Book Description
The debate over the true author of ShakespeareÂ's body of work (some of which was published under the name “Shake-speare”) began not long after the death of William Shakespeare, the obscure actor and entrepreneur from Stratford-upon-Avon who was conventionally assumed to be the author. There were natural doubts that an uneducated son of a glover who never left England and apparently owned no books could have produced some of the greatest works of Western literature. Early investigators into the mystery argued for such eminent figures as Christopher Marlowe or Francis Bacon as possible authors, but recent scholarship has turned to Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, as the true Shakespeare.
“Shakespeare” by Another Name is the first complete literary biography of Edward de Vere that tells the story of his action-packed life—as student, soldier, courtier, lawyer, political intriguer, sophisticate, traveler, and, above all, writer—finding in it the background material for all of ShakespeareÂ's plays. Anderson brings to bear a wealth of new evidence, most notably de VereÂ's personal copy of the Bible (recently analyzed to show the correlation between his underlinings and the biblical allusions in ShakespeareÂ's work) and has employed it all to at last give a complete portrait and background to the man who was “Shakespeare.” BACKCOVER: “Makes a compelling case. . . . AndersonÂ's demonstration of how de VereÂ's real life matches the characters and circumstances found in the plays attributed to Shakespeare is especially impressive.”
—THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION
“Deserves serious attention. . . . Mr. Anderson shows there are myriad Shakespeare authorship connections for de Vere.”
—THE NEW YORK TIMES
“Tantalizing parallels between the plays and OxfordÂ's life certainly exist. . . . Anderson has a knack for finding fishy aspects of the traditional view that Shakespeare was Shakespeare.”
—NEW YORK SUN
Customer Reviews:
The Man Who Most Probably Was Not - Shakespeare.......2007-08-25
This book is very much of the type that used to be called a 'rollicking good read' in the old days; fairly light on the facts, but with a damn good plot. Rather like books about the Bermuda Triangle or Atlantis or the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, it presents its story as if it were a thriller or detective story. Perhaps it is?
The book itself is really not so much a biography of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, as a new demonstration of the thesis that the Earl was really the author of Shakespeare's plays. As such, if the reader if looking for a scholarly, thorough, well-researched and historically informed account of the Earl's actual life, then they should really turn to Alan H. Nelson's magisterial biography: 'Monstrous Adversary: The Life of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.' (Liverpool University Press, 2003). Thiis likely to be the standard work for anyone interested in the historical man for many years to come.
While Anderson doesn't really add much to a large number of other books that make broadly similar claims regarding Oxford's authorship of Shakespeare's plays, one cannot fault the author for his vigorous story-telling abilities: 'ON APRIL 12, 1550, IN THE PRIVATE APARTMENTS OF A BRITISH stone-walled medieval fortress, a lord and lady welcomed their heir into the world...'. Being British, I had a slight chuckle over the fairy-tale style opening lines, and I always thought we just called them 'castles', but perhaps this represents an American usage. Apart from the books very popular style, its other strength is to make the argument in an economical and straightforward way.
Yes, the author provides much detail to match elements of Shakespeare's poems and plays against Oxford's life, but these often seem peripheral and conjectural. Take 'Hamlet', yes it is true that Oxford's mother remarried when his father died - but there's no evidence he resented his stepfather, or that his father died of anything but natural causes. James the 1st is a better bet than Oxford for Hamlet, if you consider who killed his father, were the King a contender in the 'was he really Shakespeare?' stakes.
Likewise the argument that Oxford knew about Italy which Anderson demonstrates at length. Well, the problem here is that a great many Elizabethans went to Italy and so had first hand knowledge of the area. Anderson is therefore making a case against Shakespeare, much more than he is making a case for Oxford as Shakespeare. In any case bearing in mind there were Commedia Del'Arte actors in London who had travelled from the Continent, it needs to be a stronger case that it is: otherwise it could just be that the playwright had talked to someone who knew Italy very well, such as an Italian actor. He seems to assume that once he has demonstrated the plays aren't by what he calls the 'actor from Stratford', then it necessarily follows they must necessarily be by Oxford. But it doesn't.
