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For a year I have grown increasingly impressed with how AI can help me understand all manner of sociological, psychological, historical aspects of damn near everything I’ve challenged it with. Yes, it can be royally confused and even make staggerily obvious errors. But…
The question you will read below, is not the first AI response I’ve put in this blog. I’ve even posted a few that were in French. I’ll be putting in more in the future. The question that concerns this post follows a number of bios I’ve read concerning Joe P. Kennedy, Eisenhower, Truman and now Richard Nixon and the authors of these fully fleshed out books.
This question is part of my long search for the best books to understand the world. As I was about to graduate from college I began asking college profs which books they had found particurly informative. I may have put it like this, “What books should everyone read?” I gave it up after a half dozen such converations as none of them had much interest in offering me a path to enlightenment.
I’ve had many sources of information about good reading since then. This exploded with Google and now I have conversations with AI machines that can instantly filter billions of bits of related data points about tens of thousands of sources of information. They are trained to be modest and admit their weaknesses. This particular question was prompted by a book about Richard Nixon in which the author simply explains how Nixon, as a member of the now infamous HUAC (House on unamerican activities committee), saw nothing particularly wrong about the treatment of the Hollywood Ten. Its still infamous in “liberal” circles. I asked myself was Nixon wrong in the post war 1940’s considering that Joe Stalin was throwing his resources at undermining American democracy with every human resource at his command. Maybe not enough to become a Democrat bugaboo at least prior to this 1968 presidential campaign.
To his credit Nixon had no problem with there being a communist party. He did fear Russian secret agents especially in unions. Its worth remembering how cozy the whole Kennedy family was with red baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Contemporary biography and historical candor
My question/preface, June 17, 2026
I have a strong bias for good contemporary biography, and I guess my question is about the value of contemporaneousness. Uh, I have in mind several of the bio… biographies that I have talked with you about, uh, books by Cherno, Nassau, um, and some other other authors, partly because it seems that today, there is really no subject that is, uh, off of the table including the Peccadillos of various people, which actually give good insight into the sorts of people who help build the world that we now have and the nation and the world that we now live in. I’m wondering if you can give me a sense if that kind of ethos for just telling everything was found in any of the biographers of a hundred and more years ago. I have in mind a book that I saw in my father’s bookshelves authored by a historian named Emil Ludwig. It was either about Bismarck or Napoleon. I’m wondering if there are any older books in that era that attempted or succeeded in accomplishing what modern biographers put together with the vast research they can gather information for their biographies.
Claude’s reply
Emil Ludwig wrote both — Bismarck: The Story of a Fighter (German original 1911, revised and translated into English in the 1920s) and Napoleon (1924). He was the central figure, along with Lytton Strachey in England and André Maurois in France, of what got called the “New Biography” of the 1910s-20s: a deliberate revolt against the multi-volume, reverent “Life and Letters” tradition that had dominated 19th-century biography, usually written by a widow, son, or hand-picked authorized scholar who scrubbed the record clean.
So there was a real movement toward candor in that era, but it’s worth being precise about what kind. Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918) is the sharper example — it punctured Victorian hagiography with irony, showed hypocrisy and pettiness in figures like Cardinal Manning and General Gordon, and scandalized readers at the time. Ludwig’s contribution was more psychological than scandalous: he leaned hard into character analysis, motive, and inner life, often at the expense of documentary rigor, which is exactly what academic historians attacked him for. The criticism Ludwig faced was almost the inverse of what you’d level at a modern biographer — too much interpretive speculation, not enough sourcing, where Chernow or Nasaw get faulted (if at all) for the opposite excess.
What that generation didn’t do, and mostly couldn’t do, was the sexual and financial frankness you’re describing. Libel law was a real constraint, family estates still controlled papers and could withhold or destroy them, and there was a strong social taboo against discussing a subject’s sex life or addictions in print regardless of evidentiary access. Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791) is sometimes cited as the real ancestor of warts-and-all biography since he included Johnson’s depression and odd habits unusually frankly for his century, but he was working from personal acquaintance, not archives. The comprehensiveness you’re responding to in Chernow and Nasaw is really a product of three later developments converging: the collapse of estate control over papers from roughly the 1960s on, FOIA and digitized archives giving access to financial and government records nobody could have assembled by hand, and a post-1960s willingness to print what earlier publishers wouldn’t touch. The interwar biographers had the appetite for candor; they didn’t have the archive or the legal latitude.
