Up from the Swamp
David Brinkley
1783. Congress meets in Philadelphia as Revolutionary War veterans outside loudly demand wages for their wartime service. Congress, tired of being bounced around all through the war, needs land of its own that's not controlled by any one state. Maryland and Virginia offered land and money, and Washington was born. Out of the woods and swamps rose the capitol of the first great republic since Rome.
150 years pass. Washington, even after World War 1 and now during worldwide depression, remains the sleepy, segregated southern town of 15,000 privies. Blacks migrate here looking for jobs. The rich outdo each other with lavish parties and guests to match. Congress won't help the Supreme Court with their pigeon problem because the pigeons would only fly across the street to the Capitol building. Hitler advances on Europe while isolationism reigns and life goes on, despite a few war shortages.
Japan Bombs Pearl Harbor. America finds it harder to accept a world even including Hitler let alone dominated by him and the war begins. Wartime agencies sprout like dandelions in temporary shacks along the Mall between Capitol and White House. The military appropriated property cheaply while it still could, and built the Pentagon across the Potomac River in Arlington, Virginia. Labor was short with men off to war, and Rosie the Riveter is hired. Even blacks are hired as custodians for $1800 a year. Girls typing earn $1440, still more than they earned back home. Even teachers came for higher pay. Housing was short and rent took up most of their salaries. If nobody working within 200 feet of a file cabinet knew its contents it was moved to another office. The "25 girls behind typewriters for each man behind a gun" recruiters called for would exceed the entire population of the United States. After 6 months most of them left, disgusted at on-the-job idleness when patriotic Americans should be busy helping their country in its war effort.
Sears buyer Don Nelson, editor of a publication with wider circulation than newspapers reporters calling on him worked for - the Sears catalogue - came to Washington. Finding a man with a fabric monopoly and hopes of profit, Nelson bankrupted him by changing the specifications. Congress, holding the purse strings, filled government jobs with their relatives and friends whether qualified or not. Society party guests now included military officials and Red Cross workers in uniform. Sit-ins and civil rights marches began. The Press either loved or hated Roosevelt but still wrote about him daily, following him everywhere. Touring military plants and bases, Roosevelt was deliberately kept unaware of obsolete equipment and training, some dating from the Civil War. Radio's light entertainment now included news and interviews, competing with print. Visiting royalty was served breakfast in bed while farmers back home got up at 4 a m, went out in subzero weather to milk the cows to get milk for their families, while senators made note of it for their electorate.
April 12, 1945. Shortly into his 4th term Roosevelt, felled by smoking, is replaced by Vice President Harry S Truman, former senator from Missouri. Roosevelt's casket travels slowly to Washington and then home to New York by train as people line the tracks for a farewell view of their beloved leader, as they did for Lincoln. Truman continues Roosevelt's policy and carries it through postwar rebuilding. April 30, Hitler's death is celebrated like a Boston Celtics championship, 30 years to the day the United States pulled out of Viet nam in a hail of panic and paranoia. Hiroshima is bombed and the war ends there too. After the victory celebrations life goes on in a new Washington radically different from the old, in which politics and paperwork are the main industries of this major world capitol.
Brinkley admits at the outset that he's a journalist, not a historian. Many people who were there died or were otherwise unavailable when Brinkley decided to write his memoirs of this moment in history. Forced to depend mostly on government papers often burned to keep them out of enemy hands, Brinkley still put together a readable, informative book about the workings of government and press during a great turning point for the nation and the world.
11 presidents, 4 wars, 22 political conventions, 1 moon landing, 3 assassinations, 2,000 weeks of news and other stuff on TV and 18 years growing up in North Carolina
David Brinkley
Brinkley starts off with his early years in Wilmington, North Carolina, a town with one radio station, one newspaper, and no TV station. He relates his first taste of writing, first jobs, first employment in jour=nalism writing for the local newspaper. Arriving in Washington DC in 1943, immediately assigned to cover FDR because those before him were drafted or were covering the war, Brinkley learned from watching seasoned reporters and taking notes.
Combing the city for news stories brinkley happened on an obscure office in an old building of the Anti-Cigarette Alliance, outlining smoking's health hazards way ahead of its time. Cigarette and cigar smoke continued to fill rooms until Edward R Murrow broadcast the news on his CBS show See It Now. The Alliance's founder and president died soon after Brinkley discovered his agency listed in DC's phone book.
