Two years ago I started reading books about WW2. One after the other.

I zeroed in on The Battle of the Bulge. I found these books enthralling. I even struck up a conversation with an old man while browsing the military history aisle at McKays. He recommended a book. So I bought and read that one too.
Striking up conversations in the military history aisle is undoubtedly old man behavior.
All these books later what I realized is I’m getting old. WW2 fascinates me, and that’s as much a welcome to old age as getting AARP mailers.

Last year my aging indicator was Graham Greene. This one isn’t a no-brainer like WW2. But I experienced a distinct grown feeling after reading my third Greene book. His books have an absorbing melancholy. A feeling not unlike aging. He captures neuroses, and the passage of time in a rare way. He also wrote simple novels that still tower above contemporary fiction.
William Goldman loved Graham Greene, and old white men love William Goldman¹. The transitive property works here.

It’s only February but this year’s aging sign is clear—US presidents. I’ve read eight books so far this year—four have been presidential biographies.
Teddy, Jefferson, Washington, and the latest—Grant.
Imagine trying to get young people² excited about reading. Is there a more dreadful way to lure them in than US presidents? Initially I thought nothing could be older than consuming copious amounts of WW2 books, but I may have topped it. On the face of it, nothing sounds as dull as reading biographies of presidents. Until you reach old-manhood, that is.

The Jefferson book is my favorite of the four. It was the first one I read, and I did so solely because Christopher Hitchens wrote it. His bite and his edge are not typical of biographers, i.e, historians, and journalists.
So it feels a bit unfair to compare it to the other three.

I enjoyed the Teddy book, but it was more a River of Doubt exploration book. If I could have a beer with any of these guys, or—to steal from the NYT’s—invite one to a dinner party, Teddy would be my choice. He was a different type of dude.
He lost an election, and in his dejection led³ an expedition that discovered and charted nearly one thousand miles of South American river. He went into the complete unknown.
At times blinded by disease. Repeatedly forced to portage their canoes through dense jungles to avoid miles of lethal and unpassable rapids. Miles and miles of lugging their boats along with all their supplies through dense and untrodden jungle. Months of trekking through constant danger.
Not something former presidents tend to do.

Before this year I’ve maintained a natural aversion to presidential biographies at least partially because of one word—hagiography.

Books that serve mostly to flatter. Gushing portraits of mythic heroes. Perfected⁴ by the historian David McCullough.
These four books are not hagiographies. Though the subtitle of the Grant book is an unlikely hero, and such a stereotypical trope had me leery, the book is illuminating. He came from nothing–not poor, but nowhere near as privileged as Jefferson, Washington, or Roosevelt.
A vegetarian with an aversion to killing became the most important Civil War general.
And probably the second most important and celebrated American of the 19th century⁵. Celebrated then, not so much now.
Americans loved this man. Both political parties welcomed him as their nominee, though he would run and win as a Lincoln republican. It’s hard to imagine anything like this happening today. Who does the Right and Left love equally enough to nominate? No one.
No one except George Washington.

Everyone loved Washington, and he belonged to no political party. Washington was a great revolutionary general because to a large degree he continued to call the Brit’s bluff. He retreated, and he retreated. He knew Britain would overextend themselves. And they did.

Grant excelled because he wouldn’t retreat. The harsh truth is that Grant knew the Union could lose soldiers at a rate the Confederacy could not. He was excellent at reading maps, and he continued, and continued, and continued. Lincoln loved him for it.
From appomattox to the White House. And from the White House a two year world tour. A tour that culminated with Grant shaking hands with the emperor of Japan. An uncommon thing.

These four men were contradictions.
Jefferson owned slaves. A lot of slaves. In private, and at times in public, he abhorred slavery. But he couldn’t let them go. He shamefully left it to future generations.
Washington too denounced slavery, while owning slaves.
Roosevelt believed in a racial hierarchy. He believed white people innately superior.
Grant, too. He believed newly freed slaves were incapable of coexisting with whites in the United States.
Like Lincoln, Grant believed freed slaves must be resettled elsewhere.

We shouldn’t ignore the flaws of these men, nor should we justify them by arguing they were men of their time—as if abolitionists didn’t exist.
Let’s embrace nuance.

These books caused a reckoning within me. For too long one political party has held a monopoly on patriotism. One party mythologizes our founders, and we (as progressives) let them do it. They twist and distort who these men were, and what they believed.
They weaponize them. I saw a quote today from a prominent US senator, she said “The founders would not have wanted so much of this separation of church and state”.
This is absurd. Jefferson might well have been an atheist. But we know he detested the idea of a national religion. He wrote that “he cared not a whit whether a neighbor believed in no god or in many gods”, and Christians fundamentalists attacked him for it in the election of 1800.
Our founders were progressive, and we need to reclaim as such.

It’s become clever for liberals to denounce our founders as slave-holding relics of our disgraceful past. Again, I ask for nuance.
We shouldn’t be bound or beholden by these men, but let’s acknowledge that we are enjoying the shade of a tree planted by enlightened and flawed human beings.

1. One of those old white men is Bill Simmons. And because of him I read Goldman’s The Big Picture. Then I read Adventures in the Screen Trade. Followed by More Adventures in the Screen Trade. My point is I now love William Goldman.
2. I just earnestly used the phrase young people. Another check-in to old manhood.
3. In theory. In reality this expedition was led by Candido Rondon.
4. At least in modern times.
5.  Lincoln being number one.