D-Day: The Battle for Normandy
By Antony Beevor
Viking Press, 2009

Review by James Srodes

First you need to be warned there is a downside risk to this book. Read British military historian Antony Beevor’s masterful narrative of the military campaign from the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944, through to the liberation of Paris on August 25, 1944, and you will never again be able to sit through such saccharine Hollywood bloviations as The Longest Day, Band of Brothers, or Saving Private Ryan.

What we have here is a masterwork of the narrative nonfiction genre. That is, Beevor has taken an event that most people think they already know about and transformed it into an engrossing yarn with a significant interpretation attached. D-Day—the code word itself has become a heroic symbol of the most mythologized event of the past century. Combining exhaustive archival and interview research, the author has transformed the flat history by showing us a profound point not fully acknowledged in previous recounting by such stars as Carlo D’Este, Max Hastings, or John Keegan. The point is that D-Day came very close indeed to being a catastrophic disaster that could have ended the war in an unendurable stalemate for the Allies and indeterminate survival for the Axis powers.

After nearly 30 years at the craft, Beevor is, with D-Day, at the top of his game. Those who have read his previous bestsellers, The Fall of Berlin (2002) or Stalingrad (1998), have come to expect to face the random, almost casual, but nonetheless terrifying brutality of warfare, and this book has plenty of that. Also present is a reassuring confidence in explaining the arcane details of weapons and tactics that Beevor learned as a graduate of Sandhurst, Britain’s military training college, followed by five years of European service with the 11th Hussars, and, not least, from having Keegan himself as a mentor.

But there is more this time. Perhaps because there were more archival sources and people to interview than in his previous outings, Beevor really shines when he shows just how human, and thus how fallible, the combatants were. Not only does he rub much of the marble off the surfaces of the big names attached to the battle—Omar Bradley, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Bernard Montgomery, Erwin Rommel, and Gerd von Rundstedt, and others—but also brings us into the lives of both the Allied soldiers who had to wade ashore as well as the German troops dug in on the hills above, watching their own deaths coming at them from over the water.

Beach by beach, hour by hour, Beevor takes the reader along a hurricane of explosions and carnage without losing sight of the broader strategic consequences of each decision, both the flawed and the clever. He shows us famed heroes at their most shortsighted and spiteful, acts of incredible compassion and mercy, instinctive bravery by the most unlikely, and—here and there—tragic individuals whose psycho-neuro systems simply shut down, not from what we call cowardice, but from the sheer horror of it all.

Reading what I have just written, you might think I am being overly enthusiastic; after all, it is as common among reviewers to be excessive with praise as with complaint. So I sought a second opinion. When I was doing research on Central Intelligence Agency Director Allen Dulles’s World War II spy operations for the Office of Strategic Services against Nazi Germany, I had the good luck to be befriended and guided by M.R.D. Foot, one of Britain’s foremost military historians. Professor Foot is the acknowledged expert on the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the British covert action service that performed so heroically behind German lines. Foot himself had been in the equally deadly Special Air Service and spent time as a prisoner of war after an ill-fated but spectacular mission into France. In short, he knows his World War II history.

My query about Beevor earned this e-mail response from Professor Foot:

Antony Beevor is a first-class military historian; son of the John Beevor whose S.O.E.: Recollections and Reflections you will know. Currently he is chairman of the Society of Authors which must waste a lot of his time, but he is still hard at work; almost trilingual in English, French and German, and with knowledge of Russian as well. He is also a family friend; I had lunch with him last week. His research is sound and most of his judgments are sound as well. You’re right to think highly of him.

Translation: in London anyone you have lunch with willingly has to be sound. Also, note the “most of his judgments are sound as well” qualifier.

What that means is that Beevor has not been hesitant to make uncomfortable assessments that often startle and upset the self-serving myths that so often attach themselves to historic events. In his book about the capture of Berlin, Beevor made no attempt to portray German civilians as sympathetic victims, but his stark depiction of Red Army atrocities drew howls of protests from Russia’s academic historians, who refuse to this day to acknowledge any wrongdoing of any kind during that savage struggle.

So it has been with his D-Day tale, which has had as much outrage swirling around it as critical praise. Scottish veterans organizations, for one, have demanded a formal apology from the author for accurately reporting that British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery and other officers charged that the 51st Highland Division (made up of fabled regiments such as the Black Watch, Camerons, Seaforths, and others) had thrown away their weapons and fled in the face of the first German counterattacks. They were not placated by Beevor also noting that after a change in divisional command, those same troops regained their poise and fought bravely throughout the rest of the war.

