Regarp Book Blog

A listless, uninspired, passive young man. A brooding, unsatisfied, troubled young woman. Unrequited love. Jazz music. Cats. Occasional episodes of unremarkable lovemaking. Books. Unresolved plot strands. Magical realism. Moments of literary flourish that flirt with magnificence. Clocks. Fine writing. Insipid prose. Prolonged solitude. Mysterious circumstances. An earlobe fetish. Bizarre incidents unquestioned and unexplored. Beatles tunes. Ghosts. Quotidian monotony. Fantastical beasts. Technology, conspicuous in its absence. Imaginary OtherWorlds. Sophisticated metaphor. Anticlimactic endings.

If each of these descriptions was lettered on the twenty-five squares of a standard bingo card and you checked them all off, the result would be the elements that occur in all or most of the fiction of renowned Japanese author Haruki Murakami. I know this because I have, over the years, read them all. All the novels. All the short stories. For the afficionado like myself, Murakami has become something of an addiction that—like most addictions—begets both pleasure and pain. That is because, as every Murakami cult initiate is aware, the body of his work at once translates to genius and frustration, literature and pulp, the brilliant and the banal. And this is true too for his latest novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls [published in Japan 2023; English translation 2024], a well-written if meandering and ultimately unsatisfying tale.

For the most part, the Murakami catalog falls into two distinct categories: standard literary fiction, like Norwegian Wood—his breakout bestseller of nostalgia and loss—and  magical realism, such as Kafka on the Shore, an extraordinary fusion of reality and fantasy. Had the former been my first read, I might not have gone back for more, because despite its superb craftmanship, it just didn’t suit my vibe. Instead, a random recommendation from a chatty barista pointed me to Kafka. I bought it. I devoured it. I was hooked.

I have long had a love affair with magical realism, sparked initially by encounters with Gabriel Garcia Marquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude) and nurtured in more recent times by Richard Flanagan (Gould’s Book of Fish). It’s a tricky genre, not easy to pull off elegantly. To my mind, its closest cousin is the objective correlative, a technique popularized by both Hemingway and Garcia Marquez, that has inanimate objects communicate mood and emotion. Magical realism takes a big step beyond that, typically inserting an episode of the fantastical, often teeming with irony and metaphor, into a narrative otherwise grounded in reality. At a certain point in One Hundred Years of Solitude, Garcia Marquez has it persistently rain upon the fictional town of Macondo without respite for four years, eleven months, and two days. In Kafka on the Shore, the main character encounters a pair of youthful World War II era Imperial soldiers in the forest who are stuck in time, decades after Hiroshima.

Another manifestation of magical realism constructs an alternate world that has characters slip between dual realities, either or both subject to supernational ingredients that are usually taken for granted by its inhabitants. That is the literary structure for Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish, which blends and blurs the timelines of a twenty-first century Tasmanian con-man and a nineteenth century convict in what was then Van Dieman’s Land. So too in Murakami’s 1Q84, where a female assassin stalks dual dimensions, one remarkable for an earth that hosts two moons.

The latter style forms the framework for The City and Its Uncertain Walls. (Spoiler alert ahead!) This time around, a seventeen year old listless, uninspired, passive young man whose only companion is his pet cat falls for a sixteen year old brooding, unsatisfied, troubled young woman. She describes for him an imaginary OtherWorld of a walled city with shifting boundaries dominated by a large clock with no hands, where people who cast no shadows cohabitate with fantastical beasts—in this case unicorns who perish at an alarming rate and are cremated in burn pits outside the city walls by a powerful figure, the “Gatekeeper.” Then the girl disappears from his life, and he pines for her. Through mysterious circumstances, one version of the protagonist somehow manages to cross over to the dreamscape of the walled city and is admitted by the Gatekeeper, who separates him from his shadow and damages his eyes in such a way that now he is capable of reading dreams stored at the city’s library, where he is installed as the “Dream Reader,” as the girl once predicted. The girl, who has not aged, also works at the library, but has no memory of him. Meanwhile, his other incarnation in the “real” world is so paralyzed by unrequited love that he can never free himself of longing for the girl, even as he turns to middle age in a life marked by prolonged solitude. He quits his job and moves far away to take a position as head librarian in a remote village where he manages a collection of books rather than dreams. Although set in contemporary times where cell phones and computers abound, in this particular library technology is conspicuous in its absence. But magical realism intrudes here too. Bizarre incidents go unquestioned and unexplored. Then it turns out that his predecessor, who frequents the library to offer anecdotes and advice, is actually a ghost, which upon discovery is treated as oddly unremarkable. Ultimately, the novel disappoints. What at first makes for a compelling narrative that promises to blaze a trail of fascinating possibilities within each of the dual worlds, instead wanders around interminably in successive chapters, fine writing punctuated by insipid prose, and finally narrows to multiple paths of unresolved plot strands and a frustrating anticlimax. Along the way, there is Beatles symbolism as well as a bizarre variation on the earlobe fetish. And that’s a BINGO!

