Category: Leadership

GoodReads meta-data is 629 pages, rated 3.80 by 164 litizens. 

Genre: Biography.

Verdict: Wonder Woman! 

Every scrap of paper she ever wrote remains, or so it seems, and it overwhelms a biographer. Her dates were 1820 – 1910.

No lamp and not a nurse.  Got it!  What she was was a public administrator.  Not a fashionable title these days but that it what she was.  

The woman in the girl is plainly visible with her systematic approach to everything, her appetite for work, her linguistic ability, her packrat saving of any and everything, her mulish determination to see things through, her industrial strength letter writing, and so on and on.  How different she was from her sister though both had a virtually identical upbringing. This difference is something the two sisters discussed themselves more than once, when her sister could be bothered to be serious for a moment.  

To illustrate both the differences in the girls and Florence’s nature, consider this.  The girls would attend an opera, and while there Sister would flirt with men, strike poses, and laugh to attract attention to herself. Meanwhile, young Florence would be writing notes about the music, costumes, and singing because she was keeping a spreadsheet (avant le mot) of her taste in music, trying to work out what she liked and why she liked it.  Ever the analyst she was always on duty.  Even at this age she felt she had some sort of calling.  She does much talking to god through the pages (and pages).

In the Victorian era her choices were limited. Stay at home…forever with her parents.  Or, marry a house, well, a husband, but then work the house. To illustrate one suitor with whom she well matched intellectually and morally she rejected because she feared the closeted life marriage would entail. He married another, and in the first month this new wife hosted more than twenty dinner parties, three receptions, and five open house breakfasts. He was wealthy and had political ambitions, networking constantly.  A new wife gave him an excuse to entertain non-stop, and no doubt the pace slackened later, but it indicates what the matrimonial deal was. This man would have accepted Nightingale’s other activities as long as they took second place to management of the house, the servants, the suppliers, the guest lists, the seating charts, the budget, the soirees, the children,….and so on. 

Her search for a vocation that would be pleasing to her, and to god, and acceptable to her parents went on for years, and years, and years.  There were several false starts toward nursing. That answered to her feeling of service and philanthropy, but nursing at the time was little more than a sickroom maid. There was no training, no qualification, and if anything the social status was lower than a lady’s maid. Use your imagination and figure that out.  She was intrigued by the Kaiserwerth Institution in Germany, but her efforts to find out more took several years, but she went there for three months and it inspired her.  Nurses were trained there in hygiene, sanitation, basic medical procedures like taking pulse, testing reflexes, and measuring blood pressure, and applying external salves, cleaning wounds, bandaging, and so on. They wore uniforms and there was an authority structure by seniority. A premium was on order, system, and cleanliness. Exact records were kept. This all appealed to her and she set about importing it to England.  Another uphill struggle.  Her campaign then, as later, was mostly by letter writing.

She got a chance, at last, to practice what she preached when hired to run a genteel ladies hospital.  Genteel meant middle class, usually retired and impoverished governesses, and Protestant (not Catholic, not Jewish…).  She only took the job on condition she could broaden the intake, and run it the way she wanted as long as it stayed within budget.  One of his first acts was to save money by dismissing the resident protestant clergyman who had been treating the patients as a captive audience for his proselytising. Every step she took was contested but she was made of stern stuff and felt the divine hand was now on her shoulder.  She introduced those new fangled Teutonic ideas and that was also resisted root-and-branch.  

She learned to manipulate the management committee and that experience stood her in good stead later.  She no longer went at things headfirst, but planted seeds with this member or that, and let them think it was their own idea, and voilà.  

The Crimean War was the first major conflict since Napoleon in 1815 and the British Army was woefully unprepared in every way.  But needs must. Stiff upper lip, and so on. Situation normal, all fouled up.  But then that journalist William Russell sent in his reports, and the appalling condition of the army, including the sick, wounded, and dying was there in black-and-white.  Needless to say the first reaction from Whitehall was to blacken his name, after all he was Irish, and so by definition an unreliable troublemaker.  Denial, first. Then discredit.  Next dissimulate.  All of this was and is normal damage control.  

However to its credit the Times of London which employed him and printed his dispatches stood by him, as did the photographs he got.  Then they played musical chairs in Whitehall and a new minister did many things, but most of all he recognised Nightingale. That was to save many lives in the immediate future and set in train a great many changes.

Coincidentally, Nightingale had written a petition in response to Russell’s report, volunteering to go to Turkey at her own expense and superintend one of the hospitals. That letter crossed one from the new minister offering her an official role so within five days she was on a ship for the Bosporus. Whirlwind indeed.  What she found was even worse than Russell reported, since he was restrained in the interest of not putting off readers.   

Comes the hour, comes the man, is an Italian adage I once heard, and it applies here. She was the person for the job and this was her hour. In the mayhem and chaos she cut through incompetence, carelessness, corruption, resignation, dishonesty, confusion, miasma, and worse to achieve order, system, and regularity.  She soon made the minister who commissioned her sorry he had by her barrage of requests and demands, all couched ever so politely and all implicitly backed up the threat of publicity from Russell if the response was unsatisfactory.  She worked twenty-hours a day for the first few weeks, dismissing incompetents, paying herself for some necessary equipment like mops to clean up the blood, instructing those willing to learn in the basics, writing her letters to London, and on and on.  She threw herself into as her life’s work all at once.

She herself did very little nursing and never carried that famous lamp. That was a hagiographic embellishment for public relations.  She did do rounds, sometimes at night, to double check on things.  While the army lurched from one disaster to another, her’s become the only good news from the campaign and so got pride of place, and that gave her ever more leverage, and she used it.  

It should be noted by the way that the hospitals she managed were all devoted to the rank and file and not to the officers. These grunts were the brutes and ruffians commanded by the toffs in the language of the day. The social distance between officers and men was measured in light years. That she solicited the welfare of working class dregs who ended up in the army was often part of the prejudice against her by the toffs and their kind, while making her very popular with that majority.

The conflicts within the medical service were many as were those between the medical service and rest of the army and with Treasury back in London.  Nightingale had an unending struggle with just about everyone and their cousins.  To give a reader some idea of what it was like. The society ladies and wives of officers who volunteered thought they should have separate and better quarters and food. Among others there were conflicts over authority, social status, and religion that only she could resolve, and each time she did the loser fired off an angry letter to The Times and to the Treasury.

Or another example about the Treasury which oversaw the expenses she claimed.  Treasury refused to pay for new shirts for those wounded and sick soldiers admitted to the hospital because it is a soldier’s responsibility to look after his kit.  Men who arrived in bloodied and torn shirts after being hit by cannon fired shrapnel were denied a change of clothing; she lost this war of words and paid for the shirts herself.  

