The Rise of a Prairie Statesman by Thomas J. Knock

This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.Įveryone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). Though the writing is merely capable, Knock delivers an important reconsideration of a significant 20th-century politician.Ī fine, steady study sets the stage for the second volume: running for president in 1972. Courageously, McGovern went against the normative grain during his stint as a congressman and later senator, especially regarding the Vietnam War. As he writes, McGovern believed that America “erred in attempts to impose its own values and institutions upon other countries” (e.g., in Latin America and China) and that the wasteful and unnecessary military-industrial buildup could better be spent at home on education, mental health facilities, and other programs. Moreover, as the Cold War hysteria heated up, McGovern began to forge in his writing and speeches the core of his vital beliefs, as Knock unravels chronologically and meticulously.

He was deeply troubled by the red-baiting in the 1948 election between Henry Wallace and Harry Truman. Already a married man with children when he plunged into his graduate work in American labor history and a winning debater since high school, McGovern naturally gravitated toward politics. Despite the Republican slant in the state of South Dakota, there was also a strong progressive streak, as most residents admired and benefited from the policies of the New Deal, especially in farming and agriculture. Raised in the small, insular town of Mitchell, South Dakota, the product of a Methodist minister and his second wife, McGovern was inculcated by the devout, hardscrabble, patriotic America of the Depression and World War II-indeed, he returned from the war a hero as a bomber pilot. To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order, 1992, etc.) depicts his subject as really too good to be true, or at least too good to become president: decent, conscientious, and authentically progressive.

Knock (Foreign Relations, 20th-Century U.S. The first volume in the biography of George McGovern (1922-2012).

The Rise of a Prairie Statesman by Thomas J. Knock