Importance of Reading

The importance of reading good nonfiction books which are backed by facts and filtered through the mind of clear-thinking writers becomes ever more obvious. A case in point jumped out of Robert A. Caro’s THE PASSAGE OF POWER, a biography about the life of Lyndon B. Johnson. While paging through it I came upon the passage dealing with the Cuban missile crisis.  JFK was president while LBJ stood by, mostly ignored as the vice president. As tensions increased, JFK’s advisors urged him to take military action, either bomb or invade. Caro says the President remembered reading Barbara Tuchman’s THE GUNS OF AUGUST and saw in her writing how miscalculations among European countries had exploded to cause the First World War. JFK was determined to avoid war and instead went with blockading Russian ships from reaching Cuba.

Robert Caro is writing this monumental biography of LBJ; the one referenced above is the fourth in a series of five. Presently he is writing the fifth and final volume. Our present leadership might find enlightenment in the lessons of history brought through books like JFK did.