The Protestant nurses suspected the Catholic nurses of soliciting deathbed conversions to Catholicism and vice versa. Meanwhile, Nightingale would not have a clergyman of any kind in the wards to proselytise and that offended them both. And so on and on.  Every pinhead was fought over by the pinheads.   

She got a lot of hagiography, true, but the only spurred the trolls on to ever more venom.  Her public image was two parts angel and one part devil. Her parents who had disapproved of her mission and her annoying and egotistical sister took up the cudgels on her behalf, as did many cousins, aunts, nephews, and nieces from the extended clan. Even Queen Victoria weighed in with a medal.  

Her fame attracted many volunteer nurses who wanted a share of the limelight, an oriental adventure, a change of scene, a spot of husband hunting among the officers, and she was lumbered with a great many such dilettantes and it was impolitic to send them all packing. These volunteers arrived unannounced but all with letters from someone important. Some of the society ladies who arrived would not enter a ward when they discovered it stank, was full of working class men, had vermin, and was noisey.  Carrying a bedpan was out! Mopping a floor, no way!  One such volunteer came with her own maids to do all the heavy lifting, while she graced the proceedings, she thought. That lasted just over a day.  

Is it any wonder that Nightingale lost weight, lost appetite, developed anaemia, and caught every disease floating around so that she became a semi-invalid. That added to her angelic halo for some and trolls supposed she was faking. Think of Pucker-Up on Pox News. Some things never change.  The years she spend in the Crimean War must have seemed like centuries.  The author is very good at laying out and explaining the debilitating illness that Nightingale developed after leaving the Crimea.  He is also excellent on her efforts to influence (without seeming to do so) a postwar royal commission into army reform with her revolutionary ideas, mopping the floor, not building a barracks over cesspits, changing bandaging, and so on. These were shocking and revolutionary ideas to the Army Medical Service.  Needless to say the army resisted all such recommendations.  Needless to say she persisted and overcame with enormous effort.

In her steady efforts to reform the British Army she also pursued other reforms in her spare time! When conflict with the USA loomed and the government wanted to increase its army strength in Canada, she was consulted and threw herself into the project for a month or so, poring over maps, interviewing by letter travellers returned from Upper Canada, reading weather reports from army posts, assessing the thermal properties of wool blankets versus buffalo robes, estimating the effects of exposure to the weather on marching troops, calculating the food needed to sustain a regiment in a winter, and so on. Like a barrister on a large and complex legal case, she assembled, mastered, and ordered a mass of material for a report, but the storm passed and it was not needed.  

Later when in a massive change the East India Company Army in India was integrated into the British Army she was called upon again, and applied the same vigour and methods to determining the needs of this newly organised force for sanitation, diet, exercise, and this report was completed, accepted, and implemented without her name attached to it per her preference. 

By the way, her inquires about India brought her into contact with Indian nationalists, and she became, albeit, in a low key and advocate of home rule for India. More letters!

She burned the candle at both ends, despite the bacterial infection that persisted in the absence of antibiotics and made her bedridden for much of her life thereafter the pain from which changed her personality. She became ever more imperious, short-tempered, impatient, and uncompromising. She herself suffered, at times her weight would balloon up and at other times she would waste away.  In hindsight that fluctuation came from the disease’s ravages on her system, but at the time it was incomprehensible, and all the more frightening for it. Despite her own aliments, or perhaps because of them, she worked at least two of her acolytes to death quite literally.  Least a reader think this is an exaggeration, she wrote to one who was on his deathbed to say she was disappointed he had not done more! No lady with the lamp there. 

The irony is that it took a long, long time for her to accept that germs led to contagion, sticking to the miasmatic theory for decades, despite the mounting evidence from her own statistical research, though she finally did accept it. 

The book proceeds in detail which I can no longer summarise.  Suffice it to say she was one of a kind, and we are the poorer for that, by which I mean we could benefit from more of her kind. We need more public administrators who try to get things right, and leave the headlines to those who cannot do anything else.  

By the way she was born in Florence Italy when her parents were on a grand tour, hence the name.  

The stimulus to read a biography of Florence Nightingale was a BBC Radio4 episode of ‘Great Lives’ (highly recommended to eggheads) about her, featuring this biographer. It included the only remaining voice recording of the woman herself. I was surprised and enlightened by that brief, albeit superficial, discussion and went looking for the book.  Glad I did.  

We visited the small nursing museum at the old Sydney Hospital a few years ago and it featured a display on Nightingale Nurses, and that stuck in mind, too. On a visit to Istanbul in 2015 we saw the site of Scutari from a ferry, but had not time to visit it.

GoodReads metadata is 1120 pages, rated 4.11 by 81,479 litizens. 

Genre: Biography.

Verdict: Chapeaux! 

At thirty-three, single, and out of work, when the U.S. entered the Great War Harry S. Truman joined the Army. His life changed thereafter. He became the Decider-in-Chief. 

The efforts outgoing Democratic President Truman made in 1952 to smooth the transition to the incoming Republican President Dwight Eisenhower make poignant reading after January 2021.  Truman spared nothing to put Ike into the office within hours of the election result, being motivated both by the national interest that transcended and dwarfed his own feelings, and his abiding respect both for the electorate and the office as well as his personal admiration for Ike. Read on.  

That ’S’ was put on his birth certificate because his parents could not decide which grandfather’s name to put there, both beginning with ’S.’  And they never got around to changing it. Thus neither felt slighted, I guess. Such indecision would not have suited Truman in his prime, when getting things done meant deciding right here, right now.  

Born to modest circumstances, he started wearing glasses and being bullied for it at an early age. He took to music and his parents made sacrifices so that he could have piano lessons and later as a high school student he worked several part-time jobs to pay for his own lessons. He saw some great classical performers in Kansas City (which contrary to the belief of the other guy was and is in Missouri). While in France during World War I he discovered opera and spent his money on that. He was bullied for this girlish interest in music, too but it remained with him all of his days.    

Somehow he always remained cheerful, energetic, and ready to work.

He had two months of intense combat during the Argonnne offensive, including direct fire. (The redlegs out there will know what that means and it is not good.)  Truman had been over age and blind in one eye when he enlisted but lied about his age and memorised the eye chart. In this as in much else when he decided, he finished what he started.  

As a farmer and a store clerk by experience he was well suited to the 1917 army.  Farming meant he was accustomed to supervising the work of a dozen or more seasonal hired hands, using horses, digging trenches and dikes, keeping machinery and tools in good repair, and monitoring the weather.  His clerking meant he could read the artillery tables, keep an inventory, and insist on order the routine. He commanded a battery of four guns with about 200 men, most of whom returned to Missouri and soon became his first constituents and lifelong supporters. Some were still marching with him in 1952.  

In the army he became friendly with a scion of the Pendergast family and in time that mob recruited him to run for political office.  It was a case of opposites attracting and while the relationship was not always smooth it amused the Pendergasts to have an honest man in their ranks. His organisation, attention to detail, energy, and determination made him a productive county and later state supervisor who got roads, hospitals, schools,  and bridges built and repaired while saving money. He did much of this work on site meeting people, not ensconced in an office in KC and soon gained more responsibility.  