For me, it was quite a letdown. The grand attempts at metaphor strike as forced, at times even cliché. Again and again, Murakami seems to try too hard. Early on, I began to compare the boy’s unresolved longing for the girl to the star-crossed lovers of Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. So I winced when the character Koyasu casually cites Love in the Time of Cholera in conversation, as if rubbing the reader’s nose in it. I then face-palmed when she defined “magical realism” for us. I wondered how Murakami could go so wrong.

A partial explanation can be found in the “Afterword,” where the author reveals that this book is a reworking of a novella he published in 1980 (but never permitted to be reprinted), and the mystical city is closely related to the one he fashioned in his 1985 novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. He admits he was dissatisfied with the original story and had always hoped to expand it. To my mind, he should have known better. The writer of the novella was in his early thirties; the author of the novel in his early seventies. They are at once the same man but yet very different men, separated by four decades. Vanity projects often fail. Failure is too strong a word here, but this one certainly falls short.

It was Murakami’s first novel in six years, and I had long anticipated it, especially because I rather disliked his previous two, Killing Commendatore, and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. I was hoping instead for something along the lines of magnificence found between the covers of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Sputnik Sweetheart, 1Q84, or, of course, Kafka on the Shore. That was not to be. And yet … And yet, it is not a terrible novel. Despite the flaws—and these are manifold—this work remains thought-provoking and, certainly for Murakami fans, well worth the time. While I mourn the missteps and the unrealized potential, I do not regret reading it.

 

NOTE: I have reviewed other works by Murakami here:

Men Without Women

South of the Border, West of the Sun

Hear the Wind Sing & Pinball 1973

After the Quake

Sputnik Sweetheart

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

Killing Commendatore

NOTE: For the uninitiated, a free taste of Murakami—his outstanding 2014 short story “Scheherazade” from Men Without Women—is available online at: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/scheherazade-3

 

Prior to Civil War, the southern slave power fundamentally directed the destiny of the American Republic, facilitated at least in part by an unfair advantage in representation baked into the Constitution with the “three-fifths clause” that counted the unenfranchised enslaved as fractional, fictional citizens. But yet the nature of their peculiar institution ravaged the environment and left them ever hungering for new lands to spoil, especially the vast territories of the west that had been seized in the Mexican War. Lincoln’s 1860 election on a free-soil platform foreclosed that expansion and secession ensued. Lincoln, antislavery but hardly an abolitionist, prosecuted the war to preserve the Union; only later was emancipation added as a goal. The Confederacy was finally defeated on the battlefield, yet today many historians might argue that the south actually won the Civil War, as evidenced by the long reign of segregation, institutionalized racism, and the hundreds of monuments to white supremacy that still dot the landscape. But in the three decades that separated Appomattox and Plessy v. Ferguson, the United States embarked on a radical agenda to expand human rights that reached beyond outlawing human chattel slavery to extending the franchise and legislating equality. Although Reconstruction ultimately failed, its unfulfilled promises remain inextricably bound to the soul of our nation, reemerging in other centuries in unlikely places like the Edmund Pettus Bridge and sites of Black Lives Matter protests.

In The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920 [2024], an ambitious, encyclopedic, groundbreaking work of scholarship, noted historian Manisha Sinha takes a fresh look at sixty years of American history and erases the boundaries attached to dates and events enforced in traditional textbooks, while sketching in her own markers. Civil War studies are typically bookended by the Mexican Cession that accelerated the crises of the antebellum, and the “Compromise of 1877” that officially ended Reconstruction—an artificial construct that ignores the fact that significant elements of Reconstruction endured at least until Plessy, with a last gasp when North Carolina Rep. George Henry White’s term expired in 1901, the sole remaining black from the south elected to Congress in the nineteenth century. Sinha, who previously distinguished herself with her widely acclaimed history of abolition, The Slave’s Cause, goes much, much further. In her striking reinterpretation that challenges the conventional historiography, the election of 1860 marked the dawn of the “Second American Republic,” a new era that extended far further than the timeline usually given to Civil War and Reconstruction, and expands the theme of Lincoln’s “new birth of freedom” from emancipation to a whole host of unfulfilled rights those then marginalized would claim for themselves. As such, wide arms are wrapped around such seemingly disparate topics as women’s suffrage, the fate of Native Americans, Gilded Age plutocracy, the suppression of labor, and even overseas imperialism.

