Sullying a Hero's Reputation

...Ellis treats his subject with respect, but also with a certain wariness that readers possessing a modern political sophistication will find refreshing...

...To make his case, O'Brien offers an uncommon explication de texte...

...Once he was back home, though, he used his deft pen to speak of the bloodbath emerging on the other side of the Atlantic as if it were the opening of a new day in the history of liberty...

...Up to that point Hamiltonians saw the Federal government's role almost solely as abetting the growth of cities and encouraging the establishment of industrial enterprise, considered the sure tickets to public and private prosperitycontrary to stated Jeffersonian principles...

...His analyses of some of Dumas Malone's writing and of the work of Julian P. Boyd, the tireless compiler at Princeton of the Jefferson Papers, contribute to making this an important book...

...This keen phrase labels the revived interest in what the "Great Virginian" was and was not that gained momentum in 1993, with the marking of the 250th anniversary of his birth...

...29.95...

...In remarkably overheated language, O'Brien declares that Jefferson, who had seen the canny Frenchman as "a kind of political Messiah," wanted to get rid of him—a tricky business, psychologically as well as theologically...

...Of special interest will be the account of a meeting held in Charlottesville by the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation a year before...

...The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785-1800 By Conor Cruise O 'Brien Chicago...

...What he proves beyond cavil is that Jefferson's Francophilia and delight in France's upheaval arose not during his service as Minister there from 1785 to 1789, but upon his return to America...

...The distinguished Irish scholar significantly damages the Jeffersonian image...

...Joseph J. Ellis, a professor of history at Mount Holyoke College and the author of an outstanding study of John Adams, opens American Sphinx with an instructive survey of what he calls the "Jeffersonian Surge...

...For all of its splendid scholarship, The Long Affair needs to be read with care because of its tone...

...To this curious statement he adds that Hemmings' very attractiveness may have reinforced Jefferson's well-known revulsion at racial mixing, and declares: "I have concluded that the likelihood of a liaison with Sally Hemmings is remote...

...The letters he composed are unmatched in quality of language by any his remarkable contemporaries wrote...

...was one Robert Cooley...

...FDR had succeeded by then in marrying Hamilton's ideal of governmental activism with Jefferson's ideal of economic equality...

...Hereafter, all students of American history must come to grips with his detailed and lucid dissection of the Virginian's famous infatuation with the French Revolution, embedded in every American history textbook and in whatever passes for the American historical mind...

...In a word, he insisted that the long disputed story of Jefferson's alleged affaire d 'amour with his slave Sally Hemmings was gospel truth...

...Still, removing old heroes and heroines before replacing them with new ones may not be good for the health of society...

...In his final section, O'Brien voices concern that American militiamen, while not likely to call themselves Jeffersonians, are swept up in Jefferson's memorable preachment that the Tree of Liberty must be watered with the blood of tyrants...

...He points out that Jefferson was a silent onlooker to the mighty events in Paris and did not even display excitement over the fall of the Bastille...

...Heroes and national icons like Jefferson have fallen on hard days...

...What about the fiasco of his American Embargo of 1807, when he clung to the illusion that economic sanctions would keep us out of war even after it was abundantly clear that they only devastated the American economy...

...Jefferson, as every reader of American history knows, wrote with a golden pen...

...So when President Clinton on his Inauguration Day 50 years later began his journey to the Capitol at the Jefferson estate in Monticello, he appeared to be proceeding from the home of Everyman's hero-democrat...

...367pp...

...He shows, for instance, that duplicity, was a notable element in the character of "the American sphinx...

...Ellis sets forth the indictments respected historians presented on that portentous occasion...

...Surely one would expect an experienced diplomat and public officeholder like O'Brien (he served in the Senate of the Irish Republic) to be more understanding...

...Ellis contends that sex and sensuality did not combine in Jefferson's psyche: "Jefferson's most sensual statements were aimed at beautiful buildings rather than beautiful women...

...Was the President, like most citizens, misreading the past...

...and abroad, biographers are nitpicking on the images of Winston Churchill and David Ben-Gurion...

...Indeed, his quotability was his passport to immortality...

...If the mystic in Jefferson still lingered, he may have found it hard to repress a mental picture of Peter denying Christ...

...Paul Finkelman of Virginia Tech charged that Jefferson was a hypocritical racist from one end of his life to the other, professing equality while fervidly maintaining that blacks and whites could never coexist on an equal basis...