Truman liked making things happen, liked being out and about meeting people who would use the bridges and schools, and soon aspired to ever higher offices at the State level or even Congress in distant Washington.  He was an enthusiastic Franklin Roosevelt supporter as early as 1924 and voted him at the nominating convention in 1930 and never strayed from that path, though Senator Truman did vote against the Supreme Court packing, and opposed FDR’s third term, facts recorded in the White House.   

Quite how Truman avoided the Pendergast enterprises of prostitution, boot legging, tax evasion, profiteering, influence peddling, illegal gambling, tax evasion, and more is not specified. The Pendergasts focus on Missouri meant it was easiest to send their tame honest man to the Senate where he would not interfere with their profits and so he went to Washington where he kept his mouth shut and his head down for a time. He sat near another notable Senator, Huey Long of Louisiana whom he detested.        

His first term was unremarkable, but when re-election loomed the Pendergasts support shifted to another candidate (for the same reason, to get him out of Missouri), and in the ensuing three-way race the pundits of the St Louis and Kansas City Press placed Truman third. 

This was an all of nothing race for him. He was fifty and broke. The farm had long since been sold by his sister. He campaigned in a car and criss-crossed the state.  He was not a good platform speaker but he was sincere and he worked the crowds before and after the speeches until everyone went home.  That is, he never quit.  During the thousands of miles he racked up, he often slept in the car since he had no money for hotel rooms. He never gave up! He never surrendered!  By Grabthar’s hammer he won!  In a way that victory foreshadowed 1948, as the cognoscenti know.  

He returned to the Senate in 1941 now clearly his own man, while in Missouri the Pendergast gang was being dismembered by Federal tax evasion prosecutions, which also dragged down both of his opponents in the Senate re-election campaign.  In all these investigations which went on for years, no link was ever found that led to Truman though the investigators looked hard for it (after his above mentioned opposition to FDR’s third term).  

He became chairman of a special Senate Select committee on war procurement and that made his name. He had seen waste and profiteering in war contracts in Missouri on a grand scale, and supposed it was a general malaise.  When he proposed an inquiry there was much opposition in the name of the emergency, and FDR had no interest in riling contractors who would be major donors to future campaigns.  One man stepped forward in support, and that is all it took.  That was George Marshall. He volunteered to testify and appeared as the first witness. That set the tone for all that followed and began their lifelong bromance. Years later Marshall estimated that the Truman Committee, as it came to be called, cut costs by 25% and raised quality by a like amount in war industries.  Its revelations were breathtaking in the audacity of the crimes revealed, far beyond anything Boss Pendergast would have dared.  Reading the excepts from the testimony is, well, depressing.  See Arthur Miller, All My Sons (1946) for another perspective on this sad chapter.

The Truman Committee made Harry a national figure. Hearings and investigation were held here, there, and everywhere, and Harry was ever-present.  As chair he was unfailingly polite and considerate and seldom spoke in public sessions beyond the need to order the agenda. The Committee was bipartisan and it focused on facts. (Remember those?) Over the years it issued twenty-five reports and made four hundred recommendations.  Each report was unanimous and so was each recommendation. That was the first and last time such a bipartisan ad hoc committee had such unanimity. Put that down to Truman’s endless smoothing of the members and his absolute insistence on facts, and nothing but in their private deliberations.  

Then came the big ticket. FDR changed Vice-Presidents like his shirts. While incumbent Vice-President Henry Wallace wanted to hang on, in 1944 he was perceived to be past his use by date. The ultra-liberal Wallace, a civil rights advocate, and one who flirted with Communists was deemed a liability in both north and south this time. (In 1940 with his recent exemplary record as Secretary of Agriculture to compensate, he had been an asset in the South and West.) The obvious choice was Senator Jim Brynes who knew the presidency better than anyone bar FDR himself, but he was a southern Roman Catholic who was a racist. He would be a liability in the North and West and not an asset in the South because of the Catholicism. Many others were considered and still others put themselves forward. As was often the case, FDR was inscrutable.

Moreover, and this was news to me, nearly everyone in the inner circles (there were several inner circles) realised FDR might not live out the next term.  In choosing this Vice-Presidential candidate they were nominating a president to be, or as one wag put it, in this convention two presidents would be nominated. There were even those who feared that FDR would die before the election and that would make Henry Wallace president, so palpable was the worry.  

Truman got the nod for these reasons: No one was against him. He was acceptable to organised labour; he would not antagonise the black vote in the north nor alienate the white vote in the south; he had impeccable New Deal credentials; he was staunch on equality before the law; and though only four years junior to FDR he appeared youthful and energetic in comparison. That latter was an asset when he proved to be a vigorous and likeable campaigner, though he was never an accomplished speaker in a way that became an asset for it made him seem ordinary, ‘one of us,’ as many auditors told journalists. The 1944 Democratic ticket was also aided by the ineptitude of the Republican campaign of Thomas Dewey as below. 

For his part Truman realised that in taking the nomination he was likely to become president. Indeed he was among the shortest serving Vice-Presidents, holding the office for eighty-two days.*  Yet as the biographer shows he made no effort from the nomination in July 1944 to prepare himself for the higher office.  Quite how he might have done that without seeming presumptuous is anyone’s guess.      

Then came the message one day while he was presiding over the Senate. A handwritten note scrawled by FDR’s appointments secretary and delivered by a sweating messenger to him in the well of the Senate asked him to come to the White House right now! He ran most of the way as if he knew what the news was. The whirlwind followed.  

After years of FDR’s prestidigitation, oracular vagaries, rhetorical heights, sly manipulations, sleights of the tongue, temporising, increasing lethargic mien, Harry S Truman was a cyclone in small and large ways.  Where FDR with his ten-pounds of steel braces was ponderous, Harry was a jack rabbit and the Secret Service men soon discovered they could not keep up with him. Items that had languished on FDR’s cluttered desk for months or more because with his declining energy were briskly dispatched. The office staff accustomed to FDR’s deliberate pace were unprepared for this barrage of decisions.

The biggest ticket in all this is Special Project S-1.  Truman knew nothing about the Bomb until the twelfth day of his presidency when the Secretary of War, the redouble Henry Stimson, asked for an interview and brought in a two-page summary, along with General Lester Grove to elaborate.  So secret was the project that this two-page paper had been typed by Groves himself and it was not sent ahead in the usual way but carried by hand.  There followed the most momentous event of Truman’s presidency. The hindsighters have made careers out of being holier than thou about this, but to read the process in context it all makes sense. There are many threads in this tapestry but one that new to me were the intercepted Tokyo cables to the Japanese ambassador in the then neutral Soviet Union in April 1945 declaiming there would be absolutely no surrender on any terms.  At best the Soviet Union might broker a truce, nothing more. (For those dozing in history class, the US had cracked the Japanese naval and diplomatic codes in 1941, but not the army one.) Everyone in Washington, but few members of the Hindsight League, recalled the Japanese continued negotiations in December 1941 even as the attack fleet turned into the wind to launch the first wave of aircraft. (I also learned why fire bombing in massed raids occurred in Japan and not Germany and that, too, had a logic to it.) 