An outline of the events of Reconstruction should be familiar to most Americans—but sadly that is not the case. When I was growing up, the story of the Civil War—as scripted by “Lost Cause” mythmakers and overlayed with the dramatic musical refrain from the film Gone with the Wind—was styled as a regional conflict of white men, a brother-against-brother struggle over states’ rights and tariffs. African Americans had bit parts, and slavery was almost beside the point. Then the “gallant” Lee surrendered, Lincoln was shot, the enslaved went free, and a national reconciliation occurred just about overnight. Reconstruction was treated superficially if at all, but once more to the tune of that same leitmotif that had poor downtrodden southerners preyed upon by rapacious northern “Carpetbaggers” in a harsh occupation. Then, in a flash, federal troops did the right thing and withdrew, white people north and south lived happily ever after, and blacks were essentially erased from history.

It remains astonishing that, until relatively recently, that is how most Americans understood the war and its aftermath. All too many still do. But the scholarly consensus has established that the central cause of the Civil War was human chattel slavery, that African Americans played a pivotal role in the Confederacy’s defeat, and that the postwar years in the south had far less to do with depredations by greedy northern plunderers than with the prevalence of violent bands of white supremacists who terrorized and murdered blacks attempting to claim civil rights newly won and enshrined in amendments to the Constitution.

The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic opens at the dawn of Reconstruction. Lincoln left no definitive blueprint for how he would frame the postwar period, but broad hints seemed to point towards generous terms for the defeated, rapid reunification, and at least some guarantees for the welfare of the newly emancipated. What was clear was his conviction that the process was to be directed by the executive branch. Congress—then controlled by the “Radical Republicans”—disagreed. They advocated for some sort of punishment for the south after all the bloodshed, demanded stiff conditions for states that had seceded to rejoin the Union, and imagined vastly expanded civil rights for African Americans—all under the purview of the legislative branch.

Clashes between these competing visions were made moot by Lincoln’s murder, just five days after Appomattox. At first glance, his successor, wartime governor Andrew Johnson—a Jacksonian Democrat known to despise the plantation elite, who had preemptively freed the enslaved in occupied Tennessee—had seemed a likely ally for Congressional aims. But such hopes were dashed early on as it became clear that the insecure and deeply racist Johnson gloried at the prospect of earning the esteem of his old foes by offering blanket pardons, while blocking all efforts to wield federal authority to protect freedmen under threat by their erstwhile masters. Leading Confederates, who once feared retribution, were delighted by the unexpected turn of events.

But Congress fought back. Significant legislation was passed, Johnson’s many vetoes overridden, and the landmark 14th Amendment mandating equal rights for African Americans was enacted in 1866. Johnson barely survived impeachment, but his tenure had wrought much havoc. Legal statutes proved tenuous against militant leagues of white supremacists like the Ku Klux Klan that would routinely intimidate and frequently murder blacks unwilling to be bullied into submission, as well as the whites who stood by them, particularly as the ranks of federal troops thinned with demobilization.

Next in the White House was the politically moderate Ulysses S. Grant, Lincoln’s rightful heir, who both sought unity and sympathized with beleaguered blacks. But for all his good intentions, Grant turned out to be less adept and less effective as president than as general. And in many ways, it was already too late. There was no way to turn back the clock on the Johnson years. One by one, states formerly in rebellion that had rejoined the Union effectively overturned Reconstruction governments and claimed “Redemption” as ex-Confederate elites took power, and African Americans were even more heinously brutalized. Those who had once led the rebellion even took seats in Congress. Reconstruction formally sunsetted as occupying armies were withdrawn in a deal that settled the disputed election of 1876, but that was more ornamental than consequential. Reconstruction had been defeated; that was just a matter of pulling up stakes.

Efforts to realize the goals associated with Reconstruction persisted for the rest of the century, but these were generally marked by some small victories and many larger defeats. A number of blacks were elected to the House and Senate, even as equal protections guaranteed in the 14^th Amendment faded away in practice. Although the 15th Amendment that extended the franchise to African American males became law in 1870, it could not be enforced across the bulk of the old Confederacy. And thus, the old three-fifths clause, officially extinct, had come full circle. Blacks were no longer counted as fractions for the purpose of representation, but as whole numbers. Yet, just as before, they were effectively denied the right to vote. The old slave power, sans the enslaved, had taken back much of what had been lost by secession and war—and somehow gained even more political clout.

For those who have read Eric Foner or Douglas Egerton, there is not much new here, but Sinha succeeds brilliantly in adding much-needed nuance while contextualizing Reconstruction beyond the political to a complex, interrelated movement of social, economic, and cultural forces that coexisted with often competing dynamics of a postwar United States driven by a thirst for wealth and territorial domination, while desperate to bury the past and move forward.  As in her previous work on abolition, the author rightly refocuses the history on the ground to highlight African Americans who did the heavy lifting to advance Reconstruction, rather than their white allies who habitually receive credit in other accounts. And here again she excels, reminding us just how common it was for blacks to be arbitrarily targeted for violence and how many were left for dead. By citing numerous incidents, and attaching names (when possible) to the victims, she restores their humanity from the statistical anonymity of most studies.

