Happy New Year!

A little update for my readers as this century is now one-quarter complete

Happy new year, readers! I would like to start off this newsletter by thanking all of you who stuck with me throughout 2024, and hopefully will continue with me throughout 2025. You have really given my life meaning, after years of drifting aimlessly wondering what kind of future would await me. I am pleased that everyone seems to legitimately enjoy my writing style; your complements don’t seem empty. I am eternally grateful.

I concluded last year with a thorough, thought-provoking research essay on the grim prospects for a peace agreement in Ukraine. In this new year, I would like to shift my focus to a lighter topic- a book summary of Destiny of the Republic by Kansas-based historian Candice Miller.

Destiny of the Republic recounts the harrowing tale of James Garfield’s brief but tragic presidency in 1881. An academic fluent in both Greek and Latin, a congressman from Ohio, and a gentleman farmer, Garfield was recruited to stand for the presidency by a divided Republican party as a compromise candidate between feuding factions. Even though Garfield never sought the office of the presidency, the presidency was forced upon him. And for Garfield, the job proved every bit as miserable as expected. Not only was Garfield thrust into the deep end of the so-called Spoils System, where federal appointments were dependent on cronyism and patronage, his wife Lucretia suffered from a near-fatal bout with malaria courtesy of the swampy, mosquito-infested Washington DC of 1881.

In the Spoils System, the presence of arrogant and power-hungry office seekers in the White House was a daily misery for Garfield. One of these office-seekers, Charles Guiteau, belonged in a category all to his own. Believing he was tasked with a mission from the Lord Almighty to become Ambassador to France, the mentally unbalanced Guiteau reacted to his many rejections for this post by refocusing his divine quest into killing the President of the United States. And on the fateful day of July 2, 1881, Charles Guiteau’s bullet transformed James Garfield’s presidency from a challenge to a tragedy. In the blink of an eye, the once-healthy Garfield, on the floor of a Washington train station, was subject to a crude medical probe with unwashed hands, ensuring that his non-fatal gunshot wound would have fatal consequences.

And this is the point where Miller’s narrative turns. After several hundred pages, albeit with a large font, of praising Garfield’s achievements and record of kindness and humility in the fields of academia, the Union Army in the civil war, and even congress, Miller plunges the reader into the despair of the excruciating final 80 days of President Garfield’s life. Out of my sense to offer the deceased president the dignity he never received in this period I admit that I often skipped over dozens of pages detailing the most excruciating moments, thus I will leave them out of this review. The overall theme of the second half of Destiny of the Republic is the arrogance and incompetence of the doctors who treated Garfield, who ignored the emerging medical science discovered by British physician Joseph Lister. They instead exposed the ailing president to a petri dish of germs the American medical establishment at the time did not believe existed.

However, like any writer, Miller completes the narrative arc by emphasizing not only the disgrace these arrogant doctors experience after Garfield succumbed to his many ailments, but also how this tragedy enabled the American medical establishment to finally accept Lister’s proven germ theories- a practice that has since saved millions of lives. Furthermore, the tragedy was the final nail in the coffin for the Spoils System, a practice both congress and the public agreed contributed to the president’s death. Even though Garfield will go down in history as one of four assassinated American presidents, his legacy also birthed profound reforms of the American medical and bureaucratic systems that have served this country well. Thus, you now know that I spent my Christmas holiday reading Candice Miller’s Destiny of the Republic.

On the news front, there was one story that you probably did not see that attracted my attention. In the Spring of 2023, in order to achieve the final credits needed for my Masters Degree in International Affairs from Middle Tennessee State University, I spent some time doing side work for a national security outfit started by Morgan Ortagus, a Navy Reserve Intelligence Officer, Republican national security operative, and periodic Fox News commentator who also served as Mike Pompeo’s spokeswoman at the State department from 2019 to 2021.

Thus, when I saw her name mentioned as Donald Trump’s appointee for the Deputy Special Envoy for Middle East Peace, I was quite pleased. Ortagus has a breadth of knowledge of Middle East Affairs and will certainly be a highly capable representative in the region. I have also had the pleasure of meeting her on multiple occasions, and Morgan has always been nice to me. However, I was more than a little unsettled that the president-elect publicly hinted that she was once one of his critics, and the appointment is merely a favor to other Republican officials and operatives who clearly recognize her talent and knowledge. Such a public warning shot, directed at a person I know, while definitely in that oh-so-familiar Trumpian style certainly signals an interesting four years ahead of us.