To that date in April 1945 no unit of the Japanese army or navy had surrendered at any time. That left the million-man home army and its civilian auxiliaries (women trained to stab with cutlery and children to strap on explosives), another million soldiers in China, and a third million in South East Asia to subdue. Would each one of them fight to the death? That seemed a possibility. Pentagon planners estimated one million US casualties to overcome these forces, assuming that they fought as tenaciously as had those in Okinawa and Iwo Jima.  Thirty divisions of the US Army in Europe were being re-fitted for the Pacific, and in the Pacific rear echelon troops like MPs (including my dad) were being trained in assault firing. Little was expected from the depleted Allies, Great Britain and the Soviet Union, beyond a symbolic participation. 

One of Truman’s early acts was to appoint a new Secretary of State.  Why had he bothered to take the time to this in the urgency of the circumstances?  Because according to the Constitution of the time, the Secretary of State was now next in line for presidential succession and he wanted to ensure it was someone who could govern if fate took that turn. That is presence of mind.  

There is a detailed discussion of the Potsdam Conference where the primary American objective was obtained, a Soviet commitment to enter the war against Japan no later than 15 August 1945. Everything else was at an impasse and there remained.   

As soon as the war ended, domestic politics descended into chaos with labor strikes large and small, price manipulations by big business, corporate shenanigans on Wall Street, back-biting in Congress – in short, business as usual.  Truman had hoped the unity of purpose during the war would continue in the face of the incipient Cold War.  Not so, and he floundered for some time, but finally arrived at the conclusion that he had to act, and did, winning no friends but bringing some order to affairs.  He was likewise distrustful of the Soviet apologists in his own ranks, like Henry Wallace but felt unable to act against them without creating more instability. The incompetence and corruption in the IRS shook his faith in government, but he bit that bullet, too. 

But all of this was only just the beginning when came the Berlin Blockade, the Marshall Plan (which he got through a Republican Congress), the Greek Civil War (initiating the Truman Doctrine), Soviet delay in withdrawing from Iran, and one crisis after another end-on-end.  As it was his strength so it was his weakness that he did not want to discuss problems but to resolve them and resolution was by a presidential decision, and damned the torpedoes, he made them.  When he made mistakes, and he did, he just as quickly corrected them, but it was always full steam ahead for this land lubber.  

Not all the crises were international. The House Un-American Activities Committee undermined by hyperbole, innuendo, and lies most government institutions. In this context Truman appointed David Lilienthal (of the Tennessee Valley Authority [TVA]) to head the newly created Atomic Energy Commission and that set off a long-running fire storm. The Army opposed civilian control of nuclear energy, and ergo any appointment. Senate Republicans saw in Lilienthal an easy target and went after him with little or no scruple. The fact that at the TVA he had done more concrete good for more people than all of the cannibals combined only proved to them that he was a pinko, if not worse. (On the TVA see ‘Wild River’ [1960] for enlightenment. Roger Ebert said it was Elia Kazan’s love letter to the New Deal.) 

When Truman offered Lilienthal the job, Lilienthal had predicted a difficult confirmation, and Truman said he knew that and would see it through come what may, and he did.    

The 1948 campaign had many unusual and remarkable features.  Too many to enumerate here, but election junkies will find it worth reading those chapters.  I will limit the keyboard to two of them. The polling showed Truman behind 3 to 1. In 1946 the Republicans had already secured comfortable majorities in both houses of Congress. Yet Truman never doubted he could win and infused his entourage with energy, if not belief. 

Truman’s masterstroke was this. The Republican nominating convention produced a platform for the election of proposed legislation, which was largely modelled on the current situation. Their claim was that they could do it better, not that it was much different from Truman who was an accidental president, a common man in over his head, and an incompetent (and by innuendo, corrupt).  

Leaving aside that insulting rhetoric, Truman found little to dislike in the Republican platform, but he doubted that it represented the reality of a Republican administration.  To test that proposition he did the following.

He called Congress back into special session during the campaign and dared the Republican majorities to pass the legislation proposed in the campaign platform into law: unemployment insurance, low cost housing, immigration extensions, farm price support, and so on, and on. If they pass it, I’ll sign he said. If that is what Republicans want, they can have it now.  

Congress duly assembled in the sauna that Washington is (at a time when air conditioning was scarce) and….  Well, all that platform was publicity and did not represent the intent of the GOP, and instead of passing bills, they spent the two weeks of his session denouncing Truman for making them return to Washington.  Did he ever get mileage out of that. This was the do-nothing Republican Congress. Any momentum the GOP had from its 1946 Congressional majorities was stopped then and there.  

His opponent was Thomas Dewey, governor of New York State, who had run against FDR in 1944. In that campaign Dewey had gone for blood, demonising Roosevelt, slandering Eleanor, deriding each of the Roosevelt children by name, and even deprecating the pet dog, Fala. As one wit put it, the only thing that stopped him from stooping lower in vilifying every Roosevelt was the floor. Dewey lost, and decided to go at 1948 in a different way.

He ran as though he had already been already elected. He ignored the platform mentioned above, and spoke only in platitudes and generalities. His failure to emphasise the Republican platform gave Truman ammunition. The vagaries of Dewey’s speeches were such that the Truman campaign published collected excerpts from them to show that he had nothing to offer.

Dewey’s aim was to present himself as above partisan politics, while not making campaign promises that would later tie his hands. He was being presidential, he thought, acting as if he had already won, after all that is what the polls kept saying.  He presented the smallest target ever.  And he never once asked audiences to vote him, as beneath presidential dignity. While he, too, travelled by train he did not stop at every crossroad and give a talk, but moved from city to city to speak in hotels and auditoria. After he spoke, he did not descend from the podium to shake hands, but rather left by a back door. Even on the platform he exuded an icy aloofness that journalists reported. 

In contrast, Truman explicitly asked for members of the audience to vote for him.  In so doing, he sometimes directed this request to Republicans in the audience who had come to see if he was the fool being portrayed.  He was always careful to distinguish Republican voters, who were ordinary folks, from Potomac Republicans in Washington D.C.  The voters were just trying to get along and mistakenly thought sending Republicans to D.C. would help them do that.  But how could it, he would ask, look at that do-nothing congress that had ample opportunity to enact its own measures for the benefit of the common man, but did not do so, because that was not really the goal. The goal was to win office, and then favour the vested interests of Wall Street, industrialists, and their kind. He hammered away at this theme, leading to that famous headline.   

