard for a country store named Ivanka's Country Barn, Ivanka got mad, said "I told my dad we needed to trademark my name. He never listens to me. He never listens, but I told him." I would like to point out at this point that her name is actually Ivana, and the country store owner sounds like she was actually named Ivanka, but no matter, because guess who filed a trademark application on the name Ivanka for oh, pretty much everything put onto the body (but not, I guess, the country store?). 
• At some point the kids found their nanny dead of a heart attack.
• Ivanka would love to be president.
• Ivanka's supposed friendship with Chelsea Clinton before the election is mentioned as "acquaintance" here. 
• Ivanka is all about how she presents her image and is a control freak about it and will trot out the same things over and over again. 
• Ivanka and Jared made a cameo on Gossip Girl and now the show's creator regrets not giving Jared more lines since he doesn't speak in public. 
• Ivanka got tricked by a homeless man she regularly gave money to.
• At one point Ivanka had a friend group that was all named Lindsey except for her. WHAAAAAAT? 
• Generally speaking she is polite and kind (and actually giving money to a homeless guy is above and beyond the rest of the relatives).
• Jared and Ivanka are deemed a good match for their similar parental issues. 
• Wedding guests got gifts of a little Hebrew book and flip-flops. 
• Jared's dad sounds like (not shocking given what he got convicted for) a total asshole. As for his mother, when introduced to someone, she said nothing, plucked a hair off the person's sweater and walked away. 
• The Kushner parents don't like Karlie Kloss compared to Ivanka. 
• I rolled my eyes very hard at how Charlie and Jared defended themselves about Charle's crimes. "All he did was put together the tape and send it.," says Jared. 

Don Jr--Voltron Number Two: The Attack Dog

• Don Jr. seemed to be caught between trying to be a "regular" guy by showing up in a dirty pickup truck at school, versus being a party boy. He earned the nickname "Diaper Don" for wetting other people's beds. 
• When the Three were coming back to work after lunch, Don Jr. got the bright idea to clothesline tackle Ivanka and then sit on her head, announcing to all that he used to do this to her all the time. Eric jumped in and started tickling her. "I'd say it was definitely not something you'd see in every office, but this wasn't every office," an observer said. 
• Most people wouldn't voluntarily do frat hazing after their first year. But Don Jr. loved it. To him, it just seemed like a good time. I mean to GET hazed, not to BE hazing. 
• He and Eric call themselves "the brutes." 
• Don Jr. has been dubbed "the Fifth Avenue Redneck" for his love of hunting and fishing.
• Don Jr. was the most troublesome of the kids to Donald.
• Don Jr. claims to have broken probably every major bone in his body, presumably due to all the fights he likes to get in.
• Donald would yell at the kids to trust nobody, himself included, when they were four. The author points out that if you're in a duck blind in the middle of nowhere and sliced your forehead open and you're way too far away from medical professionals (at one point Don. Jr. had to glue his own head back together in a situation like this), you have to trust who's around you. 
• Vanessa Trump thought Donald was ah, the r-word because he introduced himself to her twice like he hadn't met her at all earlier. 
• Don got a deal on Vanessa's engagement ring if he proposed to her in a mall in New Jersey with cameras rolling. (Vanessa later said he'd proposed privately two months earlier.) 
• Nobody wants Tiffany in their wedding party--Vanessa had ten bridesmaids, including Ivanka. 
• Don Jr. was too cheap to donate to his kids' school but totally offered free construction advice. 

Eric--Voltron Number Three: The Builder

• At age six, Eric called a teacher a bitch for asking him to put away his mat. He was "counseled out" of the school. This is a thing that happened to all of the Big Three at one point or another.
• It sounds more like Eric got parented by Don Jr. and Ivanka (and nannies and whatever). 
• Eric, as a grade schooler, demanded a table right away because he was a Trump in a crowded restaurant where even the celebrities wait.
• Apparently Eric is the better of the brothers at his job. At one point Donald was asking a friend what he'd do if one son was more talented than the other, and when Eric got a job over Don Jr., Don Jr. did not like it. I'm not sure if "better at the job" is really what the Trumps think it is since the authors point out that after Eric remodeled that Scotland golf course in 2016, the company lost $23 million due to the renovations. 
• He did like building Legos and working in the woodshop as a kid. He actually would do his homework EARLY. Donald did not approve. Eric just said he wanted to get things done early so he could have more time to read about things he cared about. In other hot news, a Trump reads! 
• Eric's parents didn't bother to visit him the entire time he was at boarding school and Ivana didn't even show up for his graduation. 
• Eric would claim to be "no relation" when people asked in college.
• Eric's high school nickname was "Choad" after he called someone else one. He was also voted biggest mooch on campus. People would torture him by making presumably nasty doctored photos of his mom and sister and leave them around for him to find. 
• Eric is described as being "fairly quiet, sometimes awkward, mostly uncommonly kind." He likes to tell people he'll give them huge noogies. He did not party as hard as Don Jr. did. 
• His wife Lara broke both wrists two weeks before the wedding, but was permitted to wear soft casts that she could remove during the ceremony, and then covered them with "fingerless, gathered and bejeweled gloves custom made for her and her casts." 
• Jared at the wedding: "You are not just gaining a family. You are getting 6 million Twitter followers." Eric said that what Jared had to say was "heartfelt and especially meaningful." 

