Category: Reviews

“The Making of a Justice: Reflections on My First 94 Years”

by John Paul Stevens (Little, Brown and Company)


Former Justice John Paul Stevens served on the U.S. Supreme Court from 1975 until his retirement in 2010, the third-longest-serving justice in Ameri-can history. Appointed by President Gerald Ford, he joined the court under Chief Justice Warren Burger as a conservative, and left under Chief Justice John Roberts during President Obama’s first term as one of its leading liberal voices. In between, he published nearly 400 opinions for the court and more that 500 dissents.

In a new autobiography, “The Making of a Justice,” Stevens surveys his life before his appointment to the court — growing up in Chicago, and working as a naval traffic analyst at Pearl Har-bor during World War II and in private law practice.

But Stevens devotes the bulk of the book to reviewing key cases decided by the Supreme Court during his tenure. With 35 years on the bench, it’s quite a ride.

Some of the most interesting passages of the book deal with the backstory of some of the landmark cases decided during his tenure, in-cluding Bush v. Gore and District of Columbia v. Heller.

Stevens recounts watching the Florida recount in the 2000 presidential election unfold with interest, confident that the controversy was unlikely to reach the Su-preme Court — the Constitution, after all, expressly delegates the “time, place, and manner” of elections to the states. He was so confident, in fact, that he made plans to go out of town. He was shocked when a majority of the court rushed to intervene and to stay the Florida recount, effectively handing the presidency to George W. Bush. “I remain of the view that the Court has not fully recovered from the damage it inflicted on itself in Bush v. Gore,” he writes of the decision.

Stevens also took particular offense at the court’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, which construed the Sec-ond Amendment for the first time as forbidding reasonable regulation of guns. He notes that “colonial history contains many examples of firearm reg-ulations in urban areas,” all of which the court ignored in its rush to recognize a heretofore unknown personal right to bear firearms. In Stevens’ view, “Hel-ler is unquestionably the most clearly incorrect decision that the Court an-nounced during my tenure on the bench.” Stevens went on to author an op-ed after the Parkland shootings calling for a repeal of the Second Amend-ment.

A larger question running throughout the book is how to approach constitutional and statutory interpretation. The Constitution is written in sweeping terms, and statutes, too, are often imprecise — some-times due to poor drafting or political pressures, and sometimes intentionally to allow for broader application.

Typically, judges consider not only the text of the constitutional or statutory provision at issue but also its larger purpose and legislative history. But the late Justice Antonin Scalia was a fierce advocate of focusing solely on the text of a provision and how those words were understood at the time they were drafted.

Stevens was the strongest voice in opposition to this so-called “textualist” approach, pointing out that interpreting a constitution as fixed by the meaning of the words as they were understood at the time is itself a choice, and one that “is unfaithful to the expansive principle Americans laid down when they ratified the [Constitution]; … it countenances the most revolting injustices in the name of continuity, for we must never forget that not only slavery but also the subjugation of women and other rank forms of discrimination are part of our history … It is judicial abdication in the guise of judicial modes-ty.”

That debate continues to this day, even after Stevens’ retire-ment and Scalia’s death. With newer appointees venerating Scalia and his restrictive approach to our Constitution, it’s refreshing to consider Stevens’ common-sense rejoinder.

The Los Angeles Times once called Ste-vens a “national treasure.” At age 99, with this book, he cements that lega-cy.



Text einfügen (Abschnittwechsel oberhalb nicht löschen)

In her new book, “Leadership: In Turbulent Times,” Doris Kearns Goodwin uses four very different presidents (Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson) to examine their development into remarkable leaders. The author will appear Oct. 1 at Benaroya Hall.


“Leadership: In Turbulent Times,”

by Doris Kearns Goodwi

Simon & Schuster; 496 pp.


Doris Kearns Goodwin has been described as America’s historian-in-chief and it’s a well-deserved title. Over the course of five decades, she has devoted her career to the study of American presidential leadership including Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson.

“Leadership: In Turbulent Times,” her most recent work, is something of a career-capstone project, drawing lessons from a lifetime of work studying American history including these four American presidents, their lives and how they handled and confronted very different challenges they faced while occupying the White House and the highest executive office in the United States.

The book is a study of leadership. Leaders develop from different, often unique, backgrounds, and their strength, courage and vision often are not visible until put to the test. Kearns Goodwin uses these four very different presidents (two Democrats; two Republicans) to examine their backgrounds, experiences and development into remarkable leaders almost eerily suited to the needs of their times.