But Sinha may be less successful when she leaves the struggle for African American civil rights behind to attach a Reconstruction zeitgeist to much wider arenas that encompass women’s suffrage, the Indian Wars, unbridled capitalism, strike-breaking, and imperialism. To be sure, Reconstruction was a truly radical attempt to remake society that carved deep grooves elsewhere, but there are limits. Certain ostensible correlations might be overstated. There is no doubt that the outcome of the Civil War resulted in a federal government capable of serving as a powerful agent for change, which warrants underscore. But even absent the conflict, it seems that given historical forces already present in the antebellum, such as the explosive growth of manufacturing in the north, an expanded labor pool fueled by immigration, innovations in communication and transportation, and westward expansion, subsequent developments such as the Second Industrial Revolution, an overheated economy, increasing inequality, and clashes between capital and labor were likely to occur regardless. As to overseas adventurism, so-called “filibusters” hankered for Cuba many decades before Theodore Roosevelt helped facilitate that “splendid little war.”

Sinha’s thesis finds its firmest ground in her treatment of the suffrage movement, as the long fight for women’s voting rights was first manifested in a series of alliances—of whites and blacks—that overlapped with causes favoring abolition and equal rights for African Americans. Many white women who had expended so much effort in this behalf were deeply embittered when black men seemed to leapfrog over them to earn the franchise. Some cloaked their disappointment, steadfast in the belief that their time would come. Others turned hostile. Sinha reveals the uncomfortable story of how, for a time, suffrage icons Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton betrayed black women by making common cause with Democrats openly inimical to civil rights in order to advance attempts to obtain the ballot. Other suffragists, loath to view expanding rights as a zero sum game, took a more honorable path. Sinha concludes The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic with the ratification of the 19^th Amendment in 1920, which finally granted the right to vote to all adults, regardless of gender or color. Of course, for black women across the south, like their male counterparts, this was to be an empty promise until the late 1960s.

It is more difficult to connect the dots from Reconstruction to the displacement and near extermination Native Americans: brutally forced off their lands, driven to starvation, herded into reservations, hunted and killed by the cavalry, faced with extinction. Sinha emphasizes that many advocates for black equality witnessed these events unfold with horror and went on record in protest. But these figures represented the tiniest of minorities. The rest of America, north and south, was just as united after the war as in the antebellum in the pursuit of manifest destiny, and either wholly antagonistic or merely agnostic to the plight of the indigenous. Stephen Douglas’s cry for “popular sovereignty” that ended up fanning the flames of secession was deeply entangled with lobbying for a transcontinental railroad that would ride roughshod through domains Indians claimed as their own. Few whites objected then or later. In 1860, southern elites lusted for the western territories to recreate enslaved societies on the plains, while northern free-soilers yearned just as fervently for wide open spaces reserved for yeoman farmers. Neither vision included free blacks, and each excluded Native Americans. The end of the war simply translated into more resources that could be brought to bear upon Indian relocation or annihilation, accelerating a process long underway.

Like many historians, Sinha bemoans the fact that Lincoln’s party, which once cheered abolition and equality, mutated into a coldhearted pro-corporate entity indifferent to rights denied to large segments of its citizenry, and unfriendly to a labor force comprised principally of foreign nationals. Tragic indeed, but how surprising was that? The origin of the Republican Party, after all, was a coalition of former pro-business Whigs, disaffected Democrats, nativist “Know Nothings,” and racist, antislavery free-soilers—most whom despised the tiny minority of abolitionists who clung to the fringes. Antislavery and abolition rarely overlapped in those days. And in 1860, abolitionists were split over whether to endorse Lincoln. Even later, emancipation and civil rights were ideologically dominant in the party for only a very brief period. With the Union restored and slavery outlawed, Republicans cynically returned to their roots.

While impeccably researched and extremely well-written, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic is also a long, dense read, which some readers may find intimidating. Scores upon scores of individuals populate the narrative, further complicated by references to numerous organizations thereafter rendered in acronym. It is, at times, hard to keep track, something that might have been mitigated in appendices by a “cast of characters” and a table or two. Still, I suppose this is a quibble, and should by no means overshadow Sinha’s achievement in turning out this outstanding work of history that is original, illuminating, and thought-provoking. If you have a Civil War era bookshelf, this volume belongs on it.

 

Note: I reviewed Egerton’s Reconstruction work here: Review of: The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era, by Douglas R. Egerton

Try to imagine a one-megaton thermonuclear bomb striking Washington, D.C. You can’t. It’s way beyond your comprehension.

It begins with a flash of light that generates heat of one hundred eighty million degrees Fahrenheit, some five times hotter than temperatures at the center of the sun, producing a gigantic fireball that expands at millions of miles an hour and extends to a diameter more than a mile wide …

its light and heat so intense that concrete surfaces explode, metal objects melt or evaporate, stone shatters, humans instantaneously convert into combusting carbon …

Not a single thing in the fireball remains.

Nothing.

Ground zero is zeroed.