Tiffany--The Voltron from Another Universe:

• Tiffany had a hard time coming up with a speech for the presidential campaign since "she didn't have many unique, intimate moments with her dad."
• The author (and probably anyone else with any sense) thinks Tiffany was very fortunate to be raised in California away from the other Trumps and had no idea what it was like to have her parents living together. She also didn't get chased by paparazzi all the time there. 
• Some anonymous friend said that Donald "gets that he screwed it up when it came to Tiffany, and this is a man who doesn't ever admit that he got it wrong on anything." 
• Marla had Tiffany record one song, which is apparently featuring "a voice hardly decipherable as a human as a result of all the autotune." 
• Marla likes to go on about how she was fortunate to have raised Tiffany as a single parent. 
• As Ivanka wrote about in a book of hers, she had to sweet talk her dad into giving Tiffany her own credit card, which apparently had a $500/month budget. Tiffany was notorious at college for only paying exactly what she had to because of her budget. 
• When Tiffany went to the East Coast for college, things changed. She got rejected from a campus women's group because "People in the group thought she was perfectly nice, but feared that having someone with her last name would turn off other girls looking to join the house." 
• Tiffany is a "rich kid of Instagram." 

Overall, I give this three and a half stars. I think it's probably a bit hard to be comprehensive in some ways on this situation, but there's good points made where she can find them. 

Yes We (Still) Can: Politics in the Age of Obama, Twitter, and Trump

By Dan Pfeiffer.

Here's another (sorta) Obama-employee memoir. Except Dan Pfeiffer, former communications director and now podcaster, takes some different takes on it, focusing on how the world has changed, what mistakes he and the administration made, how their win led us to this shithole situation, how Facebook and Twitter have ruined/changed everything, etc. Dan admits his flaws and faults and especially mistakes in this.

Notable moments:

• Quote from Obama: "I just banned torture. That's pretty cool, huh."
• Dan is besties with Alyssa Mastromonaco, who he cites as saving his behind frequently and presumably also getting the title of her book from moments like the ones he had. 
• The time when Dan split his pants at work and then had to do a walk and talk with Obama.
• "Did you know that historically White House communications directors get fired and go to jail more often than any position other than the White House counsel?" --this was pointed out to Dan, who ran to verify its truth. You'll note how many people have gone through the job since Trump took the office. 
• According to Dan, people in Silicon Valley have no idea how to deal with the monster they created either. 
• Even after the birth certificate was presented, "four in ten Republicans still believed that Barack Obama was not born in the United States....They couldn't hear what Obama was saying because Obama was saying it." 
• The Obama team couldn't work with the Republicans because "they were petrified of being tossed out in a primary challenge if they were photographed treating Barack Obama like a human being." 
• Every Obama win came at a long-term cost and the Republican base got worse and worse. 
• While on his very brief holiday break around the end of 2013, Dan read some books and realized that "at some point in every second term, a president and his team must learn to make an impact without Congress." 
• Dan started having some stress-related health issues that put him in the hospital a few times, at risk for having a stroke. He got the bright idea to keep on tweeting so no one would notice he was absent, started tweeting while going under anesthesia, and accidentally made a really bad sounding typo. "The fact that I couldn't put Twitter down long enough to get my liver biopsied is a sign of the times." 
• "I've never done meth, but I imagine the experience is much like using Twitter. You start it casually because you heard good things; next thing you know, you have  been up for ninety-six hours, have lost all your teeth, and are living in a shopping cart outside the local supermarket." 
• There is a page about the time when Kanye asked a question. And when I say asked a question, I mean "ranbled on about random shit until Obama politely broke in to stop him and then said "That shit cray" in the limo on the way home. 
• I'm amused that the "lucky" thing the Obama team did was eat chicken tenders. "My wife even sent me chicken tenders on our wedding day to make sure we got our marriage off to the right start." 
• He points out that whoever had the best message wins. Trump's was clear, Hillary's was not. "campaigns will always be decided by who tells a more compelling story about America." 
• Like me, Dan may very well be afraid that "we may never have another election again and because we will die in a nuclear attack or Trump will seize power in an authoritarian coup." Or at least he mentions that in a footnote.
• Also, Dan absolutely looooooooooooves footnotes. Should you choose to read this book, I imagine this would be a whopping pain in the ass to read in an ebook, so maybe make it paper, eh?
• Sample footnote: "[Bradley] Cooper was a few years ahead of me at Georgetown and was known around campus as Fabio, because he had long blond and hair and tended to wear flowy linen shirts unbuttoned to his navel. This is not super-relevant, but I had to tell someone." 
• Last quote from Obama in the book: "Maybe I am just looking for a silver lining, but I am hopeful that this will be the clarifying event that will show the public the two different versions for the country."

West Winging It: An Un-Presidential Memoir

By Pat Cunnane.

