Feingold: A New Democratic Party
Author: Sanford D Horwitt
Russ Feingold is a rarity in American politics. A staunch civil libertarian, he was the only member of the U.S. Senate who voted against the ill-conceived USA Patriot Act that was rushed through Congress in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks. In 2002, while the Bush administration's fabrications and scare tactics persuaded an overwhelming majority of the Senate to vote for the Iraq war resolution, Feingold opposed it. Washington insiders thought such controversial votes could doom Feingold's 2004 reelection. But he won by a near landslide, far outdistancing his party's presidential candidate, John Kerry.
Sanford D. Horwitt writes in this timely, compelling independent biography that Russ Feingold "represents the progressive side of the Democratic divide more clearly and authentically than any successful politician on the national stage." The third-term senator's willingness to take bold stands -- he was the first in the Senate to call for a timetable for redeploying U.S. troops from Iraq -- has inspired a growing number of rank-and-file Democrats across the country.
Drawing on scores of interviews and historical documents, Horwitt shows that Feingold's authenticity is deeply rooted in the old progressive tradition personified by one of his heroes, Robert M. La Follette, the legendary Wisconsin governor and U.S. senator. "Fighting Bob" and the other great reformers of the Progressive Era placed a high value on honest, efficient government, investment in public education, health and infrastructure, and curbs on corporate power and other wealthy interests in the political process.
Feingold became known to a national audience when he teamed up with Republican JohnMcCain on campaign finance reform legislation. After a seven-year battle, the McCain-Feingold bill became the first major reform of the campaign laws since the Watergate era.
Feingold, who grew up in a small southeastern Wisconsin town, is a man of modest means and the grandson of Jewish immigrants. In this lively portrait, Horwitt evokes mid-century Janesville, a Republican stronghold on the banks of the Rock River, where a precocious Rusty Feingold absorbed lifelong lessons about the importance of community and personal integrity.
Beginning with his first election to public office, he has defied conventional political wisdom and long odds, Horwitt tells us, a pattern that has been repeated throughout his career. Feingold has shown how a new, reinvigorated Democratic Party can stand for progressive ideals, resist the corrupting influence of special interests and win elections.
Kirkus Reviews
Admiring portrait of the maverick liberal who was the only U.S. Senator to oppose the Patriot Act and the first to call for a timetable for American troop withdrawal from Iraq. Horwitt, the biographer of activist Saul Alinsky (Let Them Call Me Rebel, 1989), draws extensively on interviews with friends, family and colleagues of the 54-year-old, twice-divorced Wisconsin Democrat. Russ Feingold grew up in one of the few Jewish families in Janesville, a small farming community. His Yiddish-speaking Russian grandfather Max owned a grocery store; his father was a progressive lawyer. One of five children, Feingold early showed himself to be bright, hardworking and a self-described "renegade by nature," waging campaigns at his high school for a more relaxed dress code and other reforms. He first tasted politics at the University of Wisconsin, where he campaigned for John Lindsay in the 1972 Presidential primary. After college and a stint as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, he attended Harvard Law, practiced briefly and won election to the Wisconsin state senate in 1982. Ten years later, at 39, he became the youngest member of the U.S. Senate. He co-sponsored the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform bill, passed in 2002, led efforts to censure George Bush over NSA wiretapping of international phone calls and remains a steadfast opponent of the Iraq war. Written with the senator's cooperation, the book describes an unfailingly courageous politician who champions reform in the progressive tradition of Teddy Roosevelt and Wisconsin Governor Robert M. La Follette, often to the consternation of colleagues. "You're not living in the real world," Hillary Clinton told him when he objected to the DemocraticParty's efforts to gut McCain-Feingold. Noting that the Wisconsin senator has been discussed as a possible presidential contender, the author suggests that Feingold offers "a serious, authentic alternative" to Washington's Democratic establishment. Not an official biography, but it might as well be. Agent: Mary Evans/Mary Evans Inc.
Book about: Tecnologia determinata commercio
Reflected Glory: The Life of Pamela Churchill Harriman
Author: Sally Bedell Smith
English debutante Pamela Digby first came into the public eye when she married Churchill's dissolute son Randolph. While he was overseas in World War II, she had an affair with Averell Harriman, the first in a line of wealthy and prominent men - including Jock Whitney, Prince Aly Khan, Gianni Agnelli, Elie de Rothschild, and Stavros Niarchos - who supported her over the next two decades. She found legitimacy as the wife of Broadway producer Leland Hayward and became wealthy when she married Harriman on the eve of his eightieth birthday. At age sixty she reinvented herself as a kingmaker in the Democratic Party, and more than a decade later was rewarded with an appointment as U.S. Ambassador to France. Smith details how Pamela Harriman, even after she had become independent and respectable to a degree that would have been unimaginable in her party-girl years, burned through the Harriman fortune, prompting her late husband's disgruntled heirs to file a series of lawsuits accusing her of being a "faithless fiduciary." Always a brass-knuckle fighter, she made headlines with a barrage of ironic countersuits - against the family whose name elevated her to Democratic doyenne, the Wall Street brokerage that provided her wealth, and the advisers who had guided her every move. At each stage of Pamela's life, newspapers and magazines recounted her public exploits and amplified her legend. The private moments were equally indelible: playing bezique late at night with Winston Churchill, enlisting Dwight Eisenhower to help in the kitchen at her officers' club during World War II, presiding over lavish dinners at the Riviera estate of Gianni Agnelli, fixing chicken hash at midnight for Leland Hayward and his Broadway stars, talking one-on-one with Bill Clinton in the Oval Office.
