Good Intentions

The Real Romney  by Michael Kranish and Scott Helman (Harper, $27.99, 401 pages)

“Looks like I’ve turned out like all the rest, but Mama my intentions were the best.”   Randy Travis

“A lot of it is, he is patrician.   He just is.   He has lived a charmed life…  It is a big challenge that he has connecting to folks who haven’t swum in the same rarefied waters that he has.”   A former aide, quoted in The Real Romney

I’ve now read two accounts of the personal and political life of Mitt Romney – adding up to some 664 pages – and yet I feel like the singer in Randy Travis’s song.   No matter how good my intentions are, I’ve not had any luck in finding out exactly who Mitt Romney is, in head or in heart.   I’m beginning to wonder if his biographers wind up with the same frustrated feeling.

What were his issues?   What did he believe?   Sure, he was against Kennedy, but what was he for?   In other words, who was Mitt Romney?

The team of Kranish and Helman, trained reporters for the Boston Globe, covered Romney as Massachusetts governor for four years; therefore, they have some background on the subject.   And the 400-plus page account that they’ve fashioned initially seems impressive – with annotations and a fine index – until it dawns on the reader that the subject of the book remains more of a specter than a human being.   Specter: something that haunts or perturbs the mind (Merriam-Webster).

What Kranish-Helman do well, fanatically well, is provide a “fair and balanced” approach.   There’s almost a mathematical precision to their balancing of “good” Mitt versus “bad” Mitt stories.   Let them provide a couple of examples in which Romney did admirable work based on his Mormonism, and they’re quickly followed by two stories of when he allegedly acted uncharitably – and perhaps heartlessly – toward two Mormon women facing personal struggles.   And when it comes to his work with Bain Capital, the stories of Romney’s “good” venture capitalism are quickly cancelled out by an equal number of tales of his practice of “bad” vulture capitalism.

“The goal of the investor in Bain Capital is to make absolute returns.   When they do well, Bain does well.   When Bain does well, they do well.   It is essentially capitalism at its finest – and its worst.”   Howard Anderson, MIT professor and former Bain investor

It all seems to verify the accounts that Romney is only the real Romney when he’s practicing his Mormon faith.   However, since that’s not something he’s comfortable either talking about or dealing with in public, it means that the person he is – or may be – remains hidden.   In reading The Real Romney, an image came to mind of the presidential candidate dressed in a Zorro-style costume – a man who wears a mask that’s never removed, and which never slips or slides for even an inch.

“After all the weeks and months of that campaign, if you ask ‘Why did Mitt Romney run for U.S. Senate, and what did he stand for?’ most people had no clue.”   Mitt Romney, as quoted by a fellow party member

There are entertaining sections of this nonfiction read, most notably those involving Romney’s seemingly foolish run against Ted Kennedy for the U.S. Senate (a race that Romney thought he had a chance of winning until the pre- and post-debate polls came out) and the details of his single term as governor.   The reporters also do an admirable job of explaining how Mitt’s life is almost a re-run of his father George’s life – both were elected as governor of a state at the age of 55, both were successful businessmen, and both ran for president.   In this respect, Mitt Romney sounds a lot like Al Gore, who was raised to accomplish the things that his senator father had not been able to.   Yet, it’s never clear in this account if Mitt Romney has the fire in his belly that will make him settle for absolutely nothing less than the presidency.

“When he’s with people he doesn’t know, he gets more formal.   And if it’s a political thing where he doesn’t know anybody, he has a mask.”

“He has that invisible wall between ‘me’ and ‘you’.”

Unless you’re the ultimate political junkie, there’s simply not enough here to justify reading 400 pages to find that the mask, the invisible wall, never comes down.   The question simply changes from, “Who was Mitt Romney” (past tense) to “Who is Mitt Romney?”   Based on The Real Romney (and on the previously reviewed Mitt Romney: An Inside Look at the Man and His Politics), it remains an unanswered question.

Joseph Arellano

A review copy was provided by the publisher.

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By His Own Rules:  The Ambitions, Successes, and Ultimate Failures of Donald Rumsfeld

One would think that an 803-page tome about a two-time Secretary of State would be sleep-inducing.   But this book by Bradley Graham races along like a fine Capitol mystery-thriller.   It is the biography of a man who might have been president, Donald Rumsfeld.   While it is presented in what is now known as a fair and balanced approach, it becomes clear that Rumsfeld’s faults and failures will add up to be larger than his successes.

This is first and foremost a tale of hubris and ego.   The young Rumsfeld, one of the youngest Congressman ever elected, is seen as clean and prepared, like the 1.0 version of Mitt Romney.   The young Rumsfeld made connections with the right people, with names like Ford, Bush and Cheney, which is how he came to have a long and stand out career.   Yes, he eventually ran for president in a campaign that was stillborn and he met his albatross in the Iraq War.

Iraq was the vehicle that fully exposed Rumsfeld’s weaknesses and caused President Bush to accept his resignation; Rumsfeld became McNamara 2.0.   This is a well-written, cautionary, tale.

Public Affairs, $35.00, 803 pages

Reprinted courtesy of Sacramento Book Review.