The book also has provoked the ire of those keepers of the flame about the Royal Air Force (“The Few”), the U.S. Army Air Corps bomber command, and the general air power strategy that was committed to destroying industrial sites inside the Third Reich despite enjoying complete air superiority over the now depleted Luftwaffe. Beevor produces compelling evidence of the disdain that both the British and American air commanders had for General Eisenhower, and their initial refusal to divert any bombers to attack the entrenched pillboxes and gun emplacements along the Normandy beaches. And even when dragooned by Eisenhower into allocating the planes, the pilots were so distracted by the fear of bombing their own troops on the beach and by the German anti-aircraft fire that nearly all the bombs fell far inland. It was naval gunfire, often undertaken at perilously close range, which proved far more effective.

No one comes out of Beevor’s story very well, with the notable exception of Eisenhower, who was no one’s first choice to be commander-in-chief of the operation, yet managed to get a veritable lunatic asylum of competing egos—think Bradley, Churchill, de Gaulle, Montgomery, and George Patton—and jealous military establishments into harness long enough to launch the invasion. Beevor gives us a new Ike worth considering. He gets behind the unflappable, confident exterior and gives us a chain-smoking, coffee jagged worrier who fears going forward but cannot go back, a man who tears up saying goodbye to his airborne troopers and has already drafted his statement that the mission has failed.

Also dispelled is the myth of the meticulous planning of Operation Overlord, the D-Day invasion strategy. Most of the troops, especially the Americans, did not receive anything like adequate preparation. Many of the British units tasked with leading the attack in their sectors were near mutiny from having been worn down by years of fighting in the North African deserts. Much of the equipment was comically ineffective. There also is the suspicion that Montgomery (who was certifiable) may well have nurtured his own plan to make a dash for Paris no matter what the broader agreed-upon campaign orders were. The failure to capture the Norman town of Caen and its final destruction, the ignorance of the perilous hedgerows of the French countryside, and the ambivalence of French civilians were nearly fatal intelligence failures.

The Germans helped ensure Allied success—that also is one of Beevor’s points. The nation that had invented modern military command structure found its various combat arms under deliberately fragmented leadership, with its supreme leader insanely playing one service off against the other and keeping the strongest divisions paralyzed in place by his own indecision. While many seasoned units had not yet been sent to the Eastern Front, many of the Wehrmacht units were invalided Germans or Russian and Polish prisoners of war just waiting for the chance to surrender.

The fact that Allied soldiers were able to scramble off the Normandy beaches and march down the boulevards of a free Paris just 50 days later was due in the end to the individual bravery and determination of ordinary men from many nations, and Beevor wins our admiration for them with this finely crafted story. The author is someone I would like to have lunch with, too.

James Srodes’s biography, Allen Dulles: Master of Spies, was named the best intelligence book of 2000 by the Association for Intelligence Officers. His e-mail address is srodesnews@msn.com.

Woodrow Wilson: A Biography
By John Milton Cooper Jr.
Knopt, 2009

Review By Ronald Goldfarb

John Milton Cooper Jr., a history professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a recent fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., is the author of two other books on the 28th president of the United States: Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations (2001) and The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt (1983). This biography has all the facts of Wilson’s extraordinary career as an academic and a politician. Wilson was an achiever—from a modest background he rose to become Princeton University’s 13th president, our country’s president, and governor of New Jersey in between. Yet Cooper’s adoring book does not explain why Wilson is not generally considered to be in the popular pantheon of great presidents, or should be.

Wilson was a leader of the progressive movement of the early 20th century. A doctor in philosophy, teacher and writer, later college administrator, and two-term U.S. president, the liberal Wilson had another, darker side. Cooper admits that Wilson presided over “egregious violations of civil liberties,” permitted “massive violations of freedom of speech and the press,” and “turned a stone face and deaf ear to the struggles and tribulations of African Americans.”

Wilson was a man of contradictions, not only as an academic (for 25 years) who moved to the world of politics. He was a religious man—Presbyterian—who met his first wife in church, and is the only American president buried in a church. Yet, in addition to his life of public affairs, Wilson had private ones as well while occupying very public positions, Cooper notes. He was raised in the south and shared its culture in matters of race while prospering in the northeast. He studied law, but never truly practiced. He began teaching at Bryn Mawr College for women in Pennsylvania (condescendingly) and ultimately presided over what was then the all-male institution of Prince-ton. He wrote books about Congress but became a governor and president, never a legislator. He was a popular lecturer and wrote serious academic books, but did not enjoy what he called “the tedious toil of what is known as ‘research.”’

