I. David Rosenstein's Blog: Focus on Non-Fiction , page 8

Book Review: The Golden Thread: The Cold War and the Mysterious Death of Dag Hammarskjold

Great Mystery Arising Out of the Era When African Colonization Was Changing to Self Rule

In The Golden Thread: The Cold War and the Mysterious Death of Dag Hammarskjold, Ravi Somaiya takes the reader back to the mid-20th century, a time when European colonization of Africa and Asia was being terminated in favor of self rule. I read many histories. But this is the first I have read about this era.

In 1960, when Belgium departed from the Congo (now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo) the southernmost, and richest, province declared its independence as the State of Katanga. At the request of Congo’s Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, the United Nations sent armed forces to try to reunite Katanga with the Congo. From that point on the armed conflict was between UN forces and Katanga forces.

In the hopes of negotiating a peace settlement, on September 17, 1961, Secretary General of the UN, Dag Hammarskjold, embarked on a secret flight to an airport in Rhodesia to meet with Moise Tshombe, the head of Katanga. However, on its approach to the airport Hammarskjold’s plane crashed and he was killed.

Official inquiries conducted immediately after the crash, held by both Rhodesian and UN authorities, concluded that it was caused by pilot error. However, several people, primarily friends of Hammarskjold, did not trust the conclusions of these tribunals and commenced their own investigations. Throughout the years others have continued these investigations.

Somaiya masterfully describes these efforts to determine the exact events surrounding this plane crash. He explains why there were good reasons to disbelieve the conclusions of the original inquiries. The investigating tribunals, consisting of only white officials, summarily disregarded the testimony of multiple African witnesses who saw a second plane following Hammarskjold’s plane and possible flashes from that second plane before Hammarskjold’s plane went down. And these tribunals inexplicably failed to investigate the possible motives of others who might have wanted to prevent a peace agreement under which Congo’s new government ruled over a reunited Katanga.

Somaiya shrewdly reveals that there were plenty of entities with such motives. The European white nationalist mercenaries who were hired to fight for Katanga might have wanted the war to continue to protect their paychecks. The European mining company that was continuing to operate in Katanga might have feared the rule of Congo’s new government. And the United States and Britain might have been concerned that Congo’s new government was subject to Soviet influence.

As in any well-told mystery, Somaiya divulges new witnesses and additional pieces of relevant evidence that turn up every time someone new attempts to reopen the inquiry. And he increases the mystery and raises additional suspicions by pointing to numerous governmental agencies that continue to refuse to provide access to evidence that may be locked away in their archives.

While I always enjoy a good history book, they usually take some time to read. This is a rare history book that I could not put down. In addition to being a great mystery it was also an excellent reminder of the tragic harm caused by European colonization of the African continent. I give this book 5 stars and recommend it for anyone interested in a good true-life mystery, international diplomacy and/or 20th century history.

Three Recommendations: Spectacular Corporate Implosions

When I was working as a General Counsel at a public company I read as many books in the "Corporate Implosion" genre as I could. I hoped that by reading about the scandals at other companies I might be able to better identify any impending scandals at my own company.

Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar – This book is one of the oldest and one of the best of this genre. It is the perfect tale of greed on Wall Street in the 1980s. The story starts with a team of executives, led by CEO F. Ross Johnson, trying to buy control of RJR Nabisco. It ends with a free-for-all in which all the major players on Wall Street engage in a wild bidding war for the company. It does not end well for the company or its employees.

Conspiracy of Fools by Kurt Eichenwald. – This book tells the story of the fall of Enron, one of the dot-com darlings of the first days of the 21st century. Enron was a high-flying participant in the deregulated natural gas and electric markets. Before its fall, Enron rose to the 6th most valuable company on the New York Stock Exchange. This story includes everything that you might expect from a spectacular corporate implosion – senior executives willing to flaunt all rules for personal gain; profits concocted with smoke and mirrors; accountants, attorneys and investment bankers who ignore the shenanigans in order to continue collecting their fees; and a gullible investment community willing to continue to bid up the price of a company’s stock even though no one could quite explain how that company was making its money.

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyou – This book tells the story of Theranos, the company created by Elizabeth Holms that purportedly developed equipment that could provide immediate results for blood tests conducted at a remote location. We have all grown accustomed to scientists developing technologies that we could not have dreamed of in the past. This book reminds us that some technologies remain just dreams.

Other Recommendations:

Three Recommendations: The Vietnam War (September 20, 2020 Post)
Three Recommendations: 19th Century Presidents (September 26, 2020 Post)

Book Review: The City Game: Triumph, Scandal, and a Legendary Basketball Team

True Story of Triumph and Tragedy

Start with one part underdog sports story and stir in one part true crime story and you get The City Game: Triumph, Scandal, and a Legendary Basketball Team, Matthew Goodman’s engrossing story about the 1949-1950 City College of New York’s basketball team. This is one of those true stories that you could not make up if you tried.

