Much love, Mr. Diaz.

You're lucky I've had an exceptionally productive writing day.

For those who read presidential biographies, I direct you to Jean Edward Smith's "Grant," an exceptionally thorough defense of one of the greatest generals in modern warfare and putatively one of our worst presidents. Smith's pedantic approach is oftennumbing: the chapters dealing with Grant's great victories (Fort Donelson, Shiloh, Vicksburg) lack any dramatic interest; compare Smith to Grant's own written accounts and you'll note the difference between descriptoin and evocation.

Smith also fails to address Grant's drinking. He's too quick to dismiss some of the more famous stories (falling off horses, etc) as apocryphal, and I just don't buy it: some of those rumours just had to be true. Smith is so obsessed with emphasizing Grant's heroic qualities that he too rarely rebukes him for his obvious character flaws. Granite-like intensity and sureness of mind are awesome virtues, but as president these qualities produced questionable Cabinet secretaries whose corruption was so shameless that Grant's name was forever sullied by historians.

All that said, he does a marvelous job rehabilitating Grant's presidency. The record is astonishing. In so many instances Grant's prescience astounds: his genuine concern for Native Americans; willingness to use Federal power (and more adeptly than Eisenhower would later do) to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments; his understanding of how inflation would deflate an exploding American economy. Most fascinating, he and Secretary of State Hamilton Fish brokered the Treaty of Washington, which, among other things, was resposnible for the Anglo-American friendship which persists today. And if you consider how selflessly Grant would lobby for all these things himself – protocol be damned – you have a Chief Executive of first-rate character.

gore Vidal and Edmund wilson had already whetted my appetite for Grant's "Personal Memoirs" (Gertrude Stein said it was one of her favorite books). Smith has now compelled me to purchase an early Christmas present.