Restored to office, things went from bad to worse for Truman. The Berlin Crisis remained. There was an assassination attempt. China went Red. The Senate went witch-hunting. North Korea went south. George Marshall quit due to ill health. Never a dull moment. At this point I think I will give up summarising his presidency except to say it was action-packed.  Just remember there is the Korean War, the showdown with General Douglas McArthur over civilian control, the vandalism of that Kremlin asset Joe McCarthy, and more. 

Perhaps one point has to be made. Truman was adamant that the atomic bomb would not be used in the Korean War.  Though there was much pressure to do so from the public, the army, the press, and the Congress, he steadfastly refused even to consider it. He, like any sensible person – always a minority in a crisis, was terrified of this weapon and kept it off the agenda. He could say honestly it had never been discussed as an option. Not even in the darkest hours when the Busan perimeter buckled. Though he made many decisions to act, this was perhaps his most important decision and it was not to act and he made it repeatedly.   

He had made up his mind in 1950 just before the Korean Conflict started that he would not seek another term in the 1952 election, because by then he would have served just 82 days short of two full terms. That was enough for anyone, he concluded, and wrote in longhand a letter he kept in his drawer to be produced in the middle of 1951 in which he declared he was stepping down.  

There are long chapters on the 1952 election with the reluctant candidate, Adlai Stevenson succeeding Truman as head of the Democratic ticket.  Stevenson had the soul of a poet, not a politician, but in any event no one was going to best Dwight Eisenhower.  Ditto 1956 when no one else wanted the nomination and Stevenson backed into it again.  

In retirement the still sprightly, Truman moved back to Independence to the family home and devoted himself to memoirs, which are largely lists of meetings offering no insight into either events or people.  He also turned his formidable energies to his presidential library. Though there is much discussion of the detail, this book does not give Truman nearly enough credit for establishing the concept of the presidential library. He had seen the way souvenir takers had carted off just about anything mobile from the White House when FDR died, from furniture to filing cabinets of papers.  Truman had encouraged Eleanor to take whatever she wanted, and it turned out she wanted a lot because it had been her family home for more than a decade and she had proprietorial feelings. This observation was the seed that later came to fruition.

He lived thereafter on his army pension, as there was no presidential pension, and later a publisher’s advance for memoirs.  

I have been to the Truman Presidential Library in Independence and a visit is highly recommended for president buffs.  It certainly reflects the man, fearless, direct, and simple. While it was being built he pitched in more than once himself to the work (no doubt as relief from this memoirs), and insisted on some of the displays, like the piles angry and damning letters he got from parents of GIs serving, missing, wounded, or killed in Korea. Those families paid the price for his decision(s) and he thought they should have their say. He would take the heat.

Of all the things he said and all the things said about him, the one that I like best is his remark in this paraphrase:  There are million people who are more qualified than I am to be president, but it has fallen to me and I will give it everything I have got.        

The book reads like a novel, a thriller even, in its invocation of people, places, and events.  I found myself on more than one night sitting up past my usual bedtime reading on and on, finding it hard to stop mid-chapter, and so not stopping.  My practice is usually to switch off such serious reading in the evening and read a few pages of a krimi as bedtime and sleep beckon, but some books are hard to put down and this is one of them.  It is easy to see why the Pulitzer Committee gave it an award.  I have been through one other of his biographies, that of John Adams quite a time ago, with no particular memory of it, but that was the audible version while I was driving around historic utopian communities in the midlands, midwest, and upper south in days gone by. 

  * Who was the shortest serving Vice-President, you ask?  Take notes for the next round of pub trivia. John Tyler had 31 days from taking the oath of office to when President William Harrison, just elected, died. Andrew Johnson who succeeded Abraham Lincoln had 42 days. William King who never set foot in Washington D.C. as VP died 45 days after taking the oath of office in Cuba. Then comes Truman. 

The Last Empress: Madame Chiang and the Birth of Modern China (2009) by 

Hannah Pakula.

Good Reads meta-data is 816 pages rated 3.75 by 424 litizens. 

Genre: Biography.

Verdict: Excellent. 

Much is explained about Soong Mei-ling (1897/8-2003).  As a boy her father worked passage to the United States on a merchant ship and left it in Wilmington (North Carolina) where he found a philanthropic sponsor who paid for his education at Trinity College (before it became Duke University). Having left China at four years old, first for Bali with his father, and then on State-side, he returned to China when he was twenty, a convinced Christian, accustomed to Western food, inexperienced with chop sticks, and committed to American ways with only a boyish smattering of the Chinese language.   

He married an equally unconventional Chinese woman who sang and painted, practices usually associated with prostitutes, and sired six surviving children, including Mei-ling, giving each a Christian name, too, hers being Olive.  He became a successful entrepreneur and to show his wealth and western ways, educated his daughters as well as his sons. Thus Olive found her way to Wellesley College (I gave a talk there once, or was that Wesleyan?) in the Connecticut woods where she had novelty value and soon learned to use that to her advantage.  She maintained a lifelong correspondence with one of her roommates which is much quoted in these pages. 

Already we see the woman in the girl. Her Chinese looks made her exotic to Americans, and her American ways made her exotic to Chinese, and she learned to use both perceptions to her advantage, and to switch back-and-forth from Chinese to American in a single conversation.  

Like Charlie Soong, Sun Yat-Sen was well-travelled, imbued with America, a firm Christian, and an advocate of a new, reformed, modern China, and their paths crossed, whence they became friends and allies. Sun was the public face, while Soong became the bagman, securing funding through their trials and tribulations as the old regime tottered on its bound feet. The crucial times were just before the Great War in Europe, around 1910 -1912.  Olive would have been about 14.  When Sun married her older sister, they became family.  She was a witness to the baptism of Twentieth-Century China.

There is much background about Chinese history which aids this reader in locating the characters in time and place, more history than one usually finds in a biography and that adds to its length. As a girl she was wilful, energetic, committed to a New China, took for granted the privilege of wealth, and resisted the pressures to get married young and be a good wife. There is a certain dilettantism to her New China commitment rather like Anglo champagne socialists.  Never for a moment did she consider that a New China might have no place for her, that wealth might lose its privileges, that the coolies might want to govern. 

The divide between North China (including Shanghai) and South China that had bedevilled the tottering empire remained and at times there were two would-be governments, one in Peking (the ancient capital of the empire) and the other in Canton or Nanking, vying for legitimacy, foreign recognition, loans, allies, and friends. Later the Japanese set up another in Manchukuo, while the Brits held on to Hong Kong.   

The Chiang Kai-Shek who appears in these pages is an ambitious and unscrupulous man, but one so lacking imagination he can (possibly) be led.  He wanted to marry Sun Yat-Sen’s widow (think Richard III), but she reviled him, and so he settled for her younger sister, Olive, who was more pliable at the time, to gain the social status and financial connections of the Soong family one way or another.  Like Henri Quatre he converted to get them, from a nominal Buddhist to a nominal Methodist.