The story continues with Truman and later, opposite congressmen and other politicians, some of whom served as governors or legislators in their home states. Brinkley goes to each party's convention in each election year, sitting high in the rafters away from would-be attackers while sitting through boring speeches as delegates schmoozed, shook hands and played cards on the convention floor. Other delegates headed for restrooms, restaurants, bars or local tourist attractions of which San Francisco abounds. Beginning with the 1964 Democratic convention in San Francisco, ABC garnered the lion's share of viewers without knowong why. Brinkley died in June 2003, shortly after his alst book came out and half a year before I read his books (during the election year 2004) so I'll have to wait until I reach Heaven to give him the real reason, still valid today: TV reception or lack thereof, and nobody to complain to who can and will deal in audience favor on this issue.
The book is filled with new little-known details beginning in World War II, an era Brinkley lived and worked through, information only an insider would have, reaching beyond this era as the TV news industry grew from its humble beginnings in radio, played by ear from those who came in at the beginning and stayed. Invited to dinner and other social settings Brinkley describes encounters with friends he made along the way, giving the inside scoop on every name in DC whether household or not. Many of them are deceased by the time this book is published, but Brinkley still retains readers' interest in everyone he mentions in this well-written companion to Washington Goes to War.
Where's my money?
David Brinkley
News is something worth knowing that you don't already know. So says a classmate somewhere somewhen. Others say different ad infinitum. Nov 22, 1981 - July 16, 1995. Little homilies on how our tax dollars are spent, and how politicians get elected. Brinkley's solution to endless campaigning, keep candidates 1000 feet above ground in a balloon until a month before the election, with permission to flyer ball games. He's been there, heard that. Lots of material from his previous books but still read in context here.
World War II army captain Ronald Reagan in 1945 California does military PR films and photos. He orders an Army photographer to get photos of women at work. He shoots 25 photos of Norma jean Dougherty, so well received she quits the factory to become Marilyn Monroe. The week of Aug 30, 1987, these photos sell at Christie's auction in London for $23,000. Meanwhile Parkinson's Law dictates work getting done in the time allotted to it, no more and no less. Money left over from anything is spent elsewhwere - why return it to the Treasury? Thers's lots more where that came from, some of it from Brinkley himself. Grudgingly, of course. Two things standardized worldwide, tire valves and (I forgot what) or is that from his Memoirs? Read both and find out.
His latest and last book
David Brinkley
People, places, events shaping our time. 10 men one token woman and her knitting. The Mississippi River, Normandy then and now, political conventions, the JFK assassination.
People in chronological order of their birth, from early days to today. Places documented on film. Events covered in the news, recording history with early TV technology. History and classics for us to stare fascinated at. Unlike so many others, at least Brinkley got to finish his last book. Segregation, integration and civil rights, Washington parties and crashers, men he grew up with in North Carolina who lost their lives in World War II at Normandy asfter he was sent home to cover it all on radio and TV.
Canadian soldier
Walter Farley, barely old enough to serve, couldn't wait to join his father's old Hastings Prince Edward regiment, well-prepared by years of hiking and camping across Canadian wilderness. After training the Hasty Pees were soon sent to Italy along with British soldiers to help take its mountainous territory away from Hitler's German army. Of those surviving the landing many more Canadian troops lose their lives in battle dragging heavy artillery over mountains to the main battlefield against the Germans. Bloody corpses and broken war equipment litter fields and roads while Farley plods on in winter weather, still alive as an outdoor expert ready made. The regiment, finally met and assisted by ragged British troops, at last take the terrain for an Allied victory in Italy. Home in Canada, Farley hears complaints of soldiers' easy lives in sunny Italy, quite the opposite of what he and fellow troops lived through first hand.
Lauran Paine
At last, readably the inside scoop of D-Day and the end of World War II in Europe's theater, as only a British insider can relate. While the world slept, Hitler armed his nation to murder 60 million people, setting an all-time world record, killing not only Jews but German and Allied troops, plus whatever civilians and Underground died along the way. It took years of wartime hardship and rationing lasting even after the war to uproot Hitler. Without Russia's help from the east, the Allied cause would have been lost. Peace in our time came from guns, not words. The book tells how Normandy's coast was divided between American and British troops, their last hours on shore before leaving for France, their trip over and their landing. Many lives were lost through errors in communication as tropps slogged up through French farmland and country villages house-to house, taking this occupied land back from Germany through greater errors on their part. Victory is won through civilian and military sacrifice, leaving land behind the beaches as memorials to this great battle against tyranny.