Kearns Goodwin organizes the book into three sections: First, in separate chapters she reviews each president’s earlier years, rise and remarkable early success. Next, she examines challenges each faced — and surmounted — giving them the grit, determination and perspective necessary to confront their future challenges. Finally, she examines their ultimate test in the White House and how their leadership emerged from the sum of their experiences, trials and lives.

Lincoln, of course, confronted the Civil War, perhaps the greatest challenge ever to face these United States. Teddy Roosevelt faced the great coal strike of 1902, at a time when the Northeast depended almost entirely on coal for winter fuel. Franklin Roosevelt took office during the Great Depression and launched a blizzard of legislative activity, transforming the American economy in his first (and now famous) “100 days.” Johnson took office after the brutal assassination of President Kennedy, and immediately demonstrated his legislative mastery by pushing through JFK’s tax cut, followed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Medicare and so much more.

Kearns Goodwin traces the very different lives of each of them, as they lived through adversity and used it to develop hidden depths of strength and resilience that would later prove invaluable. Lincoln rose from poverty to modest success in the state legislature but lost not one but two campaigns for the U.S. Senate. The sting of those losses never left him. Teddy Roosevelt lost his young wife in childbirth and, on the same day, his mother, from typhoid fever.

Franklin Roosevelt was stricken with polio, rendering him barely able to walk, and then only painfully, and primarily used a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Johnson, raised in poverty like Lincoln, had long operated on the principle that if “he could get up earlier and meet more people and stay up later than anybody else,” he could win whatever he set his sights on. His campaign for a U.S. Senate seat in the special election in 1941 to fill a vacancy caused by the death of Sen. Morris Sheppard crushed him with a losing margin of just 1,311 votes.

Each of them could have been destroyed by their fates. Instead, each used the hard lessons as a fulcrum and motivation for future success. Kearns Goodwin uses each to study how leaders grow, where ambition comes from and how adversity affects the growth of an emerging leader.

It would be difficult to imagine someone better suited to lead that study than Kearns Goodwin. She worked for Johnson in the White House, observing presidential power at close range, later helping LBJ to write his memoirs. She published her own study of his presidency in “Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream.” She won the Pulitzer for her book on Franklin Roosevelt, “No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor and the Home Front in World War II.“ She wrote the acclaimed “Team of Rivals” on Lincoln’s White House and “The Bully Pulpit” on Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.

So it’s perhaps no great surprise that Kearns Goodwin has a strong grasp on her subject and is able to distill critical lessons on presidential leadership. It’s as if she spent her entire career simply preparing to write this one volume. It was worth the wait. And well timed: If ever our nation needed a short course on presidential leadership, it is now.

Lisa Brennan-Jobs paints a rich portrait of her childhood, alternating between a mother barely able to support herself and a father almost pathologically distant. It’s a heartbreaking memoir, beautifully rendered.


“Small Fry”

by Lisa Brennan-Jobs

Grove Atlantic, 381 pp.


Steve Jobs was, beyond question, brilliant. He transformed the computer industry, launching Apple from ashes to the most valuable company in the world. But like so many intense, creative and successful people, his private life was just a bit more complicated.

Jobs had a daughter with artist Chrisann Brennan. For years Jobs largely ignored both Chrisann (they never married) and his daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, denying paternity. For Lisa, Steve Jobs was more of a myth than a presence. When he did show up — to take her skating, or for an impromptu hike across the Golden Gate Bridge — Jobs was often cold and distant.

As she grew older, her father took an interest in her and she moved into his enormous but famously spartan house. But even then she was left feeling she was an outsider looking in on her father’s wife and their three children.

In “Small Fry,” Brennan-Jobs paints a rich portrait of her childhood, alternating between a mother barely able to support herself and a father almost pathologically distant. It’s a heartbreaking memoir, beautifully rendered. Jobs’ success at Apple and Pixar are distant muffled echoes; this is an intimate story about family and family dysfunction.

There is no licensing requirement to have a child and, while some parents are naturally great parents, others struggle to provide their children with warmth, support and encouragement. Fortunately, children are resilient and most can rise above whatever their parents were unwilling or unable to provide. But however one might measure the quality of a parent, Jobs would surely not score terribly high. Petty, thin-skinned and vindictive, he would refuse to say good night to his 14-year-old daughter, even when she all but begged for the attention. He repeatedly denied having named the famous Apple “Lisa” computer after his daughter (only finally admitting the obvious late in life when Bono asked him). He refused to fix the heating in her bedroom. He refused to pay her college tuition her senior year at Harvard, leaving it to kindly neighbors to fund it — only later repaying them.

