Book Review: "The Bully Pulpit - Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism," Doris Kearns Goodwin, 2013

 

I came to Doris Kearns Goodwin's The Bully Pulpit expecting to be impressed; I had, after all, enjoyed Team of Rivals immensely, and Theodore Roosevelt has long been one of my personal heroes.  Instead, I found myself disappointed both in the book and in TR.

Goodwin sets out to chronicle three separate but linked stories here.  First is the story of Theodore Roosevelt, who defined his age to the point that, a century later, we remember who he was while forgetting the presidents around him.  Second is the story of another, more easily forgotten president - William Howard Taft, Roosevelt's hand-picked successor and the only man ever to serve as both president and a Supreme Court justice, who is remembered, if he is remembered at all, for being fat.  Third is the story of an era of journalism focused on politically charged exposes and a breach between old and new formats - the era of the muckrakers, focused on the staff of McClure's Magazine.  It is impossible to separate the stories of Roosevelt and Taft; after all, Roosevelt famously split the Republican Party in 1912 over a breach with Taft and what Taft represented.  Unfortunately, Goodwin fails to tie the stories of McClure and company, and Roosevelt and Taft, as effectively as she hopes to do, and is at least partly blinded to this failure in her work by her own political biases.

The book starts off with a summary of Roosevelt's return from abroad after the end of his presidency, and the misunderstandings and bad feelings that resulted between two old friends - Roosevelt and Taft - because Roosevelt failed to respond to a letter from Taft, and Taft did not rush to see his friend on his return from overseas.  From there, it follows a structure of parallel lives, alternating a chapter on Roosevelt and a chapter on Taft.  This structure, by itself, would work quite well.  It worked for Plutarch, and it does an outstanding job of showing how, at various points in their lives, different influences shaped different men to similar ends.  Roosevelt emerges as constantly combative, trying to fill every hour of every day, while Taft comes across as convivial and contemplative, more likely to reason through all sides of a problem than to have a sparking, intuitive solution.  They are both men likely to stick to their conclusions once they reach them, but for very different reasons: Taft, because he has examined it thoroughly and satisfied himself to the answer, and Roosevelt, because he immensely dislikes yielding ground.  I should stress that neither of these approaches is inherently bad, and I make no value judgments on the men themselves for this.  I think Goodwin's Plutarchian approach with Roosevelt and Taft is admirable, and so far, this would have been a good book.

Where it falls apart is the journalism story.  There is a fascinating story to be had here - the interplay of journalism and political reform in the last years of the 19th, and the early years of the 20th Century, and the development of "serious" serial journalism at publications like McClure's.  There is even a tangential link to the Roosevelt/Taft story because Roosevelt deliberately cultivated the press, creating the modern relationship between media and presidency.  However, here, the journalism narrative feels bolted-on, and the level of detail lavished on the journalistic side of the house is much less than that lavished on each of the two political principals.  To refer back to Plutarch, it's as if Plutarch had also tried to include the story of Greco-Roman historians in his Parallel Lives.  It is an extra layer that fails to attach effectively to the parallel-lives structure.

There are several causes for this, but it mostly comes down to the fact that Goodwin has a conclusion that she has seen, and has just decided that it's there whether we see it or not, and we as the readers are merely passengers.  She establishes that it matters well enough, she establishes that it touches the parallel lives well enough, she even establishes that the Roosevelt-Taft split had serious repercussions in the world of journalism, but she doesn't ever manage to pull it together.  It's like telling a joke where you know there's funny material in there, but it just won't coalesce.

I mentioned that Goodwin's political biases were on full display.  This is part of what blinds her to the fact that her narrative just isn't working: she is so determined to show that modern progressive causes are not new, and that quality media matters, that instead of developing two separate, smaller books on those two threads, she tried to force the two of them together and almost succeeded.  That "almost" makes the failure even more glaring, at least to my eye.  This is a pity, because both threads of her narrative are even more relevant than they were in 2013: quality information does matter, and poorly sourced, hastily constructed news reports are just as dangerous, and much more common, in the 24-hour news cycle as they were in the yellow journalism era.  Similarly, given that Theodore Roosevelt ran in 1912 on a platform that would appear progressive today, the political debates of a century ago are just as relevant today as they were then.  The idea that a charismatic populist would shatter the Republican Party largely in a fit of self-centered pique is a hugely ironic development, and the main reason I walked away with a lower opinion of Roosevelt.  Even apparently minor things like Roosevelt's politicization of the judiciary have modern echoes.

To bring this all back together, The Bully Pulpit was an ambitious book, clearly a labor of love on the part of the author, and it failed because it did not receive a thorough critical examination prior to release.  The themes are solid but scattered and the lack of focus harms the overall narrative.  It is an interesting but flawed book, and Goodwin has proven elsewhere that she could do better.