Traveling at the speed of light, the radiating heat from the fireball ignites everything … several miles out in every direction … a great firestorm that begins to consume a 100-or-more-square-mile area that … was the beating heart of American governance and home to some 6 million people …Those incinerated are spared the unprecedented horror that begins to be inflicted on the 1 to 2 million more gravely injured people not yet dead in this first Bolt out of the Blue nuclear strike …

There is a baseball game going on two and a half miles due east at Nationals Park. The clothes on a majority of the 35,000 people watching the game catch on fire. Those who don’t quickly burn to death suffer intense third-degree burns. Their bodies get stripped of the outer layer of skin, exposing bloody dermis underneath …Within seconds, thermal radiation … has deeply burned the skin on roughly 1 million more people, 90 percent of whom will die. [p xvii-xix]

This excerpt from the opening pages of Nuclear War: A Scenario [2024], by Annie Jacobsen, serves as a sort of fitting sequel to Oppenheimer, restoring the gory details so conspicuously absent from that film that dramatically told us the truth of the bomb’s creation while elegantly omitting the consequences. Of course, it’s important to recall that Oppenheimer’s weapon was a somewhat primitive fission device that in 1945 was yet responsible for the deaths of more than a hundred thousand residents of Hiroshima. But, as terrible as that was, an atomic bomb like that is today relegated to a more or less junior role as the triggering mechanism that produces the high temperatures necessary for the complex fusion process that detonates a thermonuclear weapon with a potentially explosive force a thousand times more powerful than an A-bomb, capable of killing millions.

But that’s only a single hydrogen bomb. And in any nuclear conflict there would never be only one bomb. By best estimates, there currently are 12,119 total nuclear warheads in the world, spread among nine nations: the United States, Russia, the UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea. Of these, there are 3,880 active nuclear warheads. There are also hundreds and hundreds of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), many armed with Multiple Independently-targetable Reentry Vehicles (MIRVs). Washington and Moscow, once more engaged in a tense relationship, each have something like 400 of these, capable of deploying 1,185 warheads to multiple targets, along with decoys to confuse the enemy. And this destructive potential is reinforced by their ever combat ready “nuclear triad” that can simultaneously launch thermonuclear attacks from land, sea, and air. Mutually assured destruction—MAD—has never simply been a theoretical construct.

Horror has long been a favored literary genre, and until very recently, my most frightening read was a toss-up between the original Dracula, by Bram Stoker, and Stephen King’s The Shining. But when it comes to sheer terror, these fictional attempts to breed fear are far outstripped by the fact-based content in this latest book by Jacobsen, an acclaimed if sometimes controversial investigative journalist. In a brilliant blend of science, military technology, geopolitics, and history, combined with an all too plausible apocalyptic vision, the author demonstrates both keen analytical skills and talent with a pen in a fast-paced narrative that is—so unusual for a nonfiction work—all but impossible to put down. It is also, to be quite honest, deeply depressing.

The ”scenario” of the title imagines what is termed a “Bolt out of the Blue” surprise nuclear strike on the Pentagon by a “mad king,” in this case the North Korean dictator. We are not told why. It hardly matters. What does matter is that such a thing could occur, at any time, without warning, by accident or design. If the plot is fiction, the premise of what would follow is based upon nothing less than scientific certainties. Once launched, this ICBM takes a mere 33 minutes to travel more than 6,800 miles to obliterate the nation’s capital and murder millions of people. And that’s just the beginning. The worst is yet to come. Jacobsen guides the reader minute-by-minute from the instant that early warning systems alert American officials that an ICBM is on the way to the moment of the blast and its aftermath. Spoiler alert: it does not end well.

Along the way, I learned that for someone who has spent his lifetime in the nuclear age, there’s an awful lot that I did not know. For instance, I had no idea that the president of the United States, keeper of the nuclear codes, has only six minutes after notification of a first strike in progress to decide whether to respond via the briefcase dubbed the “nuclear football” with a counterattack that will set forces in motion that will surely end civilization as we know it. Six minutes. And in this six minute window, the president must decide not only whether to strike back, but also to select targets and determine how many nuclear weapons to use. Only six minutes. It is said that most people on average devote about eight minutes to their daily shower routine. The president has less time than that to decide whether to destroy the world.

And what if he’s wrong? Because I also did not know how common nuclear false alarms are. The answer: all too common! In November 1979, believing that 1,400 nuclear missiles had been launched by the USSR, a retaliatory strike was about to get underway when it was discovered that the origin of the alleged Soviet attack was a training cassette carelessly left in the command computer system! In June 1980, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, informed that 2,200 Soviet missiles were headed our way, was reportedly one minute from making a phone call to President Jimmy Carter urging an immediate nuclear response when word came that it was a false alarm! In September 1983, a Soviet early warning system falsely signaled a small-scale impending attack by the US; nuclear war was in this case averted by quick-witted Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov, the officer in charge that night, who doubted the alert and defied military protocol by not notifying Moscow! In October 1960, the NORAD nuclear command center reported a Soviet atomic attack in progress that turned out to be just the moon reflecting radar waves back at the monitoring station! There are many, many more such incidents. Especially relevant for Jacobsen’s scenario, as recently as January 2018 there was another false alert that this time assumed an attack from North Korea! (Note: every exclamation point in this paragraph is deliberate!)