The initial press accounts of Brennan-Jobs’ memoir focused attention on these moments of indifference or cruelty, reinforcing the popular perception that Steve Jobs was the self-centered and cruel genius portrayed in Walter Isaacson’s biography “Steve Jobs.”

And perhaps he was. But with all due respect, that misses the central point of Brennan-Jobs’ book. This isn’t an attack on a distant and emotionally cold father. It’s a love story for the father that she had, flaws and all, and a recognition that he, too, knew he had failed her and burned with regret. Yes, as widely reported, in one of their last encounters, he told her that she “smelled like a toilet.” But, as she recounts, she had recently applied an organic perfume that degraded quickly, something she had not realized. And he made the comment only after a long and loving hug. It was not a cruel insult; it was truth from someone who saw that as a gift, not a slap.

Brennan-Jobs describes how she attended her much younger sister’s birthday party and, while passing through the kitchen, noticed honey jars with labels containing five illustrations of bees with the names of the family members written beneath each of them — but not including her. It hurt, but then she had a moment of revelation. “It was irrelevant that I wasn’t named on the honey pots. I had not been a mistake. I was not the useless part of something meaningful … I wouldn’t trade any part of my experience for someone else’s life, I felt then, even the moments where I’d wished I didn’t exist, not because my life was right or perfect or best but because the accumulation of choices made had carved a path that was characteristic and distinct, down to the serif, and I felt the texture of it all around me for just a moment, familiar, like my own skin and it was good enough.”

Brennan-Jobs’ memoir is a wise, thoughtful and ultimately loving portrayal of her father, who fell far short of ideal but somehow helped to raise an intelligent, perceptive and forgiving young woman. And that surely must rank as Steve Jobs’ most improbable accomplishment.

Jeff Guinn, author of the best-selling “Manson,” delves into the 1978 tragedy in Guyana, where more than 900 church members drank cyanide-laced drinks.


“The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple”

by Jeff Guinn

Simon & Schuster, 531 pp., $28


In the end, Jim Jones never drank the Kool-Aid.

Jones, the charismatic founder of Peoples Temple, famously led a fanatic group of followers to carve a compound out of the Guyana jungle in South America. In 1978, facing increasing pressure from authorities, he convinced more than 900 church members to drink cyanide-laced drinks in a horrifying act of mass suicide.

In “The Road to Jonestown,” Jeff Guinn, the author of a national best-seller on mass murderer Charles Manson, tells the fascinating story of Jones and his church. It all started innocently enough. Jones, a young minister from Indianapolis, preached a curious blend of gospel, Marxism and racial integration — all leavened with miracle “cures” and southern-tinged revivalism.

Jones taught and led his flock to serve those in need. Peoples Temple groups fed the poor, clothed the homeless and worked hard to integrate his church. He found jobs for church members and intervened to help with problems small and large. In the turmoil of the 1960s and early 1970s, Jones attracted an increasing number of devoted followers who donated their salaries, personal property and even homes.
3-course dinners for $32 starting April 2.

Guinn is a master storyteller with a unique expertise in murderous psychotics. The book reads like a thriller, each page forcing your attention to the next as the Peoples Temple slowly slides from groundbreaking progressivism toward madness. As Guinn notes, “there was something unique about Jones and those who chose to follow him. Traditionally, demagogues succeed by appealing to the worst traits in others … Jim Jones attracted followers by appealing to the best in their nature, a desire for everyone to share equally.”

Jones, always a dominating figure, increasingly demanded control and warned of a coming apocalyptic confrontation with outsiders. He led more than 900 of his followers to Guyana, where they hacked a rustic compound out of the sweltering jungle and Jones exercised nearly complete control.
With parents and relatives expressing increasing concern, Congressman Leo Ryan led a delegation to investigate, accompanied by reporters and distraught relatives. Jones concluded that an invasion was imminent.

Seeking to send a message of defiance, he looked to the historical example of the Jewish fighters at the walled fortress of Masada. Surrounded by Roman legions, they famously committed mass suicide rather than submit to inevitable loss. It was, to put it mildly, an inapt comparison.