What, I think is a shame is that Anderson doesn't really attempt to deal with some of the obvious objections to be made against the case for the Earl being the author of Shakespeare's plays, which would have made it a much stronger book, but relies on the 'conspiracy of silence' thesis.
Bearing in mind that many aristocrats eventually found their work published either during or after their deaths during in this period, it has never made much sense that if the Earl of Oxford had really written Shakespeare's plays, why the secret hadn't come out after his death, when he wasn't around to be shamed by it all? Though the claim there was a stigma against aristocratic publishing is quite slender when you consider both Oxford's actual character - as Nelson makes clear he did not much care what people thought of him and so many people said unpleasant things about him as it was- and the fact that the many people who must have known the secret would have realised by about 1610 that these works by Shakespeare weren't going to disgrace his memory in any case. So why weren't they published under his name by his friends? Elizabeth and James I had a tremendous passion for plays, so would either have been scandalised to discover one of their Earls had become a famous playwright.
However, there are a also number of other objections that the book doesn't address which it should have, as they would have made for a rather more solid work.
1. Oxford's published poetry is generally judged by literary critics as fairly mediocre, if competent, by Elizabethan aristocratic standards, so how exactly does he rise to become the greatest poet of his age in so short a time? If his published poetry represent his early work, then his rise to be able to write Shakespeare's plays is really quite unprecedented in world literature? Are there any other examples of such development?
2. As Nelson shows quite conclusively, there isn't much evidence that Oxford is very well educated (although he had expensive home tutors, that doesn't actually mean much unless he was learning). He left University when he was still a child and both of his University degrees were honorary, awarded when he visited Oxford and Cambridge later as part of royal parties. In any case a degree at Oxford and Cambridge basically marked attendance during a period at this point in history - and there's no evidence that he was any kind of University star like Marlowe. From his extant letters, Oxford doesn't seem very much interested in literature, beyond the typical patterns of aristocratic patronage. How can we reconcile this with his writing of Shakespeare's plays that seem to demonstrate the type of learning you would expect from someone educated to at least good Elizabethan grammar school standard and where you either learned in school, or else you suffered? Though Nelson in his book on Oxford does demonstrate convincingly that his Latin wasn't very good, which might suggest that Jonson's famous comment about Shakespeare's 'Litle Latin' has an applicability, Oxford's published letters don't suggest he had much feel for English either and he invariably refers to himself as Oxenford, not Oxford.
3. While Oxford certainly knew about Elizabethan court life, is there really anything in Shakespeare's plays representing court life in general, that isn't in the works of a host of other middle class playwrights of the period from Marlowe to Webster etc.? More significantly, Shakespeare's plays are filled with depictions of the everyday worlds of rural and urban life and the big question is how would an aristocrat such as Oxford have easy access to that kind of knowledge? There was plenty of material available in books and in plays about court and aristocratic life, some of it written by playwrights further up the social scale than Shakespeare, but very much less was avilable on the inside life of farmers or workers.
4. It is a common truism, but very much proven by the dramatic qualities of Shakespeare's plays over the years of performance, that he is the supreme example of the actor's playwright - no one writes as well for actors. You see this in similar figures like Sophocles, Moliere, Brecht, and the playwrights who weren't actors have spent sustained periods of time in the theatre - Checkhov, Beckett, etc. It is usually assumed that this means that Shakespeare must have been an extremely experienced actor to have that kind of insider knowledge of how plays worked. If so, where is the evidence of Oxford working in the theatre in that hands on kind of way?
5. Whatever autobiographical facts Shakespeare's plays may conceal - one of the most obvious things about them is their ability to present a wide variety of different kinds of people in wholly sympathetic and convincing ways. Shakespeare can present sympathetically anyone from a murderous Macbeth, to a jealous Moor, to a maligned Jew. Focusing on proposed autobiographical facts is one thing, but the book doesn't provide any evidence that Oxford had that kind of amazing ability to enter into other's lives so convincingly that is often cited as one of Shakespeare's trademarks.