I also did not know that despite all the discussions over many decades about continuity of government in the event of nuclear war, there is no bunker in Washington that would withstand nuclear attack, so wherever missiles might strike, if continuity is even remotely plausible it would have to take place elsewhere. And that means, assuming the president is in residence at the White House in a time of crisis, the bunker beneath the East Wing would not be suitable shelter. Which means that with all this going on, the president would have to be whisked away to some place like the Raven Rock Mountain Complex near Pennsylvania’s Blue Ridge Summit, a free standing city constructed within a massive, hollowed out mountain. Could he get there in time? In one piece?

What if the president is missing or incapacitated? And what if the vice-president cannot be located? Provisions have been made for a “designated survivor” in the event of a “decapitation strike” that takes out the top leadership, but in reality it seems like whoever is left standing would have to play it by ear. And who wants to make such plays? Who would want to survive, and what kind of survival would that amount to? And for how long?

The reason Soviet Lt. Col. Petrov gave for not passing that dubious alert of a small-scale attack on to Moscow that night in 1983 was that “when people start a war, they don’t start it with only five missiles.” That’s a good—if chilling—point. In the six minutes that the president has to decide how and to whom to respond to, he has to know that there are certainly more missiles on the way, or will be soon. Will he correctly identify the enemy? And if he does, when he launches a counterstrike, will other nuclear-armed nations like Russia realize that the retaliatory missiles targeting Pyongyang are not heading their way instead? Apparently, we learn from Jacobsen, when crisis calls are made from Washinton to Moscow, Moscow doesn’t always answer the phone. Things are hazy in the fog of war. And amid Armageddon.

Mistakes made by any party cannot be taken back. An ICBM is irrevocable; it cannot be recalled once initiated. Neither can a submarine-launched SLBM. The bomber leg of the triad is the only one with some flexibility; their pilots perhaps get to be the last ones to die. Also, it turns out that Anti-Ballistic Missiles (ABMs) are, in practice, so unreliable as to be nearly worthless in such circumstances. Nuclear war game theory has demonstrated that nuclear weapons are only useful as deterrence. What if deterrence fails? The answer, in each and every simulation, is a colossal global loss of human life and the absolute end of civilization. Every simulation. Every time.

If hydrogen bombs aren’t bad enough, for the unlucky survivors there’s another gem in the enemy’s arsenal likely to be launched concomitantly: a nuclear electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack that knocks out all power and neutralizes all technology. There’s also the sudden solution to the problem of global warming that is an enduring nuclear winter. There is death. There are the burned and mangled. There is the slow death of radiation poisoning. There is disease. There is more death. Spoiler alert: civilization does not end well.

My earliest recollection of elemental fear as a child experiences such a thing dates back to October 1962, with the whispers and sometimes louder voices of grown-ups talking about how it could happen. I was only five, but I was already all too familiar with the concept of what might follow, probably more so than most in my age bracket because my grandmother, who raised me, often spoke to me as if I was an adult. She once casually noted that in nuclear war our bodies would disintegrate. Now, as the grim talking heads on our black and white TV preempted regular programming, even my beloved cartoons, it seemed all too real. “Grandma,” I asked as the panic took hold, “If I’m disintegrated, how will God know it is me so I can get into heaven?” Then I suddenly had to use the bathroom. After this episode, grade school “duck and cover” drills would seem quite unremarkable.

For a long time, I believed what they told me, which was that this event, the Cuban Missile Crisis, was likely the closest we came to nuclear war. But Jacobsen’s book is a sobering lesson that the prevailing wisdom is not always correct. That may have indeed been the closest we came to deliberate nuclear hostilities, but that is hardly reassuring. The number of accidental nuclear alarms are … well … far more alarming. And as tense as the days of the Cold War were, we can look back on them with almost a kind of nostalgia for Kennedy-Khrushchev given the instabilities of today’s world, with the Russo-Ukrainian War, the powder keg that is the Middle East, and the ongoing brinkmanship with North Korea. There are nuclear powers in each vicinity.

That Jacobsen’s scenario is focused on Pyongyang is not entirely fanciful. Whether or not he means business, Kim Jong Un certainly acts the belligerent villain, and while stockpiling nuclear weapons and delivery systems, he has constructed vast subterranean cities with an eye on survivability. When Donald Trump was president, he first taunted Kim as “Little Rocket Man” and then courted him by exchanging “love letters,” but in the end, if there really ever was a brief moment for détente, Trump’s bold if sophomoric approach at diplomacy achieved nothing. Catastrophe yet looms.