Jones brought events to a crisis on Nov. 18, 1978, by sending members to gun down Ryan and others waiting at the nearby airfield. With a self-made crisis now upon them, Jones laced Flavor Aid (not Kool-Aid as was widely reported) with cyanide and urged his followers to drink it. They started with over 200 babies and children. Jones himself used a handgun.
Government investigators arrived later, stunned by the eerie silence covering hundreds of bodies, already swollen in the tropical heat. It got worse. There were two other layers of badly decomposed bodies below. Snow shovels were required to remove them all. The final death count was 918. They are all buried in a mass grave at Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland. Jones’ body was cremated and his ashes deposited in the Atlantic Ocean.

The author, a longtime writer for The New Yorker, spent years traveling the country and chronicling American life, sometimes uncovering riveting tales of murder and mayhem.


“Killings”

by Calvin Trillin

Random House, 293 pp., $26


Murder is as American as apple pie and motherhood. In 2015, according to the FBI, there were more than 15,000 murders in the United States. Calvin Trillin would not be surprised.

Trillin, a longtime writer for The New Yorker magazine, traveled the U.S. for 15 years, producing a series of articles called “U.S. Journal.” The 3,000-word articles were published every three weeks. As he dryly notes, “Magazine writers asked, ‘How do you keep up that pace?” Newspaper reporters asked, “What else do you do?”

Some of those pieces are collected in “Killings.” It’s not intended as a study of killings. Instead, it’s “meant to be more about how Americans live than about how some of them die.”

Trillin writes with ironic detachment: “Reporters love murders. In a pinch, what the lawyers call ‘wrongful death’ will do, particularly if it’s sudden. Even a fatal accident for which no one is to blame has some appeal.”

First published in 1984, the book was out of print for years, forcing true Trillin aficionados to scour used-book stores in search of the volume. The newly released edition contains half a dozen additional pieces written since the original publication.
The stories, each riveting in its own way, are like passing a particularly gruesome car wreck. You know you shouldn’t slow down to look, but you just can’t help it.

“Right-of-Way” (new to this edition) tells the story of a property dispute between two strong-willed but very different women who move to Rappahannock County in the bucolic Virginia countryside. Rather than peace, they find each other. And death soon follows.

“I’ve Got Problems” (also new) tells the tragic story of a standoff in Cairo, Nebraska, between Arthur Kirk and the Nebraska State Patrol SWAT team. The heavily armed Kirk, holed up in his home and surrounded by SWAT team members bristling with firearms, hung up on negotiators, explaining with perhaps unintended understatement, “I’ve got problems!” “The Mystery of Walter Bopp” recounts the disappearance of a health-store proprietor in Tucson, Arizona, who, on close inspection, had a deeper backstory than anyone might have imagined.
But the best in this collection is the last essay, a classic by any measure. “Covering the Cops,” first published in 1986, is about Edna Buchanan, an iconic Miami Herald crime reporter and now a murder-mystery writer. As Trillin notes, there were police officers in Miami who said it wouldn’t be a homicide without her.

Her leads, always pithy, are direct and to the point. Writing about a woman set to go to trial for a murder conspiracy, Buchanan wrote, “Bad things happen to the husbands of Widow Elkin.”

Seattle criminal lawyer John Henry Browne takes an admiring look at his life and work — with a disappointing lack of introspection or depth.


‘The Devil’s Defender: My Odyssey Through American Criminal Justice from Ted Bundy to the Kandahar Massacre’

By John Henry Browne

Chicago Review Press, 248 pp., $26.99



In his just-published autobiography “The Devil’s Defender,” John Henry Browne, one of Seattle’s most flamboyant criminal defense lawyers, takes a look back at his life and career. He finds much to admire.
While certainly an easy read, with a fluid and conversational tone, the book is an opportunity missed, and badly. Browne has worked on some very interesting cases that raise difficult questions, and there’s certainly a book in there somewhere. But this brief survey of his professional life betrays a disappointing lack of introspection or depth.

As a young lawyer in the King County Public Defender’s office, Browne was assigned to represent serial killer Ted Bundy, who confessed to 30 homicides of young women over several years. Bundy was ultimately convicted of murder and executed in Florida in 1989. Browne developed a close relationship with Bundy that spanned years of calls and correspondence.