Stephen Greenblatt's 'Will in the World', his recent biography of Shakespeare makes this point again, though John Keat's did it better than anyone else when he spoke of Shakespeare's 'negative capability', implying that was the reason it was so hard to get an idea of the person behind the drama. Yet, Oxford's life and published writings don't seem to give any of that impression that he can see things from other people's radically different and often conficting points of view.
6. Last, there's a long critical tradition of critics perceiving Shakespeare's work as being subtly ironic and subversive of the feudal world order and therefore the power structures of the Elizabethan world. That is why a whole series of radical thinkers from Marx and Engels to generations of the European Left have thought Shakespeare was quietly but consitently undermining the whole of the social structures he lived in.
How can we square this with an aristocrat writing as Shakespeare using a nom de plume and in addition, one who seems to accept the social status quo as right and natural? Wat evidence is there that he isn't confined to the narrowness typical of his social class - bearing in mind that almost all of the Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights came from middle-class, professional and gentry families and none (that I can think of) from the aristocracy, let alone the highest and most socially elevated and isolated aristocracy like Oxford? It is more of a leap to see an aristocrat capable of this than one of the bourgeois Elizabethan playwrights who'd experienced poverty as a child or as an artist.
If there is a second edition of this book, or another one with he same thesis. then these are the kinds of questions it will really need to be able to answer, to make a more convincing case for Oxford having anything to do with Shakespeare's plays. Identifying possible allusions and references just isn't enough - the literary qualities of the plays and poetry and the theatrical quality of the drama need to matched against what we know of Oxford. Or a contemporary Elizabethan document announcing that Oxford wrote Shakespeare's poetry and plays.
In the meantime, it is a fun read, but treat it more an an enjoyable work of fiction that anything more substantial.
REVIEW OF MARK ANDERSON'S SHAKESPEARE BY ANOTHER NAME BY JOHN CHUCKMAN.......2007-08-23
This is a biography of Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, but the focus of this book is not so much to document the Earl's life as to demonstrate that the Earl was the author of the plays and poems we ascribe to William Shakespeare.
The known facts of Shakespeare's own life are few and seemingly unpromising to have produced the language's greatest poet. Many scholars and critics over the centuries have speculated that others were responsible for the plays and poems.
In de Vere, Anderson does have a fairly strong candidate. The author does show many connections between events in the life of Edward de Vere and facts and references in Shakespeare's work.
I think Anderson's strongest argument is the idea that a man like the real William Shakespeare, actor and theater producer, a man without any access to high levels of government, a man who so far as we know never traveled to any extent, and a man who would not have had access to any great library, simply would not be familiar with all the sophisticated matters touched on in the plays.
To bolster this general argument, Anderson identifies many circumstances from the plays that may be explained in terms of de Vere's experience, but they all remain suggestive, and in many cases Anderson does go through a rather tortured effort to make what he regards as a strong point.
Anderson offers many other supporting suggestive bits such as anagrams and drawings seeming to reveal another as the actual playwright and passages annotated by de Vere in contemporary books. The whole of this is suggestive, at times powerfully so, but it is somewhat less than convincing.
Although I enjoyed this book, nevertheless, in the end, I remain unconvinced. As Anderson says himself, there is no "smoking gun" - and, God, how I wish a scholar writing about our greatest writer would avoid such clichéd American expressions.
The most important doubt for me is found in de Vere's own known writing. While his letters show a man of learning and eloquence, I just do not hear Shakespeare in his words. There are times when Anderson says a reference in a letter is the same matter as a reference in a play or poem, but the magic of the language just isn't there to my mind.
Several interesting thoughts come to mind with the de Vere thesis. First, de Vere - wastrel and swashbuckler, was not a particularly pleasant or even ethical man, quite different to the figure most of us imagine Shakespeare's being.