Nuclear war is a significant component to the metaphorical “Doomsday Clock” that was originally set to seven minutes before midnight in 1948. In 2024, it is now set at ninety seconds to midnight. Jacobsen’s clear frustration at the lack of real efforts to lower tensions, improve safety valves for nuclear triggers, and reduce the risks of atomic confrontation—accidental or deliberate—are palpable in the pages of her book. Unfortunately, there’s little room for optimism. Still, I would urge the leaders of every nuclear power to read this book, experience the horror that lies within, and look for ways, large and small, to mitigate the story it foretells from ever coming true. Every leader, that is, except Kim Jong Un … it might give him ideas.

 

Noted biographer David Herbert Donald, confident in his conviction that Abraham Lincoln’s character was defined by what he styled as “his essential passivity,” was to take him at his word in an 1864 letter in which the then-president alleged that “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” That someone of Donald’s stature could be so utterly deceived by Lincoln’s celebrated acumen for spinning different yarns for assorted audiences simply astonished me. While I bristled quietly, acclaimed Lincoln scholars objected both audibly and vehemently, and do so to this day. But if ever there truly was a passive occupant of the White House driven almost entirely by outside events, it was the William McKinley that emerges in The President and the Assassin: McKinley, Terror, and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century [2011], by international correspondent Scott Miller, a fast-paced, well-written portrait of America in the final years of the nineteenth century burdened by one of the most ill-conceived and awkward titles in recent memory.

McKinley, the mild-mannered pro-business twenty-fifth president, is largely remembered—when he is remembered at all—for his assassination at the turn of the century, which catapulted his far more colorful and politically progressive Vice President Theodore Roosevelt into executive office. Yet, it was McKinley who presided over a newly-expansionist America’s initial violent baby steps towards a global presence in its first significant act of overseas aggression, the Spanish-American War of 1898. But here too McKinley was upstaged by Roosevelt, who in his then-role as Assistant Secretary of the Navy helped instigate the war, and then famously led his “Rough Riders” on charges up Kettle and San Juan Hills in Cuba. Meanwhile, McKinley spent much of his time quietly vacillating over policy, when not tending to his sickly, likely hypochondriac, wife Ida. McKinley, who was quite popular and even beloved, won reelection in a landslide, but his second term was abruptly cut short by bullets fired by anarchist Leon Czolgosz during his attendance at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York on September 6, 1901. He died of his wounds one week later.

Those who turn to The President and the Assassin for a focus upon McKinley’s untimely end may be disappointed, because despite the title this incident represents only a small slice of the narrative. But that turns out to be just as well, because Miller instead serves up a much wider menu that ranges from the explosive expansion of the American economy fueled by industrialism and innovation, the roots and endurance of labor unrest, the related growth of political radicalism and its sometime close cousin anarchism, and Washington’s lust to join the other Western powers in an orgy of imperialism that included the peaceful annexation of Hawaii, along with the ill-begotten gains from the war with Spain that added Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines as overseas territories, while asserting an “Open Door” right to access Chinese markets. Each of these topics merits a book-length treatment, but Miller succeeds in blending these themes and much more into a fascinating and immensely readable account of disparate forces that coalesced to shape the nation as the nineteenth century drew to a close.

The post-Reconstruction Republican Party largely abandoned African Americans and their struggle for civil rights while embracing big business and pro-growth policies that in an era lacking any real regulation created enormous wealth for some while tethering the welfare of masses of wage workers, many of them immigrants, to the whims of the few who controlled factories, mills, mining, and other industries. The vast economic inequality that characterized the Gilded Age bred deep resentment and anger among the working class, who found themselves paid a pittance of near-starvation wages while compelled to labor long hours in often unsafe conditions and liable to be fired at a moment’s notice if they advanced even the slightest objection. The protectionism in vogue at the time—McKinley made his political career championing tariffs—kept prices high even when wages arbitrarily fell. The law favored business and their captains of industry, such that the attempts of organized labor to improve their lot were frequently crushed with the support and active participation of the police and the military, leaving workers dead, imprisoned, or unemployed, even blackballed from being rehired ever again.

McKinley, who many years earlier served pro bono as counsel for striking miners, as president demonstrated little concern for the plight of workers, but he was, as the author emphasizes, consumed with the growing problem of overproduction that was threatening the nation’s long-term economic health. In short, the buying power of the population of the United States could not support purchasing the amount of goods that factories were churning out. Rather than producing less, as the typical capitalist supply and demand economic imperative would dictate, manufacturers kept up a frenetic pace of increased supply, cutting wages by caprice to increase profitability. It was this dilemma that got the president to shift his gaze overseas. If cutting production was unthinkable, perhaps expanding the market for American goods to foreign shores would do the trick. And it was that notion that saw McKinley, a Civil War veteran who had witnessed enough bloodletting in his time to enter office firmly resistant to any kind of jingoist adventurism, begin to temper that opposition even as larger events presented a convenient opportunity to do so.