Wilson is well-known as the 13th president of Princeton (he also taught at Wesleyan University) though his career as an administrator there ended in personal failure as good causes he passionately pursued (an integral graduate school and residential colleges to replace clubs) were defeated. During his long marriage to his first wife, Ellen Axson, Wilson had a long, personal relationship with Mary Peck, a socialite he met in visits to Bermuda and with whom he corresponded for many years. Cooper is uncertain whether their relationship was “a full-fledged affair.” Wilson frequently wrote to her ardent if stuffy letters.

Wilson’s presidency at Princeton was characterized by what Cooper called an “academic civil war.” While the general reader may not be interested in all the details of this battle over Wilson’s attempts to democratize the university, his was the reformist, progressive view necessary for “transforming the old-style small college into a modern university.” Wilson’s failure to convert the moneyed interests on the Princeton board motivated him to move his career to the political stage where his admirers and critics at Princeton followed him.

In this 600-page book, Cooper offers only one chapter, a mere 20 pages, to Wilson’s governorship of New Jersey that catapulted him to the presidency. The 53-year-old political neophyte’s rise was meteoric and remarkable—a progressive pushed by state conservatives and cheered into office by “machine supporters and Princeton students.” He won the governorship by a wide margin and had a successful regime early on, ending in a more contentious fashion, though he had by 1912 earned a national reputation as a progressive executive. Cooper concludes: “Troubles in New Jersey and unpleasant reminders from Princeton now faded as Wilson set out on the greatest adventure of his life” into national and international politics.

In 1912 Wilson’s reputation as a progressive—and the opportune timing in national politics—catapulted him to be the Democratic Party’s candidate (after 46 ballots at the convention) for president. He won a four-way race against a former president (Theodore Roosevelt); a sitting president, William Howard Taft; and the Socialist Party’s Eugene V. Debs (who won 6 percent of the vote). Cooper concludes that Wilson would have trounced Taft if he ran only against the latter, “but nearly everyone assumed he would have lost to Roosevelt.”

Wilson’s presidency was in a quieter time—he wrote his own speeches, golfed regularly, and dated privately in his second term after his wife died. Cooper claims, excessively, that Wilson’s first term domestic record “would rank him among the greatest legislative presidents in the 20th century, perhaps in all of American history.” He did succeed in creating the Federal Trade Commission, pushed for tariff reform, ensured the passage of the Clayton Antitrust Act, fought for workers’ compensation and improved work days, and made the remarkable appointment of Louis Brandeis to the U.S. Supreme Court.

At the same time, wars with Germany and Mexico were brewing, and his wife of 30 years died. Reluctant to take his unwilling nation to war, Wilson called frequently for an association of nations to band together against war. Wilson poured out his heartfelt feelings in letters to Peck, the woman with whom he had “emotional intimacy, but never a hint of romance,” and later to his soon-to-be second wife Edith Galt, a 42- year-old widow with whom he corresponded daily as they courted. Cooper states—one wonders how he knows—that Wilson, at 58, hadn’t “cooled his physical desire. . .he had the sexual appetite of a man half his age.”

In a close election, Wilson won a second term in 1916 by defeating Charles Evans Hughes, a former New York governor who resigned from the Supreme Court to run. In words loaded with modern relevance, Wilson urged that America be a nation exemplary for being “so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.” He said that “If my re-election as President depends upon my getting into war, I don’t want to be President.” He added, “I will not be rushed into war, no matter if every last Congressman and Senator stands up on his hind legs and proclaims me a coward….I am for peace,” even while the world is on fire with “things I cannot control—the actions of others.”

High-minded rhetoric though that was, Wilson was dragged into war fearing “the uselessness of this mechanical slaughter.” When his private diplomatic efforts at mediation, through his long-time private counselor Colonel Edward M. House, failed and submarine attacks on American ships increased, his unanimous cabinet pressed for war, and Wilson went to Congress pleading to make the world “safe for democracy.” It was, Cooper states, “the greatest speech of his life.” Congress quickly declared war. Economic mobilization, a national draft, incursions on civil liberties (denial of mail privileges to critical press and invocation of the Espionage Act), and continued racial inequities followed, though women’s suffrage evolved and finally was ratified in 1920, along with the Prohibition. In 1918 Wilson delivered his “Fourteen Points” speech, outlining the peaceful conditions he sought for “peace without victory.”

Cooper offers little information or insight into Word War I (126,000 American men died in combat), but devotes much to Wilson’s failed attempt to bring to life his dream for a League of Nations. Wilson’s ideas were visionary and admirable, but his political skills—or lack of them—led to the crushing defeat of his dream for an institution for international justice and peace. Wilson’s stubbornness, unwillingness to compromise, and political partisanship allowed his congressional enemies to block U.S. participation in the league. With statesmen, as with his faculty colleagues at Princeton, Wilson’s adamant integrity prevented the reforms he initiated from becoming reality.