Second, de Vere was not just a failure as a businessman, he was a total failure at being even the keeper of his inheritance. He had no commercial sense at all.
In the American national battery of tests for teachers some years ago, I noticed an odd question about Shakespeare in which the "correct" answer was about his being a good businessman - running a successful theater company, etc - rather than the romantic ideal of the artist. I thought the question heavily biased by America's focus on making money. If de Vere was Shakespeare, the question is not only odd, the desired answer was altogether wrong.
Despite my reservations, this is a book that should be read by all admirers of Shakespeare and by all who are fascinated by the Elizabethan period.
A curious dislike for Oxford.......2007-05-23
Mark Anderson's book is best understood within the context of Oxfordian history to better reveal its strengths and weaknesses. The seminal book was Shakespeare Identified by the English schoolteacher J. Thomas Looney (pronounced Lohney).
This was followed by The Seventeenth Earl of Oxford by B.M Ward in 1926. Nothing was published until after the war years when Charlton and Dorothy Ogburn wrote This Star of England, which was followed by their son's The Mysterious William Shakespeare. There were also some smaller books arguing the Oxford case, such as Shakespeare Who Was He by Richard Whalen and Alias Shakespeare by Joseph Sobran.
Shakespeare's Unorthodox Biography by Diana Price is a detailed account of the life of the man from Stratford-upon-Avon.
The Ogburns in their biographies of Oxford advanced the notion that Henry Wriothesley was the son of Oxford and Queen Elizabeth I. They provided evidence that the Queen and Oxford were a romantic couple and interpreted Venus and Adonis and Shake-speares Sonnets as a literary record. This was followed by Elisabeth Sears Tudor Rose, which details the mysterious circumstances of Southampton's birth. This is known in Oxfordian circles as the PT Theory (Prince Tudor).
However, if PT and PT II are true, this means that Queen Elizabeth had an incestuous relation with her own son, producing Southampton. And this is what every orthodox Oxfordian avoids. Yet, the works of Shakespeare abound with what Hamlet says is "incest that abomination."
My book, Oxford: Son of Queen Elizabeth I, asserted that Princess Elizabeth had a child in 1548 by her stepfather, Thomas Seymour, and this child was placed in the home of John de Vere, 16th Earl of Oxford. He was raised as Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. This is known as PT Theory Part II.
The book further asserted that Elizabeth had a total of six children, Robert Cecil, Robert Devereux (Essex), Henry Wriothesley (Southampton), Mary Sidney and Elizabeth Leighton. Elizabethan history had to be rewritten to understand Shakespeare and Oxford.
Second, that Oxford did not die in 1604, but was exiled to the Isle of Mersea in the English Channel and there he wrote The Tempest, Shake-speares Sonnets and created the King James Bible. Subsequent, articles have shown that there is no acknowledgement of Oxford's death until January 1609 and an article that compares the topography of Mersea to the island described in the Tempest.
Mr. Anderson has chosen to ignore the main themes developed by Oxfordians and other historians over the decades and presents a rather sanitized version of Elizabethan events. For example, it is simply a known fact that Robert Dudley (Earl of Leicester) was the Queen's lover and rumors abounded that she had children with him. This Mr. Anderson ignores.
It is further known that Robert Dudley was married when the Queen ascended the throne, but Robert Dudley was married. His wife was found at the bottom of the stairs with a broken neck and everyone in England thought Dudley murdered her. The clamor prevented the Queen from marrying Dudley.
Mr. Anderson makes many comparisons between the characters of Shakespeare, and the life of the Earl of Oxford. Yet, in the most autobiographical of all the plays, Hamlet, he states that Polonius is William Cecil, Ophelia is Anne Cecil, Oxford's wife, the Queen is the Queen, but he fails to draw the logical conclusion that Hamlet, the prince, is Oxford, the Prince of England.
He posits this strange interpretation of the Venus and Adonis and the Sonnets as a literary recreation of Southampton's seduction of Oxford's wife. This seems to be the only way he can avoid the directly dealing with Oxfordian thinking on the Earl of Southampton as the son of the Queen and Oxford.