Kurt Jensen
Biographers are often knocked for devoting too much attention to pop psychologizing and not enough to "the work" - the accomplishments that justify a book-length treatment of any life. In her tart new unauthorized biography of Pamela Churchill Harriman, biographer Sally Bedell Smith is refreshingly uninterested in exploring the inner child of the current U.S. Ambassador to France. The book has been cleansed of the Freudian spoor that clings to the cracks and footnotes of most current biographies.
This leaves Smith free to poke around in Harriman's thin shelf of "accomplishments" - most notably her ability to make cozy with rich and influential people, primarily men. An early marriage to Winston Churchill's unimpressive son Randolph was followed by marriages to Broadway producer Leland Hayward and, later, the elderly diplomat and Wall Street heir Averell Harriman. Harriman married well, and she dated well: The men in her life also included CBS founder William Paley and Edward R. Murrow. Her marriage to Averell Harriman gave her the Democratic party connections (and the cash) to become a major Washington social figure and fund-raiser, cultivating Bill Clinton among many others as her friends.
Bedell makes it clear that Harriman's abilities as a gadfly outstrip any others she might possess. Reflected Glory is vicious in its small details as well as in its large ones. Did Harriman perhaps possess some unseen talent as a writer? "Her personal correspondence showed scant literary merit," Bedell writes, and as a journalist "her commitment to the craft was thin." In conversation, "she was remembered neither for the originality nor the felicity of her contributions." Was she, then, a woman of bold principle, a political provocateur, on the model of her contemporary Margaret Thatcher? "Her political beliefs shifted along with the men in her life." Then she must have had style? Harriman is variously described as "dumpy" and "a banal milkmaid, a little plump, certainly not beautiful."
It was precisely because she lacked conventionally redeeming traits, that Harriman, Bedell implies, was naturally drawn to politics. Reflected Glory is compulsively readable as Bedell details the rake and shovel of Harriman's busy PAC, and the final painful spectacle of her gropings toward respectability - an ambition which culminated in her appointment as an ambassador in 1993. "A lot of French," remarks a source, "were puzzled."
Solidly researched, smoothly written and full of tangy revelations, Reflected Glory is a fascinating study of the triumph of mediocrity - and mediocrity's particular affinity to late 20th-century American democracy. -- Salon
Publishers Weekly
In 1994, Christopher Ogden, employed by Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman to ghost her autobiography, published Life of the Party. When she balked at exposing the spicier side of her career, he went ahead on his own, using her taped interviews, but legally he could quote nothing. Smith, another unauthorized biographer, quotes little from Harriman, written or vocal, for similar reasons, but 400 of her acquaintances cooperated, resulting in a deeply informed and revelatory study. Smith (All His Glory: The Life of William S. Paley) has done further homework in financial and court papers and in the diaries, letters and memoirs of contemporaries. Had it not been for Ogden's preemptive strike, Smith's intensely detailed biography of the least sedate of American ambassadors--British-born Pamela Harriman, now 76, represents the U.S. in Paris--would be even more explosive. Perhaps only in France, where premiers and presidents often have publicly acknowledged mistresses, would she be acceptable, even admired, as an envoy. Bedding her way to wealth and power, the resourceful red-haired beauty wed Randolph Churchill, Leland Hayward and Averell Harriman, filling in the interstices between marriages with Edward R. Murrow (her only unmoneyed lover), Gianni Agnelli, Aly Khan, Elie de Rothschild and other deep-pocketed admirers. Said one observer: "She could make a man, not just in bed. She stretched a man's horizons." Austerity was never her cup of tea, nor was familial loyalty to the children and grandchildren inherited from two American husbands. Her lifestyle, Smith contends, was always based on self-aggrandizement. As a former Hayward wife remarked, "Pam Churchill thought she would marry [Fiat heir] Agnelli, so she became a Catholic on spec." Brushing aside her reputation as grande cocotte, a French friend scoffed, "Everyone has a past. It is who she is today that counts." Photos not seen by PW. First serial to Vanity Fair. (Nov.)
Library Journal
In this fully documented biography of a modern-day courtesan, Smith (In All His Glory: The Life of William S. Paley, S. & S., 1990) reveals details and anecdotes extracted from 800 interviews (using 400 named sources) to animate the extraordinary Harriman and her relationships, whether personal, public, or political. The English debutante, born in 1920 and until very recently claiming France as her latest conquest as U.S. ambassador there, has led many lives. Her reputations as "wartime hostess, international femme fatale, show business wife, diplomat's consort..., and American ambassador" evolved with her marriages to three famous men: Randolph Churchill, Leland Hayward, and Averell Harriman. Smith recounts all aspects of this female whirlwind with a straightforward reporting style yet impels us to follow Harriman's continuing saga. Although an interview with Harriman would have lent more credence to her work, Smith paints a portrait with less bias than Christopher Ogden's unauthorized Life of the Party (Little, Brown, 1994). This work lends itself well to a public library's biography section. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 7/96.]Kay Meredith Dusheck, Univ of Iowa, Iowa City
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