The Glory and the Dream!
Re-reading William Manchester's big fat narrative history
Our book today is The Glory and the Dream by William Manchester, is 1974 “Narrative History of America, 1932-1972,” a great big 1300-page doorstop of a thing that immediately invokes one of two (or both) worries about such vast baggy monsters: that either the book was scurried together by researchers, interns, and underlings, or that the book was fused together from equal parts lazy nostalgia and expensive bourbon. Cast your mind over the whole sorry roster of this kind of book going all the way back to The Outline of History by HG Wells (1920, 1100 pages, 100% expensive bourbon), and you'll scarcely be able to point to even two or three examples that are anything more than, at best, guilty pleasures. True, there are books like Postwar by Tony Judt or The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow, sweeping narratives that are nonetheless pointed inquiries. But most of them are kids-these-days anecdote-farms that are (sometimes, if you're lucky) entertaining to read but almost completely worthless as the kind of history they purport to be.
The Glory and the Dream came out seven years after Manchester's bestseller, The Death of a President, six years after his hugely entertaining The Arms of Krupp, and four years before American Caesar, his remarkably (given the givens) fair biography of egomaniac general Douglas MacArthur. In other words, smack-dab in the middle of very solid work – which undermines the scurrying interns hypothesis. True, it leaves the expensive bourbon hypothesis still on the table, but so, too, is the guilty pleasure payoff.
The key to that pleasure is to do exactly what these kinds of doorstop narrative histories subtly encourage: ice-skate right along at speed, enjoying the sweep and speed and refraining at all costs from stopping and poking the ice with the tip of your skate – because a single break in the ice can web out cracks that shatter the whole thing.
One example from The Glory and the Dream jumps right out on the re-reading, since we're all still reeling after the summer of Barbenheimer: the detonation of the Bomb at Site S outside of Alamogordo:
Up and up it went, a giant column whose internal pressures found relief in a supramundane mushroom, then up, then another mushroom, finally disappearing into the night sky at an altitude of 42,000 feet higher than Mount Everest. Oppenheimer was reminded of two passages from the Bhagavad-Gita: “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst into the sky, that would be the splendor of the Mighty One” and “I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds.” Others groped for words. “Good God!” a senior officer croaked. “I believe those long-haired boys have lost control!” One jubilant physicist shouted, “The sun can't hold a candle to it!” It was literally true: at 5:30 the temperature at Zero had been one hundred million degrees Fahrenheit, three times the temperature in the interior of the sun and ten thousand times the heat on its surface. Sleeping Americans in New Mexico and western Texas had been wakened by the mysterious flash and then frightened as the storm wind blew angrily against their window panes.
This is undeniably gripping. How much of it can be chased down to being actually accurate, in granular detail? The whole point of a book like The Glory and the Dream is train yourself not to ask. If granular accuracy were the goal of sprawling books like this, 99% of them wouldn't sprawl at all.
Instead, the reader gets pulled along from detail to detail, personality to personality, recollection to recollection. And Manchester almost always feels very distinctly present in all those recollections (naturally enough, since the time span of the book is very consciously confined to years the author can personally recall). When he writes about the backyard nuclear fallout shelters everybody had once upon a time, for instance, you automatically wonder what the Manchester family shelter looked like out there in Springfield:
For most people the sticking point was the problem of what to do on D-day about improvident neighbors who had neglected to build refuges of their own. After retreating to your own dugout you would have no room for them. It would be necessary to lock them out, and you might have to use force. Some kits began including pistols with this in mind, but the public wasn't prepared to be that realistic. In time the backyard cavities became curiosities. Some where converted to barbecue pits. Others were used to stow garden tools, snow tires, and children's bikes.
And since this author will forever be linked to the Kennedy family, he's naturally evocative when it comes to Kennedy-mania:
Kennedy lore was featured in films, on television, on the Broadway stage, and in musical tributes. Every bookshop had its department of Kennedy books, of which by 1962 there were already over a hundred: book collectors were paying small ransoms for signed copies of Profiles in Courage. The fact that Lord David Cecil's biography of Melbourne was the President's favorite book was enough to turn what had been a book of limited appeal into a best seller; a report that Kennedy had enjoyed Ian Fleming's From Russia With Love made Fleming a millionaire.
I recently found the enormous old white Bantam trade paperback at the mighty Book Barn in Niantic, Connecticut. The book is still holding its girlish figure despite being a 50-year-old paperback, and it brags right there on its front cover that it's “the complete $20 bestseller Now only $6.95” and includes James Reston's New York Times shout “Magnificent.” To my astonishment, that paperback withstood a re-read without a single chip or rip. What astonished me less: oh, the guilty pleasure!
