It was the best of times. It was the worst of times…
Oh, who are we kidding? The period beginning 10/7/2023 and continuing right through 2024 was simply among the worst of times.
The Hamas attacks of 10/7 and the ugly international reaction to Israel’s defense of its borders and its people – “Globalize the Intifada” has come to include riots and attacks on Jews around the world – and attacks on the United States and Western civilization. It also includes verbal support for Israel from the Biden administration coupled with the delay of weapons, nagging and the sanctioning of individual Israelis; a rise in Iran’s aggressive activity; a Democratic primary election season that produced an eventual presidential candidate who had won exactly no votes; a campaign season that saw three assassination attempts; and a post-election season that included massive transfers of money to international organizations by the outgoing administration to which the incoming one would never accede.
Remember when the idea of political mischief by an outgoing administration consisted of President Clinton’s staff removing the Ws from computer keyboards before President George “W” Bush entered the White House? Now THAT was funny!
So, after a year of suffering hives over both domestic and foreign events, it made sense to pick history. I picked The Power and the Money by presidential historian Tevi Troy. Subtitled The Epic Clashes between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry, the book details relations between industry and politics beginning with John D. Rockefeller and Theodore Roosevelt and works its way up to Mark Zuckerberg and President Joe Biden.
Troy, a Fellow of the Jewish Policy Center, is the creator and founder of “1600 Lessons: Leadership Lessons from our Nation’s Chief Executives,” a leadership training course based on his extensive knowledge of the presidency. As well as being a bestselling author (see Shall We Wake the President and Fight House: Rivalries in the White House from Truman to Trump reviewed in previous issues of inFOCUS Quarterly), he has been a White House aid and deputy secretary of Health. He is well-qualified here.
There are ten chapters – nine of which are extraordinary. There are also three Appendices, including a CEO Joke File that is lots of fun. We’ll get to Chapter 10 in a bit.
Chapter One is, obviously, “The Blank Slate.” There was a time that “industry” was unknown. Yes, there were banks, there were businesses – factories even–but “industry” as a moving force in American politics began with JP Morgan and John D. Rockefeller on one side and Presidents Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, Chester A. Arthur, Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland and William McKinley on the other. That’s a lot of presidents learning to work with, like, manipulate, despise and try to limit two big business bosses. The bosses won just about every time.
The backlash was Chapter Two, “The Progressives,” Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson. More of the same regarding push and pull, use and scorn, admiration and derision, as personalities and a vision for the American future took shape in the 20th Century.
Troy makes them all human. His stories are amazing and the level of interpersonal relations among the two sides – and they were two sides – is fascinating. [So is his penchant for translating early century dollars into current figures: a payment from Rockefeller’s Standard Oil to presidential-hopeful Joseph Foraker included “a staggering $150,000,” chump change today, but “$5.4 million in today’s dollars” makes it something else.]
Henry Ford Diversion
Henry Ford pops up in this chapter and more in the next. He is treated fairly. His early understanding of not only automobiles but also the people who needed to have the money to buy and drive them, is covered. His pacifism – particularly as it related to WWI – and his dislike of government – even as he knew seven presidents – is covered. Ford’s own attempts to humanize himself are covered as well – and some of them are funny.
But then you get to the real Henry Ford and his antisemitism in Chapter Three: The Roaring Twenties, and onward. This is definitional Ford, and it is fairly and extensively covered as well. He keeps popping up, and new to me was the fact that Ford is the only American mentioned in Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The Ford factory in Germany continued to operate all through World War II.
Although Ford apologized for his antisemitism and stopped running antisemitic articles in his Dearborn Independent in 1927, Hitler himself praised the automobile magnate as “the leader of the growing Fascist movement in America.” In 1938, four months after the Anschluss, Ford accepted a Grand Cross of the German Eagle award from the Nazi regime.
And yet, Troy reminds us, politics are politics:
When Ford died in 1947, a host of corporate and political leaders praised him, including Roosevelt’s replacement, President Harry Truman. The praise came despite Ford’s record of antisemitism, his hatred of Roosevelt and his opposition to the New Deal. Truman had met Ford in the early 1940s, when he was still a senator from Missouri, but he recounted the meeting in a press conference he gave as president in 1951. In his comments, Truman noted that he had asked Ford about his pacifism, and that Ford had been “very certain that things that would come out of the tremendous effort which ourselves and our allies had put forth would be of great benefit to civilization.” Ford’s assessment, Truman noted, “has been absolutely true.”