Wilson lived abroad longer than any American president, tending to the creation of the League of Nations. His domestic programs and political alliances at home suffered. On his return, his spirit broken, his health failing, he suffered a stroke that eclipsed the final months of his second term (from October 1919 until the election of Warren Harding in late 1920 and inauguration in March 1921). The cabinet worked independently, his political opponents frustrated his legislative goals, a wounded caretaker he existed in seclusion. It was, Cooper wrote, “the worst crisis of presidential disability in American history.” His wife, doctor, and a few close aides managed the presidency as Wilson lived a delusional life in the White House. Even his admiring biographer concludes: “By any reasonable standard, Wilson was not functioning as president. . .He should not have remained in office.” The Republicans took over the White House at the next election.

In his twilight years, living on S Street NW in Washington, D.C., a depleted Wilson won the Nobel Peace Prize and ineffectively pursued law practice and writing. Wilson became “one of the best remembered and argued over of all presidents,” and one senses why after reading this book. Wilson was a man who was correct and visionary in much that he advocated, though he left each great institution—Princeton, New Jersey, and the White House—with very public failures by his own standards. Why? Wilson should have been one of the most memorable public figures in American history, but his straight-laced personality undercut his public goals, despite his grand personal successes in attaining the high offices he sought. A book about Woodrow Wilson that explains that intriguing subject would be worth reading; unfortunately, this book falls short.

Ronald Goldfarb is a Washington, D.C. attorney, author, and literary agent whose reviews appear regularly in Washington Lawyer. Reach him at rglawlit@aol.com.

The Will of the People: How Public Opinion Has Influenced the Supreme Court and Shaped the Meaning of the Constitution
By Barry Friedman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009

Review by Joseph C. Goulden

An oft-quoted judicial axiom was voiced at the turn of the century by Mr. Dooley, the fictional barroom sage created by Chicago humorist Finley Peter Dunne: “th’ supreme court follows th’ illiction returns.” Whether this jibe is, in fact, legitimate is the subject of a sweeping study by New York University School of Law professor Barry Friedman.
His conclusion in The Will of the People, perhaps unsurprisingly, is the same as Dooley’s, but with some caveats, and considerably fancier language. He writes:

Of course the justices have to pay attention to what the Congress and the President are saying. But they must do more. Typically, there is some slack between what the governed want and what the governors provide, but that slack closes up when issues rise to the top of the public’s consciousness. When the public has a view, its elected officials tend to heed it. The Court has to be attuned to aroused public opinion because it is the public that can save a Court in trouble with political leaders and likewise can motivate political leaders against it.

As Friedman demonstrates, the relationship between public opinion and the judiciary “developed slowly over time, as in any other marriage. As in any other marriage, too, a few serious dustups were to be experienced at first, until the rules got sorted out.”

The Founding Fathers—by way of Alexander Hamilton in Federalist Paper No. 78—argued strongly for judicial independence, but they harbored no fears that the courts would threaten democratic principles. As Hamilton wrote, the judiciary “must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgements.” Years later, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor followed with “we don’t have standing armies to enforce opinions…. We rely on the confidence of the public in the correctness of these decisions. That’s why we have to be aware of public opinion and of attitude toward our system of justice, and it is why we must try to keep and build that trust.”

For decades, Friedman writes, the Court hid behind what he called “absolutism,” defending controversial decisions by saying, in effect, “The Constitution made us do it.” Such was surely the rationale of Justice Owen Roberts, who sat on the Court in the 1920s and 1930s: “There should be no misunderstanding as to the function of this court. This court neither approves nor condemns any legislative policy. Its delicate and difficult office is to ascertain and declare whether the legislation is in accordance with, or in contravention of, the provisions of the Constitution, and, having done that, its duty ends.”

There were some horrors over the years. For example, consider the Dred Scott decision, which held that Congress could not regulate slavery in the territories. Many persons of Abraham Lincoln’s generation correctly feared that the decision “would ultimately tear the country asunder.” But very few critics said Dred Scott should simply be ignored or defied, for they accepted that the Court had made a “necessary” interpretation of the Constitution.