Later Than It Seems: Klein on Kennedy

A book that is likely to be significant, Senator Edward Kennedy’s autobiography entitled True Compass: A Memoir will be released on September 14, 2009.   This forthcoming 544 page book, to be published by Twelve, is said to have taken five years to complete.   Contra, a book that I read recently, Ted Kennedy: The Dream That Never Died by Edward Klein does not appear to be as significant.

Back in 2005, Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post wrote an article (“Ed Klein, Drowning in Ink and Grasping for Air”) concerning Klein and his then-new book The Truth About Hillary Clinton.   In his article, Kurtz wrote:  “Despite the enormous hype surrounding Edward Klein’s scathing and hearsay-filled book about Hillary Rodham Clinton, the author has been ignored by all but two television shows.”   I’m not positive about this, but Kurtz seemed to find some of the content of The Truth… a bit shaky.

Such is not the problem with Ted Kennedy: The Dream…   Instead, the problem is that most of the interesting things in this “new” biography come from other sources and, to his credit, Klein cites those sources.   It is not the credibility of this account – except in one small instance – that raises questions.   The question is do we really need another biography of Ted Kennedy, an extremely ill man, at this point in time?   If so, did it need to spend just a bit more than 200 pages revisiting ground that has been trod over so many times before?

There’s nothing in here, to these eyes, that clarifies exactly who Ted Kennedy is or what specifically makes the family he came from so unique and/or so significant in American history.   There’s also nothing in this account that is strongly pro- or anti-Kennedy (the author has claimed to be politically neutral).   If dozens and dozens of books about the Kennedys had not already been written, one might find some items of discovery here but – in the words of Jackson Browne – it’s later than it seems.

In one specific instance, Klein does appear to be in error.   He writes, on page 79, of a situation where Ted Kennedy flew back from Alaska in April of 1969 – this was subsequent to the assassination of Robert Kennedy – with other U.S. senators and after possibly having too much to drink repeatedly yelled out that, “They’re going to shoot my a– off the way they shot Bobby…”   Klein calls this ” a particularly revealing – and unreported incident.”   Sorry, but I believe it was reported on back then in the major news magazines.

If you’ve read nothing about the Kennedys then Klein’s latest might serve as a quick way to learn some relatively recent history.   But there are many, many other choices that will provide you with more information about the three Kennedy brothers and the family itself.   In my view, the two best books about the Kennedys just happen to be two books (both still in print) that focused on Robert F. Kennedy.   The first of these was Robert Kennedy and His Times by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and the second was RFK, A Memoir by Jack Newfield.

Joseph Arellano

Missing You: A Review of Losing Mum & Pup by Christopher Buckley

According to his only child, Christopher, William F. Buckley, Jr. often said, “Industry is the enemy of melancholy.”   Accordingly, Christopher Buckley has written this memoir – literally a book of memories – about his parents’ final years as a way of dealing with his loss and sense of disorientation.

We all, of course, knew about his father, the late conservative icon often symbolized by the initials WFB.   WFB wrote 5,600 newspaper columns between the years 1962 and 2008; hosted Frontline for 33 years; and had completed 56 books as of the time of his death.   Patricia Taylor Buckley, WFB’s wife, is someone we knew little of, but she comes to life in her son’s telling as a regal and charming – if occasionally impatient – woman.

What is very clear about the Buckleys is that they were, indeed, larger-than-life figures.   When Patricia one day received a call intended for WFB and was told the president was on the line she responded, “The president of what?”   Of a female politician she said, “That woman is so stupid she ought to be caged!”

While we may think we knew WFB, this book provides a few new views and perspectives.   It was clear that the author of God and Man at Yale was an intellectual (a man who could dictate using perfect punctuation), but not many of us suspected that he was a daring sailor and pilot whose near-death escapades make for lively reading.   As summed up by Chris, “Pup was the bravest man I knew.”

Well, but then politics is a dangerous sport.   Christopher, who supported Barack Obama, has the great sense to touch lightly on conservative versus liberal in this memoir.

Christopher does show us that WFB was both a prideful man and a man of fine humor.   When asked, back in 1965, what he would do first if elected mayor of New York City, WFB answered, “Demand a recount!”

WFB was to say that “Despair is a mortal sin”; and also that “I believe in neither permanent victories nor permanent defeats.”   Perhaps this is why his son crafted this book of memories so that it celebrates the lives of his parents – despite some personal faults that he clearly divulges – rather than the defeat he felt from their passings within a year of each other.

“Christo,” as he was known to WFB, was able to directly tell his father, “I love you very much.”   This despite the fact that WFB could be a harsh critic of his son’s work, including sending this e-mail message just after receiving his son’s latest book:  “This one doesn’t work for me sorry.   XXXB.”

There’s little cause to doubt that Losing Mum and Pup would have “worked” for both WFB and Patricia Taylor Buckley.   While, in the words of a traditional American folksong, “Death don’t have no mercy in this land…”, this is a life-affirming work.

Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir by Christopher Buckley, Twelve Books, Illustrated, 251 pages, $24.99.

This review was written by Joseph Arellano.   Thanks to Karen at Hatchette Book Group USA for supplying the review copy; much appreciated!