Browne also represented Benjamin Ng, one of three perpetrators of the Seattle Wah Mee Massacre in which 14 individuals were shot at close range. Defending him at trial was no small task, but Browne was able to save him from the death penalty. Another of the killers, Willie Mak, by contrast, was sentenced to death (later reduced to life without parole).

Browne’s more recent cases include defending Sgt. Robert Bales, who killed 16 villagers in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and Colton Harris-Moore, the so-called “Barefoot Bandit” who taught himself to fly an airplane and then stole several of them during the course of a small-bore crime spree. Browne negotiated a complicated plea bargain for Harris-Moore.

These cases could have provided a springboard to discussing the role of criminal defense counsel in our system of justice, or how one might reconcile one’s professional obligations with horrific blood-splattered crime scenes and obviously guilty clients. Browne comments in passing that he rises to defend those charged with such crimes not because they are virtuous but “because I believe that killing is wrong, whether it’s committed by an individual or sponsored by the state.” But that’s about as deep as his analysis gets.
Indeed, Browne’s conversations and correspondence with Bundy (some of it reprinted in an appendix) or his work representing Ng or Bales could have filled an entire volume. Instead, Browne barely scratches the surface of his work, focusing instead on apparent efforts to burnish his own reputation.

He comments that when he was asked to represent Bales, “[a]s usual, I knew it would probably break me financially. Sure it would mean international attention for my law firm and myself, but I was at the stage of my career where building my résumé or getting national media attention meant little.” Passing comments like this abound. He quotes a speech in which he contended that the ethics rules that apply to all licensed lawyers are “advisory” rather than “mandatory,” a rather distinctly minority view. He even includes “John Henry Browne’s Ten Rules for Trials” in another appendix. It’s all a bit much.

The editors of this short (fewer than 250 pages) work would have done well to tone down the bluster and to send Browne a Starbucks gift card with instructions to finish the book.

In “American Heiress,” Jeffrey Toobin revives the story of Patty Hearst for a new audience, using previously unreleased material to chronicle her odyssey from sheltered rich girl to kidnap victim to gun-wielding bank robber. Toobin appears Sept. 17 at the Seattle Public Library.
‘American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst’

by Jeffrey Tobin

Doubleday, 368 pp., $28.95


On Feb. 4, 1974, Patty Hearst was kidnapped by a leftist radical group calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army. Hearst, a college junior, was an heiress to the Hearst family fortune, and her kidnapping splashed across the front pages of America’s newspapers. The sensational story exploded when Hearst tape-recorded a message, vowing allegiance to the group and announcing her new nom-de-guerre, “Tania.”

Her parents desperately tried everything to secure her release, even agreeing to feed all of the poor people in Oakland and San Francisco, Calif., for free as a show of “good faith.” Hearst responded by prominently wielding a machine gun during a robbery of the Hibernia Bank, near San Francisco.

With access to previously unreleased material, Jeffrey Toobin recounts Hearst’s journey down the rabbit hole from kidnapping victim to self-righteous revolutionary and back again. Toobin, a staff writer at the New Yorker and a legal analyst for CNN, is well matched to the story, with a keen eye for detail and a powerful narrative style.

And what a story. The SLA was hardly an “army.” Led by Donald DeFreeze, members of the pathetic group styled themselves as “revolutionaries” but in truth constituted a handful of naive misfits hoping to inspire revolution by issuing baroque “communiqués” thickly layered in impenetrable Marxist jargon. It was, to put it mildly, ineffective.

But they certainly were well-armed. Equipped with machine guns and pistols, the “army” scurried from one dismal hideout to another.
The FBI launched a nationwide dragnet to locate Hearst but for the better part of a year turned up nothing but embarrassing failure. The FBI ultimately traced the self-styled revolutionaries to their depressing suburban hideout in Los Angeles. Hearst, with Bill and Emily Harris, was away when the police formed a cordon around the house, and the standoff erupted into the largest police shootout in American history. The police lobbed more than 5,300 rounds of ammunition and 83 canisters of tear gas. The SLA comrades returned fire with more than 2,000 rounds before the house caught fire, and all of them were either shot or burned alive.

Hearst, Bill and Emily Harris, now joined by several others, targeted Crocker National Bank near Sacramento for their next “withdrawal.” But Myrna Opsahl, a 42-year old mother of four, was in the bank and, when she didn’t drop to the floor fast enough, Emily Harris shot and killed her with a shotgun.