His only purpose was uniting China (under neo-emperor Chiang) by absorbing the fractious war lords who had emerged from the decay of the ancien régime, and this focus distracted him either from the Communist whom he underestimated and the Japanese whom he feared. For her part, Olive did occasionally try to improve the lot of ordinary people through charity and war work, but the scale of China was beyond ever her considerable energies and wits. Chiang could never quite subdue the warlords and the 1920s and 1930s was period of constant conflict somewhere in the celestial kingdom. While he negotiated with this warlord or that, the Japanese decided Manchuria had the resources and industries that Nippon needed to join the Great Powers, and so it annexed what had been the richest and most stable region of China while Chiang continued to play warlords. He accepted that as a fait accompli from his bastion in the South.  

Stubborn to the core, Chiang never changed, and when war with Japan became inevitable he stuck to the belief that others (the European Great Powers, the USSR, and the USA) would have to defeat Japan, and meanwhile his purpose was to prepare for the eradication of the Communists to consolidate his rule of China. Olive was steadfast and exercised considerable influence over him as amanuensis, translator, negotiator, advisor, observer, charmer, champion, and loyal operative.  She articulated and advocated a social program of sanitation, education, communication, and the like, much of which was embodied in the New Life campaign, but throughout Chiang’s regime the army absorbed at least 40 – 60% of the budget by all estimates. Since the wealthy middle and upper classes who supported Chiang paid no tax, and collecting customs from the International Zone of Shanghai and other Treaty Ports was impossible, the financial burden fell on peasants, who were taxed two or three times a year to amass the wherewithal for yet another campaign of final eradication against another warlord.  Olive had a finely developed blind eye for much of this oppression.  

Aside, she did not have a sustained and concrete project in the way that Eva Peron did for the shirtless ones.  Olive’s good works seem more infrequent and dilettantish than Eva’s. Nor do they compare in scope or depth to Eleanor Roosevelt’s contributions to domestic politics.  

Uniting China would garner international recognition for Chiang’s government, and that would allow him to raise funds for the army (oh, and for those social programs, if there was any left over, though it never was) from international banks. That was the logic of his focus. To unify the vast, disparate, and querulous regions of China, Chiang looked to the model of European fascism for order and discipline. Olive had the rhetoric of constitutional democracy from her American years, which he learned to tolerate, but never himself espoused, although as his translator Olive sometimes put such phrases in his mouth.   

During Chiang’s long ascension he was at times courted by both Stalin and Hitler. Russia wanted a bulwark to hobble Japanese threats to its Far East (including the buffer state of Mongolia), and if the Communist and Nationalist cooperated, China might be strong enough to impede Japanese access to its natural resources.  Hitler, on the other hand, simply wanted to bedevil French and British interests in Asia, and so on occasion invested a little time and money in wooing Chiang to undermine the Europeans. In fact, during the early stages of this second Sino-Japanese War in 1938 Chiang’s principle military advisor was a German general — Alexander von Falkenhausen — to whom he seldom listened, but who had trained and equipped several Chinese divisions, which proved to be the best in the Nationalist army. These troops were so good that Chiang tried to withdraw them from combat with the Japanese and reserve them for another eradication campaign with the Communist, a plan that came unstuck when these units became the core of American General Joseph Stilwell’s Chinese Expeditionary Force in Burma. CKS quid pro quo for these troops was a pipeline of Lend Lease material through Burma. 

There is no doubt Madame Chiang was a force.  At one point she was the official head of the Nationalist Air Force and instrumental in recruiting, retaining, and giving free reign to Claire Chennault to run it over the objections of many Chinese generals who wanted access to the prestige, money, and goods that went with it.  She was the only one who could get Chiang to bend or even change his plans. With all others he was stubborn because he aspired to the infallibility of a son of heaven emperor.  

(Chennault was an exceptional flyer, trainer, and organiser of pilots, until he developed a Napoleonic complex and tried to influence grand strategy. His strategies always made him the centre of attention and never worked and that was alway the fault of someone else.) 

The oceanic corruption in the Nationalist regime was the price the Chiangs paid, on this telling, to retain allies and subordinates in the vast, fractious landscape of China.  Trying to eliminate it would have toppled the regime, per this author. Best then to try to manage the corruption by participating in it!  To illustrate the effect of this corruption. The American manufacturer of an airplane would sell it to a Chinese agent for $1,000 who paid for it with Chinese government money but the agent would then change the invoice to $4,000, pocketing the entire sum. Nor were all the $4,000 planes ever delivered despite the payments. Some were sold at the price two or three times. To fund these outlandish prices much of the money raised for Chinese War Relief (of Civilians) by Madame Chiang was siphoned off to these war materials. (There are occasional references to this Relief fund in the contemporary Charlie Chan films.)  Without a doubt members of the Soong and Chiang families participated in this profiteering. Strange but this story reminds of a recent crime family’s occupation of the White House.    

The disjunction between Olive’s rhetoric of the rule of law and democratic equality and the reality of her personal behaviour is brought home in numerous instances. She used people and once she got what she wanted from them, they disappeared from her consciousness.  One day you were her dearest friend, and the next day she looked through you.  Servants were treated like slaves, and there were many servants, and she treated many people as though they were servant-slaves, and so ingrained was this haughty manner that it was manifested even in her wartime visits to the United States and Canada when she was tying to win friends, so much so that the press got wind and word of it and her halo started to tarnish.  Her speeches, by the way, on this trip are marvellous, though occasionally there are some obtuse passages that would make a Jürgen Habermas proud.  Two things are clear: she wrote nearly all of her own speeches and she was good at it.  Second, she relied on a dictionary with little sense of usage.  She too long retains a sophomoric desire to impress auditors with long and unusual words culled from dictionaries.    

While she was in the States raising money for Chinese war orphans, she booked a floor of the Waldorf Hotel for many thousands of dollars, and went on a mink coat shopping spree, purchasing ten, with all the associated accoutrements which added up to more thousands of dollars. This booty had to be flown into China over the Himalayas where every fourth plane crashed, often killing the American crew. This, too, the press sniffed. The author shows, piteously, that much the money raised for orphans went straight to the Soong family, including Olive. (It seemed to me to be a parallel with the argument Pericles made about the Delian League. Think about that!)  

When Wendell Wilkie visited China in 1943 he was completely enamoured of Olive and she wrapped him around a little finger, assuming he would succeed FDR.  Therein lies a juicy tale for readers of this book. Check it out for yourselves. He thereafter became the number one cheerleader for Kuomintang (KMT) China. No reality check dissuaded him. Much of Wilkie’s memoir One World (1945) is an ode to (Madame) China.  