Back to the Timeline
The ‘20’s also saw the rise of Jewish Hollywood, starting with the Warner family, which would, first of all, create an industry that lives today – although they might not be too happy with some of it – but also as the ‘20s ended and the Depression began – used their skills and their love of country to raise people’s spirits and offer solace: “God Bless America” and “White Christmas” (Irving Berlin), as well as “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” “Give my Regards to Broadway,” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag” (George M. Cohan) are icons. Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, Harry Cohn, The Marx Brothers and Mel Brooks. This was true through WWII as well. Hollywood agent Lou Wasserman started in the ‘40s and was influential until the 1970s. The patriotism and desire of these Jewish show business icons to help America should be legendary, although it is often passed over. Troy helps set the record straight.
All of this is pretty historic. And a great read.
Chapter Four: The Great Depression brings in Henry Luce and the rise of national media with the pervasive influence it has wielded since. Luce’s relationship with FDR is unpleasant on both sides. Luce used Time magazine to try to damage Roosevelt, and Roosevelt’s vindictiveness, which included dentying a Silver Star medal to John Hersey for his bravery at the Battle of Guadalcanal. Hersey was a Time correspondent at the time.
This is where a theme begins that travels through the rest of the book – and, in some ways, it means readers don’t have to consider the chapters as much as they do the trends. Luce was the beginning of the rise of the importance of communications media and later the rise of social media. You will see 21st- century elections in the 1930s and 1940s. There’s also Katherine Graham and the burgeoning importance of The Washington Post. The relative decline of “legacy media,” including The Post, doesn’t get much attention, but the rise of computer-driven and social media stars – some of whom, including Jeff Bezos of Amazon and The Post, are also legacy media owners – is there.
Eventually, you will get to Chapter Ten, where you will find two major lapses – and, in an oddity for a book that is well and carefully footnoted, neither lapse has a source – that’s because neither story is true as written. The first is the canard that Donald Trump said there were “good people on both sides” of the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in 2017. He did not, and even The Washington Post had to offer a correction. The other is that Trump told people to drink bleach to kill COVID germs – he did not. ‘Nuff said.
But that isn’t the only problem. As you pass through the Biden administration and into the 2024 election season, the end of The Power and the Presidency becomes obsolete, because we’re in 2025.
There was a lot of rejiggering of political and social positions during the 2024 election and after Donald Trump’s victory. Elon Musk, one of the key players, had been on the political left, a Democrat who was rather outspokenly anti-Trump. That changed, based largely on his belief in free speech, ending with him as the director of the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Jeff Bezos not only declined to have The Washington Post endorse any candidate, but he visited President-elect Trump at his home in Mar a Lago. Bezos was also present at the (indoor and therefore much smaller) inauguration ceremony and sponsored an inaugural event. META’s (Facebook parent) Mark Zuckerberg also visited Trump before the inauguration and announced that he was changing META to account for the fact that it had become clear that left-wing censorship was prolific. Zuckerberg also announced that META would change its “fact-finding” algorithm and that he would no longer donate to “get out the vote” organizations (which had been shown to be almost entirely oriented to helping the left-of-center).
No doubt readers will not be surprised as they check their daily news sources and watch the relationships and individuals in those relationships change. On the business and media side, they may not change their own deeply held beliefs, but when their businesses are affected, you can bet that their public positions will shift. Bud Light had that experience after Dylan Mulvaney. (If necessary, you can look that up.)
Oddly enough, these lapses do not ruin the book, and certainly don’t reflect on the author – although, it would be nice if he would announce an updated version.
The joke appendix is terrific. And The Power and the Presidency is a great way to remind yourself that our Republic has a long history and whatever we’re seeing today, even with the introduction of high-tech and high-tech moguls, the relationship between government and industry will shift as the players shift.
Buy the book and get ready for more shifting.
Shoshana Bryen is Senior Director of The Jewish Policy Center and Editor of inFOCUS Quarterly.
