Genus Politician
HUITT, RALPH K.
Genus Politician All in One Lifetime, by James F. Byrnes. Harper. 432 pp. f 5. The Art of Politics, by Rexford G. Tugwell. Doubleday. 295 pp. $5. Reviewed by Ralph K. Huitt T^hese books make a...
...It is certain that the fate of all of us is bound up with theirs...
...How can it be explained...
...It is perfectly organized, and written in the clear, sterile prose of the ghost...
...And what did Byrnes feel when the door to the White House closed, almost catching his fingers...
...He served as Harry Truman's Secretary of State in the crucial early postwar years, and as governor of South Carolina while the South's resistance to integration focused and hardened...
...he has observed them closely and without sentiment...
...One is the story of his life by a successful practical politician...
...The whole book is like this...
...people move through it, acting and talking, but they are flat, one-dimensional...
...Surely the most fascinating aspect of it is the President's devious behavior...
...In the process they made great and lasting changes in the environment around them...
...The Vice Presidential nomination that year was unusually attractive...
...Roosevelt seems to have encouraged all of them at one time or another...
...Moreover, he had to manipulate the indifferent giant on the continent without fatally identifying himself with it...
...certainly Byrnes went to Chicago believing that he had the President's support...
...the chapters are internally consistent, but their order seems to have been drawn by lot...
...But there was massive opposition to Byrnes: from Ed Flynn, the Bronx boss, fearful for the Negro vote...
...He was Under-Secretary of Agriculture and brain-truster with Roosevelt, head of the New York City Planning Commission with La-Guardia, and governor of Puerto Rico while Munoz threaded his inscrutable politician's course to power...
...That is too bad, but the fault is shared with most books politicians write...
...They worked and plotted tirelessly, keeping their own counsel, using and discarding friends, compromising principle unhesitatingly (and often without really needing to, Tugwell believes) in order to win...
...The other is a book about politicians by a professor who has worked for them...
...Byrnes doesn't try...
...In 1952 Puerto Rico became a "Commonwealth," receiving federal aids to the states and benefits from the social security system, without paying federal income taxes...
...Readers who wonder how the Puerto Rican got into such company will know after they have read the book...
...For this I am heartily prepared to forgive him, because Tugwell has worked intimately with three great politicians...
...The man has held almost every public office worth holding except the Presidency—and he came close to that in 1944...
...Tugwell worked closely with all of them...
...There is little comfort in Tugwell's book for two kinds of readers...
...Munoz's solution was a stroke of political genius...
...Introspection does not intrude, and there is not even the raw material for inferences about the kind of human being Jimmy Byrnes really is...
...These three are virile, attractive men, extroverts with huge enjoyment of life's pleasures...
...He confesses he was often wrong in his original interpretations, and he is tentative in his generalizations now...
...Reviewed by Ralph K. Huitt T^hese books make a curious com-bination...
...Tugwell does not pretend that he knows himself...
...Henry A. Wallace, William O. Douglas, and Byrnes were possibilities...
...One is the person who wants to make the study of politics a science...
...If there is any more important subject in this age of skittering around the brink, I do not know what it is...
...and from labor leaders, who wanted Wallace but would settle for Truman...
...New Deal" and his successor, "General Win-the-War...
...He sat for 16 months on the Supreme Court, then was made "assistant President" by Roosevelt...
...A book about such a life cannot fail to be interesting...
...Tugwell's three politicians are Franklin D. Roosevelt, Fiorello La-Guardia, and Luis Munoz Marin...
...Rexford G. Tugwell, on the other hand, is interested in events only for what they reveal about his principal actors...
...Apparently breaking promises not to express a preference, Roosevelt endorsed Truman, in effect choosing his own successor...
...Again he does not say, except that he harbored no resentment against Truman...
...Byrnes' book has its virtues, too...
...He had arranged for Harry Truman to nominate him...
...I do not know that it is actually ghost-written, but if it is not it is a successful imitation...
...This bizarre episode is worth recounting here for the light it sheds on Byrnes' book, and others like it...
...Needless to say, Munoz was elected governor of the new Commonwealth...
...But they lived for the fulfillment of personal ambitions...
...Yet they are as unalike as two books on roughly the same subject are likely to be...
...A professional political scientist himself, Tugwell nevertheless sees his men as artists, improvisers, unable to profit from the experience of others because no prior problems are quite like their own, never sure precisely where they are going and probably not aware of how they got there when they arrive...
...and he has told us a good deal about what makes such politicians tick...
...The three men are similar enough to suggest that there is a genus politician which, at least in its higher species, merits close and continuous study...
...The other reader who will be shaken up is the one who likes to idealize his political heroes...
...It is about events...
...He was the principal Senate strategist for Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Dr...
...His book is largely innocent of organization...
...James F. Byrnes went to Congress in the era of Woodrow Wilson...
...Munoz's problem was enormously difficult: to walk sure-footed in the passionate politics of his country between the independentistas, who would cost Puerto Rico the yanqui largesse, and the statehood party, which would doom the island to pay American taxes...
Vol. 23 • January 1959 • No. 1