The FBI eventually tracked down Hearst and the others. Her family hired F. Lee Bailey, then one of the most arrogant and self-indulgent celebrity lawyers in the country, to represent her. Hearst soon began cooperating with the FBI, completing her transition from “revolutionary” to victim.

Bailey, perhaps unsurprisingly, was a disaster. Hearst was convicted and sentenced to serve seven years. Her family posted bail and launched a rehabilitating PR campaign. On Jan. 29, 1979, President Carter commuted her sentence without comment. She had served less than a year in prison. Twenty-two years later, on his final day in office, President Clinton issued a full pardon. Neither mentioned the death of Opsahl during the Crocker National Bank robbery.

Toobin’s book is a fascinating ride through a troubled time, as the more innocent ’60s faded to memory and were replaced by something far darker. “American Heiress” is a terrific study of a malleable young woman who either bravely survived a horrific ordeal, or cravenly joined delusional self-appointed “revolutionaries,” killing an innocent mother along the way, and got away with it. Or perhaps both.

Nathaniel Philbrick’s gripping new work, “Valiant Ambition,” tells how, after years of bickering by Congress and the states, the Revolutionary cause was finally galvanized and united by Benedict Arnold’s betrayal. Philbrick appears Monday, May 23, at Town Hall Seattle.


‘Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution’

by Nathaniel Philbrick

Viking, 443 pp., $30



The story of America’s founding is well known: Defiant citizen-soldiers threw a “tea party” in Boston, formed a well-timed coalition with the French, and defeated the mightiest army on Earth. It’s a great story, but the truth is, that’s not how it actually happened.

In fact, the Revolutionary War dragged on for eight years. George Washington’s “army” was barely supported by a bickering Congress and by deeply divided states uninterested in building a unified national government. The continental army nearly froze and starved to death at Valley Forge, for lack of meaningful support from Congress.

Nathaniel Philbrick, who won the National Book Award for “In the Heart of the Sea”, tells the fascinating story of Washington’s struggle, the fractious young Republic and Benedict Arnold’s surprisingly central role in it all. This is history at its most compelling: political machinations, military jostling and outright treachery. And Philbrick’s vivid writing brings the whistling cannon balls and half-frozen soldiers to life (and death) in vivid detail. He will discuss his book at Town Hall Seattle on Monday May 23, 2016.

One of Washington’s strongest generals, Benedict Arnold, played a decisive role in several key battles. He succeeded in delaying the British naval advance down Lake Champlain that could have lost the war for the Americans. The British recognized and rued his brilliance. Congress didn’t and promoted others past him, a stinging rebuke.

Arnold, desperate for cash, ultimately convinced himself that it was in the colonies’ best interests to end the war and reached out to the British to negotiate. In exchange for a substantial payment, Arnold would reveal the plans for the fortress at West Point (which he then commanded) to assist a British invasion.

He nearly succeeded. Arnold delivered the plans, but the plot was foiled when Major John André, the British spy chief working with Arnold, was stopped on his way back to British-controlled Manhattan by a band of New York militiamen who found the plans and frog-marched him back to the American forces.

Washington had Andre promptly hanged. Arnold, for his part, barely escaped.

Arnold’s treachery galvanized the American revolutionaries, forcing them to recognize that the long-slumbering war could, in fact, be lost and quickly. Self interest was put aside, the war effort funded and victory was ultimately achieved. Washington’s steady leadership obviously deserves unalloyed credit for that victory. But it was Arnold and his infamous betrayal that finally gave the Americans what they needed: a homegrown enemy to save them from themselves.

Perhaps the most honest account of the dysfunctional dynamics of the revolution and its fledgling government was penned by Charles Thomson, the secretary of the Continental Congress from 1774 to 1789. He planned to publish it in his retirement but, as the mythology of the heroic American Revolution took hold, he destroyed the monumental memoir instead. “Let the world admire the supposed wisdom and valor of our great men. Perhaps they may adopt the qualities that have been ascribed to them and thus good may be done. I shall not undeceive future generations.”

Philbrick takes on that very task of “undeceiving” and peels back the mythology to reveal a teetering war effort, a bickering Congress, discordant states unwilling to coalesce to support the new national government and — above all — a traitor who sought to sell out his own country for personal gain and achieved instead the one thing that no other revolutionary could: a unification of the Americans and an end to the war. And for that, we have much to thank Benedict Arnold.