Here's another Obama staffer memoir. Pat Cunnane seems to have stuck with the administration all the way through, rising from the lowly media monitor job who had to e-mail everyone all the news stories, to media wrangler, writer, etc. Interestingly enough, Pat makes himself the butt of everyone's jokes, the one everyone pranks, etc. and as the occasional lone white guy in a room of ladies/PoC, I guess that'd happen. It's what makes this one fun, I have to say. He does things like mention Bieber and ask what POTUS means...awkward!

Pat's mom sounds like fun.:

• After finding out her son Harry got a tattoo (not from Harry), she decided to convince him into telling her about it--by faking a tattoo on her own foot. This works and Harry ends up showing off his tat--but he also is totally excited about his mom having one and so he goes around telling all the relatives at every family event about it, forcing his mom to rewrite the tattoo in the bathroom a lot. She eventually just writes it on her foot by default every morning until she finally caves in and actually gets it tattooed on herself for real. It took her years to tell Harry about it after that. 
• Pat and his mother were arguing over whether or not he should go to Georgetown (her choice) or University of Miami (his). She thought the tiebreaker would be to call the Larry King Show and have Larry decide. To her shock, Larry and Dr. Phil pick Miami. Miami FTW!

 Pranks pulled on Pat at work:

• His Italian girlfriend calls on April Fool's saying that the FBI is at her place with guns.
• A coworker has him picked up in a cab but told the driver he was picking up a DC prostitute. Pat of course says things like "Everybody was all over me in there!"
• "You're fired, Pat" became a familiar refrain around the West Wing."
• "Writing 'Friends, colleagues, Pat" became a frequent way to start an e-mail. And saying it became a traditional method of entering a room."
• Everyone claims he looks like Bashar al-Assad.
• "I was denied a mai tai in front of the Secret Service." 
• "I had nine direct bosses during the second term, seven of them women. All of them wonderful. All mocked me mercilessly....."
• A photo of Pat shirtless on a horse in the ocean was fished off his Facebook page and shown around the office. 
• Every time he said something ludicrous, someone made sure to write it down and save it for posterity on e-mail. Example: "I don't think we should have POTUS meeting with a hooker!" 
• Obama signs a picture for Pat with "Thanks for the good work...and the foursome!" 
• "The one time I try to pull a prank--the only time I didn't overanalyze the potential ramifications and failed to consider a worst possible scenario--it came to pass. On live TV. At the expense of the president." 

Other interesting facts:

• Most assistants in (a normal) the WH last about 18 months to 2 years before hitting burnout and getting openly cranky, and he says the staff would realize this and look into getting them another job. Hah, wish that happened at mine. 
• His uncle Bob used to volunteer to read Bill Clinton's e-mail and at one point the staff got to meet...Socks the cat. Pat would do the same with Sunny and Bo the dogs. 
• Uncle Bob also reported back that Clinton received a lot of underwear. "The amount of sexual stuff that came in for Bill Clinton cannot be overstated."
• Obama was legit playing golf most weekends. They did not want footage of him playing golf because that would lead to too many sports metaphors and "far-right-wing media personalities specifically didn't approve of this president playing golf." 
• Pat helped facilitate a story on a random fox running around the lawn. "I can confirm for you that the president has seen the fox, Carol." This story got published on the same day as Obamacare opening enrollment. Guess which story made the front page? "We just learned that 8 million Americans signed up for health care for the first time in history, but it got bumped from the news for the White House fox. But, congrats to Pat." 
• What makes Obama really mad? Writing an article all about Michelle's ass. "It's totally disrespectful!" 
• It's fun to propose at the White House Rose Garden. Even if you're not supposed to use it for personal stuff.
• On overnight flights, Obama dressed..."really not okay." Which is to say, schlubby.
• At one point Pat complained about his legs being sore to a guy who'd been in the Tour de France. 
• He once accidentally called POTUS "SLOTUS." 
• After losing three times, "That was the last time I was asked to play basketball with the president." Later he's asked to play golf with the president, who trash talks him, and then he of course triple bogeys. 
• At one point they go to Russia and are presented with teddy bears and flash drives. The flash drives are confiscated for obvious reasons, but they figure out later that the bears were also bugged. DUH. Pat has long since lost his by the time they figured this out though. 
• One Sunday morning, Pat goes to the WH having not showered, and of course three hot actresses drop on by. 
• Bill Murray has critiqued his golf swing. "You should thrust your hips more. You'd hit it farther. Plus, you'd be a hit on the dating scene." 
• When the Seinfelds are around filming the Comedians in Cars getting Coffee show, Jessica Seinfeld specifically says she had a crush on a guy with Pat's name. Not only does Pat fail to recognize her, he's all "Maybe it was my dad." "How old do you think I am?" Pat declines to follow up on that. 
• Obama calls some prison correction officers and says, "I'll see you soon!" "I hope not. We work in a prison!" "We edited the video heavily." 

So in addition to "life was awesome at the WH back in the day" stuff, you get jokes. I approve.

However, the very start and end of the book cover election night 2016. The devastation starts out the book and the end of the book features Obama rounding everyone up and telling them, "This is not the apocalypse." God, I hope he's right.

Anyway, four stars.