While it is not emphasised, in passing the author makes the observation several times that the the Chinese penchant for avoiding embarrassment and humiliation (face) meant that bad news was not reported. If an army division was destroyed, the report would be about the heroic salvage of spare tires or some such trivia. And Chiang made that cultural reluctance worse by frequently, sometimes literally, shooting the messenger. 

An Australian journalist (William Donald; there is an informative entry about this accomplished individual in the Australian Dictionary of Biography) who was undoubtedly smitten with her became her full-time press agent. His coaching and advice did much to create the public image of Madame Chiang.    

The book explains much of the post-War hysteria about ‘Who lost China,’ which radio pundits were still rehashing in the 1960s, e.g. Thomas Dodd, Paul Harvey, and Walter Judd, among others. General Joseph Stilwell and his ilk were renounced by the pygmies in D.C. after his 1946 death for his efforts to cooperate with Chou En-lai to fight the Japanese.  He had one meeting with Chou who agreed to obey his orders, but Chiang refused to cooperate with Chou on any terms. In the other corner were are all those deluded missionaries who believed Chiang’s superficial commitment to Christianity and overlooked the palpable corruption, cruelty, and incompetence of his regime.  Reminds me of the evangelicals and the other guy.  No sin is too egregious as long as he holds up an unread Bible. It became obvious by 1943 that CKS had no legitimacy in the parts of China nominally under his control. He was but one war lord among many, with this difference: He had Olive to present him to the world.  But no amount of American aid or intervention would have propped up the rotten KMT regime for long.     

CKS and KMT were unable to change.  All appointments and promotions in the government and the army were based on personal loyalty to CKS, and not competence, ability, motivation, skill, or anything else. The only criterion was loyalty to Chiang. The only thing that trumped loyalty was kinship.  CKS appointed numerous, distant relatives to important jobs, though they were unable to perform the duties, having them in place blocked out others who might not be so dependent on and loyal to Chiang.  While the nepotism crippled his regime, he never changed it. If anything the transfer to Taiwan exacerbated it.  

The native Taiwanese population were not regarded as Chinese, and so by definition they were disloyal to the embodiment of China, namely, Chiang, and, moreover, they had to be displaced to make room for those loyalists who followed CKS to the island.  Hence upon arrival his army purged the islanders from administration, education, business, army, and the like on the grounds that they were all communists, many of whom were murdered. Nor was any of this secret.  US State Department officials witnessed, documented, and recorded it, but such facts bounced off the Christian China lobby in D.C.  (Nothing ever changes with god-botherers.)  The result was to shoot the messengers in the McCarthy hysteria.  

Soong Mei-ling outlived Chiang, and just about every one else, spending her last thirty years in the States, dying in (1898-) 2003, an unreconstructed Cold Warrior.  Olive was manipulative, sly, persistent, wily, played a long game, a user, a snob, a marvellous orator, a much stronger personality than CKS, a power seeker, tyrannical, oblivious to her own contradictions, imperious, a speaker of many hollow phrases, a patriot, without self-knowledge or doubts, and much else. All that said, and more, she was one of the half-dozen major players in World War II, and the only woman to have that role.  

It occurred to me that Olive and CKS might have played good-cop, bad-cop in their dealings with the Yankees. He was intransigent and never gave inch so when she asked for the moon it seemed reasonable compared to him, often with the result being they got a lot of what they really wanted.  

She had more direct influence over Chiang and his government than, say, Eleanor Roosevelt had with FDR administration or Eva with Juan Peron.  

Oddity. Her older sister had married Sun Yat-sen early in the Twentieth Century, and as his widow she tried to adhere to his vision of China, often denouncing, sometimes publicly, the CKS regime. When the Communists took over the country, she chose to stay in China with the masses, and she was regarded as a living embodiment of the continuity of the new regime with Dr Sun, and sequestered in comfort.  She likewise occasionally, and publicly rebuked this regime, too, especially during the Cultural Revolution. Her symbolic value was so great that these remarks were overlooked by Emperor Mao.   

The book charts Olive’s growth and change from a cloistered college girl to the dragon lady whose death was not mourned by a good part of the population of Taiwan, despite the official gloss.  Though she lived in the States for years she continued (to try) to influence Taiwan politics in favour of the old guard (and her family), and her extravagant living arrangements were funded by US Aid money meant for Taiwan. When her house was cleared post-mortem, one closet was found stacked with cardboard boxes of US dollars on top of piles of gold ingots. Rainy day savings.       

The author has distance from the subject, and does not take anything at face-value.  Yet the picture of Olive is understanding, if not sympathetic, and the digressions on context were informative to this reader (otherwise ignorant of Chinese history) though they added considerably to the length of the book. However the book lacks a last summing-up chapter which I missed.  After all the details, a final chapter that weighs things up is valuable but rare in biographies. It seems biographers are exhausted at the end, and just want it to done.  Editors are so jaded they have no interested in the needs of readers, and so this book ends without a reckoning apart for a few passages from obituaries.    

The author seems to specialise in royal women with other biographies of Prussian Empress Frederick who mothered Kaiser Bill and Queen Marie of Roumania. 

Kate had a distant brush with Madame Chiang in Rees family lore. Kate’s mother bred dogs, scores of them at time, and sold one to a local agent acting, she was told, for Olive sometime in the 1960s.  

She gave one of her anti-communist speeches at Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln on 30 September 1966. I expect I read about in the local newspaper at the time, but have no recollection. I was just starting my sophomore year of college a hundred miles away. 

Good Read meta-data is 520 pages, rated 3.77 by twenty-six litizens. 

Genre: Biography.

Verdict: Indomitable!  

“Cinema lies, sport does not,” Jean-Luc Godard, an avid sports fan.

Alice who?  Among Alice Marble’s (1913-1990) lesser claims to fame is that she was the inspiration for the DC Comics character Wonder Woman!*  That accolade arose from her athletic career. (See title above.)

Born to a working class family in San Francisco, Marble’s father was a mechanic on the street cars, and her mother managed the brood of children.  In time Alice would give tennis lessons to King Edward VIII of England, and play private exhibition matches at San Simeon with the Hollywood A-List.  Get it!  

But it all started with a Louisville Slugger.  (The cognoscenti will get it.) As a tweenager she idolised her older brother and followed him in playing baseball, where it quickly became apparent that she could run faster, throw harder, field better, and out hit him.  It was embarrassing for him in sandlot games to be chosen after his kid sister, and it was worse when she won a ballboy tryout for the San Francisco Seals. (Again with the cognoscenti.) So this brother bought her a second-hand tennis racket from a pawn shop and more or less locked her into the fenced public concrete tennis courts in the neighbourhood while he went off to play baseball.  

On these courts she took on all comers, boys, girls, Jews, Chinese, blacks, and anyone else who showed up with a racket, and she won in a serve and volley game. Pow! Going out to play like this, she wore shorts and t-shirt.  In this girl one sees the woman to come and not just in the attire but also in the can-do attitude.