In 1949 City College’s student body consisted mostly of children of immigrants who were taking advantage of its tuition free educational opportunity for New York City residents. City College did not provide the typical college experience. Most of Its students lived with their parents and road the subway and/or bus to classes. But the quality of the education was good and graduates were proud of their alma mater.

City College could not compete with the major college programs for the best athletes. But its 1949 basketball team included some exceptionally talented New Yorkers. The starting five consisted of three Jewish and two African American players. Most of them lived in poverty or near poverty.

Against all odds they became the first team in history to win both the National Invitational Tournament and the NCAA Tournament in the same year. (You could actually do that in 1950). They were the heroes of the university and all of New York City.

Unfortunately, these same heroes were found to have colluded with gamblers to shave points on some of their games. Goodman relies on an exhaustive amount of research to bring to life his two parallel plots lines – the story of the double championship of the underdog heroes and the story of the investigation into gambling and police payoffs in New Your City.

Goodman makes sure that the reader knows the players, their families and their circumstances before any of the action commences. Such knowledge does not help to condone the players’ participation in the point shaving scheme. But it does make it easier to have empathy for these teenagers who were just trying to navigate very challenging circumstances and made bad decisions that affected the rest of their lives.

Goodman’s vibrant description of New York City’s sports, political and policing environment in the 1950s shows that, in some ways, very little has changed in the last 70 years. Racism is still part of our everyday lives, college athletes still play for no cash remuneration while everyone around them gets rich and government corruption is still commonplace.

I gave this book 5 stars and recommend it highly, not only for fans of sports and true crime stories, but for anyone looking to take time out from our stressful times to lose themselves in a compelling true story of triumph and tragedy.

Three Recommendations: 19th Century Presidents

American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham. – Andrew Jackson is largely known as a somewhat crude, backwoods President. The two most well known events of his presidency were the trashing of the White House by unruly supporters on the day of his inauguration and his brutal removal of Native Americans over what become known as the Trail of Tears. But Meacham paints a much more nuanced portrait of Jackson. He depicts him as a fierce fighter who did what he thought was best for America’s common man. And he shows Jackson, on a more intimate level, where he is influenced by his inner circle and by the women in his life. Most importantly, he shows how Jackson transformed the presidency into the powerful office that it is today.

A. Lincoln: A Biography by Ronald C. White – It is difficult for any biography of Lincoln to stand out among the many such biographies that are already out there. But White’s biography does just that. First, because this book is written in the style of an excellent novel, it is a book that is hard to put down. Second, by deeply analyzing Lincoln’s writings and speeches White gets inside Lincoln’s head and helps the reader truly understand the evolution of his thinking.

Grant by Ron Chernow – Like Andrew Jackson, Ulysses Grant is remembered as a one-dimensional President. In Grant’s case, it is as the alcoholic President who presided over a corrupt administration. But, as Jon Meacham does with Jackson, Chernow presents Grant as a much more complex character. In Chernow’s capable hands Grant comes across as a highly principled man trying to guide the nation through the extremely challenging post-bellum years. While this book is more than 900 pages long, it is highly entertaining and feels much shorter.


Other Recommendations:

Three Recommendations: The Vietnam War (September 20, 2020 Post)

Book Review: Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric

After retiring from my career in the electric utility industry I wrote a book that describes the130-year evolution of electricity service in America. My book begins with the story of Thomas Edison’s stubborn adherence to his direct current electric system and J.P. Morgan’s decision to undermine Edison and to merge his company with Thompson-Huston Company to create General Electric.

Having written about the birth of General Electric, I was anxious to read Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric by Thomas Gryta and Ted Mann. Gyrta and Mann are reporters who followed GE for the Wall Street Journal. Their book tells the story of GE, beginning with Jack Welch’s final years as CEO. They focus primarily on the 16-year period when Welch’s successor, Jeff Immelt, was at the helm.

During the 20 years when Welch was CEO General Electric’s value increased from $14 billion to $400 billion. When Welch retired in 2001 GE was considered to be one of the greatest companies in the world and he was celebrated as a management savant. During Immelt’s 16 years as CEO GE’s fortunes reversed and its value fell from $400 billion to $175 billion. Largely because of actions taken by Immelt, that value has since fallen to close to $50 billion today.

As GE’s value was falling, GE management jealously watched as the value of newer companies soared. Gryta and Mann describe how GE, under both Welch and Immelt, went down a dark path to try to regain GE’s position at the top of the corporate community. They show how GE management focused entirely too much on making their quarterly earnings targets, how they used questionable accounting methods to achieve those targets, and how they pressured financial analysts to maintain ratings on GE credit even when cracks started to show in GE’s finances. Most importantly for the reader, they clearly unravel GE’s most harmful attempt to stay on top - its continuing reliance upon GE Capital to boost earnings when needed.