Those events centered around the ongoing guerrilla war in Cuba by insurgents seeking the island’s independence from Spain. Americans were generally sympathetic to the rebels and eager to see the Spanish driven from the hemisphere. In 1897, McKinley even offered to purchase Cuba, but was rebuffed by Spain. When the US battleship Maine exploded for unknown reasons and sank while docked at Havana Harbor in February 1898, forces were set in motion that would lead to war. At first, McKinley sought a diplomatic solution, but he also dithered, while others—especially Roosevelt—lobbied for aggressive action. Finally, McKinley’s longing for foreign markets for American goods aligned with the pleadings of those who urged him to act in the national interest, and a shooting war was on. The once-mighty Spain fell rapidly to American firepower on land and at sea. The United States acquired Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Cuba was granted its independence, as such, even as it fell under the thumb of US domination for six decades to come. The real war, with Filipino guerrillas seeking their own sovereignty, had just begun, and was put down brutally by the United States. Later termed the Philippine–American War, it resulted in the deaths of over 200,000 civilians. While Miller’s coverage here generally deserves high marks, he tends to be far too sympathetic to American objectives and little dwells upon the terrible atrocities committed by US forces in the process of pacifying the Philippines. For that, the reader must turn elsewhere.

Meanwhile, as attempts at organized labor fizzled and union-busting went unpunished, more radical politics began to inform the disenfranchised seeking some form of satisfaction. At the fringes were anarchists like Emma Goldman who preached against any form of authority, a message that resonated among some sectors of the oppressed. Still, the powers that be feared anarchism far out of proportion to its actual influence. I have often compared George W. Bush’s vague, ill-judged “War on Terror” with comparable efforts against anarchism back in the day. Since neither jihadists nor anarchists can commonly be identified with any formal organization, attacking each with all forces at your disposal amounts to little more than punching at paper bags in a darkened room, with similar results. Chicago’s Haymarket Affair, now recalled as the origin of International Workers’ Day, began as a peaceful assembly in support of a workers’ strike that turned violent when police interceded, and a bomb was thrown by an individual who was never identified. Eight anarchists were arrested, and four were hanged, including the well-known activist Albert Parsons, even though there remains no evidence any were involved with the bombing, while the responsibility for the deaths of nearly a dozen at Haymarket were likely the result of police gunfire.

But there was indeed also an authentic violent streak in anarchism. In the two decades leading up to McKinley’s assassination, anarchists murdered the Russian tsar, the president of France, the Spanish prime minister, the Austro-Hungarian empress, and the king of Italy. It was Czolgosz’s turn next, but in Miller’s characterization, he comes across as the unlikeliest of assassins. A lazy, aimless, disaffected, and socially-awkward loner, his passion for ideology seemed to come in a far distant second to his desperation for finding a place to fit in. Instead, it cost him his life. Still asserting that he acted in support of the working man, he was swiftly tried and executed in the electric chair only forty-five days after McKinley succumbed to his wounds.

Presidential biographies are a favored genre. I found The President and the Assassin on the shelves of my personal library shortly after reading two books on James A. Garfield back-to-back, including Candice Millard’s Destiny of the Republic, which is devoted to Garfield’s long, excruciating death from gunshot wounds. McKinley and Garfield had much in common. Both were Civil War Union officers. Both mourned the loss of young children. Both were Republican politicians, highly regarded by their peers, who advanced to the presidency. Also, tragically, both fell to an assassin’s bullets, almost exactly twenty years apart to the very month. Unlike Lincoln and JFK, who were shot in the head, both Garfield and McKinley suffered injuries to the torso that need not have been fatal. Garfield, whose wounds were probed with unwashed fingers, lived an agonizing seventy-nine days before dying of the resulting infection. Medical care had improved dramatically since Garfield’s day, but it did not save McKinley, who mercifully only lingered for a week, but yet died of gangrene.

While it was perhaps a morbid fascination with McKinley’s end that first brought me to The President and the Assassin, the book turned out to have far more to offer. I want to believe that the ungainly title was forced upon Miller by an editor eager for book sales who either disregarded or disdained the author’s intended audience, but it certainly shortchanged the value of this book, which deserves not only a better title but an expanded readership. I highly recommend it.

 

Sidney Blumenthal objects to Donald’s characterization of Lincoln in the prologue of this biography: Review of: A Self-Made Man: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln Vol. I, 1809–1849, by Sidney Blumenthal

For more extensive coverage of the Spanish-American War and especially the Filipino insurgency: Review of: The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire, by Stephen Kinzer

For an account of Garfield’s long death: Review of: Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President, by Candice Millard

More on Garfield and Republican politics: Review of: President Garfield:From Radical to Unifier, by C.W. Goodyear