One observer of her powers on these courts staked her entry into local competitions (and bet on her to win). She did and he did. This led to other sponsors and other wins.  Her game was completely untutored but it was dynamic and powerful enough to get local press mentions, and that led to more sponsors.  

At one point, her penurious family bought her a membership in an elite tennis club, thinking she would learn things there about both tennis and life and attract more and better (i.e., not gamblers) sponsors.  At this country club, she was a fish out of water the only time she went for a competition. Her clothes were not suitable; she didn’t know what to say or how to say it. The only people she knew there were the bus boys who also played tennis on the public courts. Then in the club competition draw her snobbish opponent protested at playing this pathetic nobody in shorts and a t-shirt!  Rattled and embarrassed, after a re-draw Marble lost in a double humiliation.

Enter Eleanor Tennant, whose fame as a tennis coach was national, likewise of working class origins, but now tennis teacher to Carol Lombard, Marion Davies, Errol Flynn, and others. She saw in the teenage Marble the stone from which to carve a champion, and she set to work with the wit, insight, tenacity, patience, and loyalty that marked her coaching career.  She passed many of these qualities onto to her protégée.  

Both of Marble’s parents died young while she was still in her teens, leaving the elder brother as head of the family.  All the children left school and worked. From fourteen Alice worked in a Wilson Sporting Goods store in the back, shelving and stacking. The manager later gave her a brand new racket, and she hence remained brand loyal. (The purchaser of this racket left it for pick-up and never returned.)   

It is a story of ups and downs, triumphs and failures. Because of her social background Marble was often denigrated by tennis officials and her naiveté meant she was sometimes manipulated, too, because Eleanor could not be there every minute. Marble’s wins on the court were spectacular and so were her losses. With Marble there was fireworks. It was all so different from the demure and muted world of ladies’ tennis at the time.    

When she was ranked in the top ten in the USA she contracted tuberculous and collapsed on the centre court of the French Open. That seemed to end her career, if not her life. But two long years later she was back, hitting the ball harder than ever. Eleanor paid all the medical bills with the money she earned from her precarious existence as coach to the fickle glitterati.  Who knew when the novelty of tennis would give way to another Hollywood whim and leave her high and dry.  

By the way, the US Tennis Association that sponsored her trip to the French Open, spent years trying to sue her for failing to complete her contract to the point sending a bill collector from New York to California to extract the money while she was hospitalised in a sanitarium.  Eleanor as always settled that.  But it is pretty clear that had Marble been one of the tennis club snobs this treatment would not have occurred.  

Part of Marble’s recovery was to take operatic singing lessons for breadth control and she discovered that she could sing and that she liked to sing.  Another part was a contrived competition for Eleanor’s favour with her other protégé Bob Riggs. Yes, him.  

Marble was prone to dehydration in the long matches played in the sun, and a response to that, again from Eleanor, was to put soaked cabbage leaves under her visor.  These fell out at one particularly embarrassing moment.  Read the book to see when.  

Remember that snob who called her a nobody. A year or two later by chance they were again paired in a local competition, and Marble literally drove this snob off the court with a record number of aces and a smash that broke her nose.  

With Eleanor’s instruction Marble broadened her repertoire with top spin, slices, undercuts, lobs, drop shots, back spin, cross-cuts, and tactical court management, i.e., using all the court for her shots. She also slowly adjusted to the surfaces of clay and grass which had none of the bounce of playground concrete. She also learned, as was much remarked in her mature years, to play with an effortless economy of motion while still hitting blazing shots.        

She played an aggressive, masculine style and wore shorts as she had as a girl. This at a time when women wore lady-like long skirts and patrolled baselines.  Not Marble who went to the net for the kill time and again. These attributes made her news copy and she quickly became famous beyond her accomplishments.  She seems to have very little ego in it all, though, and soldiered on.    

She made the cover of Life but not Time, as far as I can tell.  This celebrity led to a line of leisure and sportswear. There was the singing, clothing, Wilson endorsements, prize money, DC Comics, and personal appearances but there was so little money in the game she was never well off and lived at home with her brothers well into maturity, when not at Eleanor’s tennis camp in the sticks, practicing all the daylight hours and retiring at 10 pm. 

She grew tired of answering questions about her personal life and made up a husband on a secret military mission, and who then died. This is the mystery of the title. The author does an excellent job in unravelling this long-running deception. By the way, for those who must know Marble had lesbian relationships, though she was at times squired around by Will du Pont as a cover.  Yes, that du Pont who is described as wooden, pinched, and gloomy.  It is no wonder she did not accept his many offers of a marriage of convenience. There is a charming account of her first encounter with the word ‘lesbian.’  

After Pearl Harbor, she tried to join up in something, anything, but was refused because of the scars on her lungs.  At the personal invitation of President Roosevelt she headed a physical fitness campaign on a speaking tour, and then took to selling war bonds in another campaign of personal appearances. In one sixty-day trip she sold a million dollars of bonds, gave the same speech a hundred times, and autographed everything handed to her all day long and some of the night.

Throughout her career she played doubles, including mixed doubles. In this case the word ‘mixed’ refers to gender.  Marble, however, once played double mixed doubles, which her enemies never let her forget. Huh? She and another woman played in a mixed doubles match with two black men in Harlem for a Red Cross fund raiser. In short order that more or less ended her access to courts in the South. 

In retirement she struggled to make a living and her health deteriorated quickly.  But with each set-back she rebounded. ‘Indomitable’ is the word that best describes her personality.  She was knocked down plenty of times but always got up swinging.  We won’t see her like again in today’s world of cosseted millionaire mediocrities in sports.  

I had never heard of her until I came across her name in one of ‘What Happened on this Day in History’ entries I did for 2018-2019.  

By the way, the public courts she started on were refurbished and named after her at the Golden Gate Park in the sky.    

She published two memoirs, the second posthumously, but both, alleges this author, are very unreliable.  He convinced me with his own assiduous research into dates and times. She made up more than that husband.   

This is an impressive biographer who has checked every fact more than once and has a deft way of putting aside Marble’s unreliable assertions for proven fact. In the fact-checking he reminds me of Robert Caro.  There is no higher praise. But the air goes out of that comparison because Weintraub also sprinkles the pages with annoying slang like ‘the writing chops,’ ‘wiped the floor with Collins,’ ‘dough,’ ‘in the joint,’ and many more that will date the book, confuse some readers who are not native speakers of English, and leave translators at a loss.     

*’Wonder Woman’ was conceived … to set a standard among children and young people of strong, free, courageous womanhood; to combat the idea that women are inferior to men, and to inspire girls to self-confidence and achievement in athletics, occupations and professions monopolized by men” because “the only hope for civilization is the greater freedom, development and equality of women in all fields of human activity.” So said her creator.