I have read a number of books that describe the fall of previously high-flying companies. Few fully explain the inner workings of the company as well as Gryta and Mann. They paint a dramatic picture of GE’s world that is all too familiar to many of us who have spent time in corporate America. It is a world where employees who try to give bad news to management are intimidated, where members of the Board are too busy with their day jobs to spend the time necessary to fulfill their fiduciary duty to shareholders and where management operates in fear of financial analyst downgrades.

The story of GE, as told by Gryta and Mann, is basically a story of hubris. No matter how bad things got at GE the attitude of the company was that “our management team is the best and they can overcome any hurdles that are put in their path.” But Gryta and Mann finally show that, notwithstanding all of their Harvard MBAs and their gold plated management training programs, the fact is that many of the executives at GE are (pardon my oxymoron) just very average.

I give this book 4 stars and recommend it strongly for anyone interested in supplementing their own business education with an expertly written case study of how strong corporations with the best intentions can go off the rails without proper institutional safeguards in place.

Three Recommendations: The Vietnam War

Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam by Fredrik Logevall – This Pulitzer Prize winning history, which reads like a great novel, explains how the United States first got involved in Vietnam. As vividly described by Logevall, the fixation on the Communist threat, which initially induced the United States’ to become entangled in Vietnam in the early 1950s, led to the tragic consequences of that conflict in the 1960s and 1970s.

The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam – After his years working as a reporter from the War Halberstam wrote this book describing the top officials in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who directed the War effort. It was the first in-depth history that I ever read and it hooked me on a lifetime of reading similar histories. Few have measured up to this one.

A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam by Neil Sheehan – Like David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan was also a reporter from Vietnam. His book tells the story of the impact of the United States’ participation in the war primarily through the life a single soldier, John Paul Vann. Vann’s story, as told by Sheehan, is basically a metaphor for the United States’ participation in the war. When he first arrived in Vietnam in 1963 he believed the United States could win. But as his time in the War extended he became painfully aware of the flaws in the efforts of both the American and the South Vietnamese armies. He concluded that the United States would never win. But he died in a helicopter crash in 1972 before the War ended.

Book Review: The Presidents vs. The Press: The Endless Battle Between the White House and the Media

A Good History That Misses An Opportunity for Useful Analysis

I read The Presidents vs. The Press: The Endless Battle Between the White House and the Media – From the Founding Fathers to Fake News by Harold Holzer hoping that a historic perspective of the Presidents and the Media would provide some clarity on the current chaos in news reporting. I may have been hoping for too much.

First, the positives. In The Presidents vs. The Press Holzer tells the stories of how 16 selected Presidents, from George Washington to Donald Trump, responded to the members of the news media.

All of these Presidents felt that the media treated them unfairly and did not report accurately. However, most fully understood that, in a free society, the media was going to continue to exist. So each of these Presidents tried, in their own way, to manage the message.

Holzer reviews the wide variation in the Presidents’ strategies. For example, John Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798 which criminalized many aspects of press reporting. Abraham Lincoln shut down presses to prevent disclosure of strategic information during the Civil War. Theodore Roosevelt befriended members of the press inviting them for informal visits during his noontime shaves. And Ronald Reagan limited his remarks to the press to brief remarks made while on the move from one location to another.

Probably most effective were those Presidents who used new forms of communication to bypass the press entirely and take their message directly to the public. For example, Franklin Roosevelt used the radio for his fireside chats. John Kennedy used televised press conferences. Barak Obama prepared his own public relations productions to send out over social media. And Donald Trump makes extensive use of Twitter.

I am a news junkie that grew up in the 60s and 70s. Holzer’s recounting of press treatment of events like the Viet Nam War protests, Watergate, Billygate, Iran Contra, the Whitewater Scandal and Travelgate were like a trip down memory lane for me. They are all part of what is truly a well written history of how these 16 Presidents have been portrayed by the press and how they have responded. I wholly recommend this book for readers who are interested in reading such a history.

But, there are also a few negatives. This book is written from the Presidents’ perspective. It deals specifically with how each of the Presidents responded to his particular treatment by the press. Holzer pretty much refrains from giving any critique of the press’ actions. Instead, he describes specific actions taken by members of the press solely to provide a basis for the President’s response.

Holzer explains how the public’s sources of news have evolved over the years from written press, to broadcast media to cable news to social media. We now have the opportunity to obtain our news from hundreds of sources. But many of us elect sources that agree with our preconceived ideas of the truth. Holzer might have expressed his opinion of what constitutes responsible journalism in this current environment. He also might have pointed to one or more members of the press that are currently meeting his definition of what constitutes responsible journalism. His failure to provide this additional material is a missed opportunity.

I give this book 3.5 stars because, while it constitutes a very good history of the relationship between these 16 Presidents and the press, it fails to provide the reader with what would have been a useful perspective on the press’ role in our current environment.