Volume 47, Number 6 · April 13, 2000
An Affair of Honor
By Gordon S. Wood
Alexander Hamilton, American
by Richard Brookhiser
Free Press, 240 pp., $25.00
Republican Empire: Alexander Hamilton on War and Free Government
by Karl-Friedrich Walling
University Press of Kansas, 356 pp., $40.00
A Fatal Friendship: Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr
by Arnold A. Rogow
Hill and Wang, 351 pp., $14.00 (paper)
Duel: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and the Future of America
by Thomas Fleming
Basic Books, 446 pp., $30.00
Burr, Hamilton, and Jefferson: A Study in Character
by Roger G. Kennedy
Oxford University Press, 476 pp., $30.00
Scandalmonger
by William Safire
Simon and Schuster, 496 pp., $27.00
We hear a lot of laments about the ways that our present-day political leaders have gotten smaller in character, especially when compared to the larger-than-life founders of the country more than two centuries ago. One explanation for this shrinkage is that we today know too much about our leaders—their eating habits, their sex lives, even the cut of their underwear—and it is all the fault of too many ambitious and nosy journalists. According to some observers, bitter partisan politics and the excesses of the media over the past several decades have exposed a series of scandals and in the process have cut our leaders down to size and made them ordinary just like the rest of us. And the more ordinary they have become, the wider and more terrifying has become the gap that separates us from the so-called Founding Fathers of the late eighteenth century. We assume there were giants on the earth in those days.
Review, 6006 words
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