The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister

My son was recently looking at a newspaper article about all the statues being erected in Eastern Europe of Ronald Reagan, and had two questions:  What did this man do that was so great they are building statues of him in Eastern Europe, and why do my son's High School teachers all think Reagan was a terrible President?

Alas, I have no easy answer to the second question.  The political beliefs held by members of our public teachers' union are beyond my understanding.  But for the first question, you could do a lot worse than this book, which explains how Reagan, with some help from Pope John Paul II and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, took a stand that won the cold war and freed Eastern Europe from communist totalitarianism.  A great read, with a great message of how a religious people (in this case, the Catholics of Poland, finding themselves in a similar situation to the Jews of Babylon) can effect real change by resisting assimilation.

Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin

I consider Abraham Lincoln to be our final founder.  I have no patience for those far right libertarians who wish to cast him as a tyrant or who argue the Civil War was won by the wrong side.  Lincoln's success in the Civil War, his Emancipation Proclamation (as politically restrained as it was) and his subsequent advocacy on behalf of the 13th Amendment, finally ended slavery, that heinous institution which so clearly violated the most important principles of America's founding documents.  But Lincoln would have considered his own best achievement the restoration and maintenance of the Union.  That Union, in turn, proved to be the world's best friend in the next century's fight against tyranny, as it clumsily but ultimately effectively fought against and beat back Japanese Imperialism, Nazi-ism, and Communist Totalitarianism.  Thus, Lincoln, who preserved the Union that freed much of the world from slavery in the 20th Century, may truly be called the great emancipator.   That Lincoln was also brilliant and literate, having written, in the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural, two documents which are a kind of American Scripture, equal to the Declaration, is just frosting on the cake.

I have long wished someone could recommend for me a single volume biography of Lincoln that was engaging and accessible enough for a lay reader.  (Unless you were a History professor, David Herbert Donald's Lincoln was sleep inducing.)  Doris Kearns Goodwin has not only written an incredibly engaging biography of Lincoln, but, for the same price, we get the biography of other political giants of that same era: William H. Seward and Salmon P. Chase, two figures I had never even heard of before (except by way of "Seward's folly") who were, prior to Lincoln's election, more well-known than he.  Goodwin also examines, though to a lesser extent, the lives of Edwin M. Stanton and Edward Bates.  These five men (Lincoln, Seward, Chase, Stanton, and Bates), after having competed with each other for the Presidency or in other arenas, came together to form the cabinet that won the civil war.

This is simply an incredible book which every American should read.  One of my favorite books of all time.