...This is not a redo in brief compass of Dumas Malone's monumental six-volume biography...

...Not mean memorials to a life clearly as human as it was heroic...

...Those who are eligible to dwell in Valhalla may be there on a very short lease...

...Although he has permanent tenure on Mount Rush-more, he might not have "made it" were that masterpiece being crafted today...

...Nevertheless, Jefferson asked France to recall him a request counter manded by President Washington...

...Why does he not recognize in Jefferson what every successful politician knows, namely that the only crime in the political arena is stupidity, not cupidity...

...lies] the only sensible road to the historical Jefferson...

...Conor Cruise O'Brien's The long Affair is of a different order and tone...

...He goes on: "In his retirement at Monticello, in 1794, Jefferson must occasionally have wakened at dawn to hear the cock crow...

...The Jeffersonianism (including its racist component) that survives today, in other words, has a potential for violence and destructiveness...

...O'Brien also deals with the Hemmings issue...

...Billed as "Jeffersonian Legacies" and expected to be eulogistic, it quickly took on "the character of a public trial, with Jefferson cast in the role of defendant...

...Only after the recruiting excesses of Citizen Edmond Genet, the French Minister to the United States, threatened to sink if not discredit Jefferson's political movement did he (now the Secretary of State) abandon his unbridled enthusiasm for the Revolution...

...That sanguinary insurrection, he believes, fed Jefferson's fear that the egali-tarianism he had espoused could lead to something unbearable: It might endanger the plantation economy that had no more loyal defender than himself...

...Ellis largely confines himself to the major episodes in Jefferson'scareer: the writing of the Great Declaration, the years in Paris, the political battles of the 1790s, the first term of his Presidency, the retirement to Monticello...

...In an appendix drawn on the reminiscences of Madison Hemmings, a child of Sally, he reserves judgment, opining that when DNA testing becomes more precise a definitive answer may become available...

...To offer only a few examples: Lincoln has been taken down a few pegs in David Herbert Donald's magisterial biography...

...But Jefferson was not everybody's idol until he was confirmed as such when Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated the Jefferson Memorial in 1943...

...Following this introduction, we are given a scintillating view of Jefferson's life appropriate for our time thanks to the author's conviction that historical figures must be appraised by the standards of their own day too, not simply those of a later period and cultural outlook: "Somewhere between presentism and pastism...

...That is the presentism against which Ellis labors, and which seriously undermines O'Brien's effort...

...Although styles in heroes and heroines change constantly, our world is built by the political leaders we place at the helmor allow to take the helm...

...Jefferson's support of the Revolution became his principal instrument for shaping his Republican Party, in contradistinction to the English orientation of the emerging Federalist Party...

...A black man, he argued that at that very moment African-American descendants of Jefferson were living in Ohio and Illinois...

...The two books under review suggest conflicting answers...

...General Colin Powell's slowness to come on board for the Gulf War is now being duly noted by critics...

...Reviewed by Henry F. Graff Professor Emeritus of History...

...The intensity of O'Brien's assertions blinds one to the excellence of his research...

...The "star" of the occasion, however...

...As paraphrased by Ellis, McKitrick inquired: "What about [Jefferson's] very un-Churchillian performance as governor of Virginia during the American Revolution, when he failed to mobilize the militia and had to flee Monticello on horseback ahead of the marauding British Army...

...Columbia...

...In an age before voice recording (Jefferson was a notoriously terrible public speaker), he had a leg up on his fellow Founding Fathers...

...In addition, he provides an appendix that is indispensable for anyone who has puzzled over the Hemmings controversy...

...Conservatives have always borne the handicap of Hamilton's turgid sentences, unsuited as they are for chiseling into marble monuments...

...O'Brien shows, too, that Jefferson's ardor for revolution was further cooled by the slave uprising in Saint-Dominique...

...editor, "The Presidents: A Reference History " Just as the refurbishing of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington is being completed, the reputation of the man it celebrates is being down graded...

...By then the Reign of Terror was already under way and its leaders were demanding Genet's head...

...My colleague at Columbia, Eric McKitrick, took on Jefferson's career in public office...

...While awaiting the new arrivals, most Americans will no doubt continue to remember Jefferson (as he wished them to) for his work as author of the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute for Religious Liberty...