Professional
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reviews of books that teach us about our craft
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By: 1st Lt. Jeffrey Bezore| Public Affairs Office | Georgia Air National Guard he subject of the president s e e ms t o be a daily t o p i c . Whether it’s about the mudslinging and name calling by the candidates or the speculation on the newest polling numbers, our current news cycle is dominated by the topic of the presidency. February provides us with a good time to explore the presidency, after all we celebrate Presidents’ Day as a nation and there are four presidential primaries that take place across the country in this month. Joseph J. Ellis’ Pulitzer Prize winning book, “Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation,” offers excellent insight into the lives and times of some of our first presidents. This book is a tremendous read for anybody interested in both American history and the stories of our countries first leaders. While Ellis’ book is a work of historical non-fiction, it reads very much like a novel. The author paints such a descriptive picture of the events surrounding the presidents and founding fathers that the reader feels like they are right there at the beginning of our republic. Ellis breaks the book up into six chapters highlighting key moments in the development of our country. The book’s main focus is on the American Revolution as a whole, but it offers great insight into the characteristics of early American politics and the first men who occupied the office of the president. Most of us are familiar with the founding fathers’ public personas but in this work we see into their private lives. This book helps put the current political processes into perspective. For example watching the news and seeing the campaigns go back and forth with the name calling seems petty and childish. This type of behavior would seem beneath the founding fathers, who represent all that was great with our country, and have them rolling over in their graves. However, this is not the case.
The politics early on in our country were far more extreme than what we are witnessing today. Ellis highlights one of the darker moments in our country’s politics, when the sitting vice president shot and killed the former treasury secretary over personal offenses. The famous dual between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton was the result of political insults exchanged between the two. I cannot imagine, if dueling was still legal, how many duals we would have witnessed already during this year’s primaries. Another example of the extreme politics from our nation’s founders occurred between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson when they were campaigning for president. Some of the insults thrown in both directions would make even Donald Trump blush, in one instance the Jefferson campaign called Adams a hermaphrodite. Ellis’ book is good for anybody concerned with developing leadership skills and is very important to our profession of arms. It can be a case study into how important it is for leaders to have respect for each other in order to accomplish great things. Many of the advances our founding fathers created for us and set in motion for our country came out of their personal relationships and not out of any rules.
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At the dawn of a new centur y, indeed a new millennium, the United States is now the oldest e n du r i n g re pu b l i c i n world history, with a set of political institutions and traditions that have stood the test of time.
February 2016 | 10