The Court began to fall in wide public disfavor through what Friedman calls a “binge of decisions” in the years after World War I. From 1921 to 1927, for example, it struck down as unconstitutional more social and economic legislation than in the 52 previous years, consistently asserting property rights as paramount. One decision provoked a Christian Science Monitor headline, “The ‘Inalienable Right’ to Starve.” Robert LaFollette, running for president in 1924 on the Progressive Party ticket, spoke for many when he thundered, “Always these decisions of the Court are on the side of the wealthy and powerful and against the poor and the weak.” (Years ago I interviewed a small-town Texas personal injury lawyer who tried railroad cases in the 1920s. He recounted that “If some poor brakeman lost a leg switching cars, his ‘contributory negligence’ was always at fault. The damned railroad wouldn’t even buy him a wooden leg.”)

During President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first term, as the nation sought to struggle through the Great Depression, the Court consistently struck down major legislation pertaining to the New Deal. The “nine old men,” as they were often referred to, seemed to be running the country, rather than Congress and the White House.

Roosevelt fumed, and then he won reelection in 1936 by a margin that The New York Times likened to “a political Johnstown flood.” Emboldened, FDR unveiled a scheme that would give him the power to add an additional appointee to the Supreme Court for every justice over the age of 70 who refused to retire, raising the possibility that the Court would be expanded by six new members of his choosing.

As Friedman writes, “Roosevelt did not challenge the Supreme Court merely by relying on the election returns (although he surely did allude to the strength of his popular majority). Instead, he argued that the justices’ understanding of the Constitution was wrong.” In a fireside chat, FDR noted vehement dissent within the Court itself over New Deal cases. What his plan intended, he said, was “to take an appeal from the Supreme Court to the Constitution itself.” He urged Americans to take a personal look at the Constitution: “Like the Bible, it ought to be read again and again.”

Roosevelt claimed that he acted in the interest of “judicial reform,” saying the Court could not handle its workload. He fooled no one.[1]

In strongly supporting FDR, The New York Daily News, which then enjoyed a circulation of more than 1 million, said: “We do not see how old judicial gentlemen … can forever be permitted to override the will of the people as expressed through the people’s own elected Legislatures, Congress and President.” H. L. Mencken, prominent among FDR’s journalistic critics, disagreed. He proposed a new Constitution: “Section One. All governmental power of whatever sort shall be vested in the President of a United States.” When Roosevelt’s court-packing bill was read in the Senate, Vice President John Nance Garner made a show of holding his nose and making the thumbs-down sign.

Then, to the surprise of almost everyone in the county, the Court did an abrupt about-face. In the space of about two weeks, the justices rendered a series of opinions that tacitly reversed past decisions negating New Deal legislation. Perhaps most notable was its upholding of the Wagner Act, which led to the creation of the National Labor Relations Board. There were cases where the Court simply reversed its own prior rulings: in the 1920s it struck down a minimum wage for women in the District of Columbia. In 1937, barely a decade later, it upheld the constitutionality of a minimum wage in Washington State.

The string of reversals caused support for FDR’s plan to cool rapidly. Senator James Byrnes of South Carolina, a key Roosevelt backer, commented, “Why run for a train after you’ve caught it?” Quoting a “Washington wag,” Time magazine added: “Why shoot the bridegroom after a shotgun wedding?”

So what heed should the current Court pay to public opinion, at a time when the country reverberates with high-decibel rancor? One of the targets of the so-called “tea bag revolution” is “The Damned Meddling Court,” to quote a placard I saw recently downtown.

Friedman won’t argue with the fellow carrying the sign. “In a sense,” he writes, “today’s critics of judicial supremacy are right: the Supreme Court does exercise more power than it once did. In another sense, though, they could not be more wrong. The Court has this power only because, over time, the American people have decided to cede it to the justices.” But, he warns, “The grant of power is conditional and could be withdrawn at any time. The tools of popular power have not dissipated; they simply have not been needed.” Even so, over time Court decisions “tend to converge with the considered judgment of the American people.”

Of course, there are times when public opinion and the courts are at odds. The Court might “get ahead of the American people on some issues, like the death penalty or perhaps school desegregation. On others, such as gay rights, it will lag behind,” he writes. The Court took a public relations beating for its decision in the Bush v. Gore election case. But as Friedman points out, “more than 60 percent of the country said it was the Court’s job to resolve the matter, compared with only 17 percent for Congress.” And a year after the decision, “the Court again was running at high levels of support among Republicans and Democrats alike,” Friedman notes.

Friedman’s book is dense with details—he has an even 200 pages of chapter notes—and is perhaps a bit weighty for the lay reader. But his background and his conclusions are well-versed. It is definitely recommended reading for any lawyer who has business before the Court.

Joe Goulden is the author of several books on the law, most recently The Money Lawyers.

Note
[1] For a superb study of how the plan went belly up, see Burton Solomon, FDR v. the Court (2009).