Mr. Anderson's has many strengths, in particular is account of Oxford's trip through Italy is worth the price of the book. He shows that the Earl of Oxford could have only written the Italian plays of Shakespeare. However, his description of the relation between Oxford and the name "William Shakespeare" and the man from Stratford named "William Shakspere" is so confusing that no one is ever going to figure out what Mr. Anderson means.
Finally, Mr. Anderson has a curious dislike or disgust with Oxford throughout the book that becomes stronger toward the end. His final description of Oxford "from a preening and prancing young champion to a betrayed and jealous middle-aged skeptic to a resigned and bitter old man."
The book has its virtues, but many other books on the subject are clearer explanations of the life and works of the Earl of Oxford, better known to the world as "William Shakespeare."
Paul Streitz
Author: Oxford: Son of Queen Elizabeth I
Superb biography of Edward de Vere.......2007-04-28
The book is a detailed and fascinating account of the life of Edward de Vere, probably the best candidate for the true authorship of the works of William Shakespeare. It is in truth highly unlikely that the man from Stratford-on-Avon, often called "Shaksper", wrote any of the Shakespearean plays, although four hundred years on even raising the authorship question continues to elicit violent emotional protests from untold thousands of supporters of the "Shakespeare myth".
The advocacy of Edward de Vere is indeed blessed by a huge amount of largely circumstantial evidence, most of which comes clearly to light in this volume. Among the most impressive evidence is the litany of detailed parallels between many of the plays and the life of Edward de Vere, including the multitude of colourful characters that surrounded him at the court of Elizabeth. And Mark Anderson does a superb job of spotting very specific references in the plays to events, places, and stories that de Vere for certain knew of first hand.
Two other things that Mark Anderson does very well and with great gusto: Firstly, the book pre-supposes that de Vere is in fact Shakespeare, and thus follows a strategy of seducing the reader rather than battling the adversaries in the authorship question. This "fait accompli" approach is extremely effective. I dare anyone to read this book and not agree that de Vere in all probability was Shakespeare.
Secondly, Mark Anderson never directly tries to discredit the Stratford man. In fact, with the "fait accompli" approach it becomes unecessary, the darkness of doubt closes upon his head quite automatically the deeper you get into the biography. This also means that no advocates of other Shakespeare authors - including the Stratfordians - are ever ridiculed. A clever tactic unless you are out to make a lot of enemies!
I think about 95% of the arguments and details presented in the book are readily believable, although there are a few that are hard to swallow for me personally, such as the interpretation that Prospero's Island (of the Tempest) should represent England - this to me is too far gone. However, a lot of the other parallels seem to make sense and are, if you will, probably true in that they reflect the relations and real life stories surrounding de Vere in great and consistent detail.
The book certainly leaves the lasting impression that de Vere is a very likely Shakespeare. That the plays to a great extent are autobiographical should surprise noone. After all I cannot think of a single author, greater or lesser, who does not write based on personal experience.
Does it have to be either/or?.......2007-04-10
I really enjoyed this book, even though I came away from both more confused and more knowledgeable about the authorship problem. But what a wonderful confusion this is - an intriguing whodunit with great literature at it's centerpiece! What I unequivocally liked about Shakespeare By Another Name was its vivid evocation of Elizabethan history by following the life events and adventures of Edward de Vere.
The circumstantial evidence that Mark Anderson marshals to his thesis that De Vere is the author is really quite remarkable, and the weight of it cannot be ignored. On the other hand, this evidence is by its nature speculative and is really not enough to base a definitive decision on. Just like someone can sure "look" guilty, De Vere sure "looks" like the author of the Shakespeare works.
However, there are bits of circumstantial evidence that work against De Vere as well, chief among them Ben Jonson's comment about the "Sweet Swan of Avon" in the First Folio. (Not adequately explained away by De Vere's former property in the area.) And then there are the poems of De Vere that were attributed to him and published under his name during his lifetime. Many folks will say they are not poetry experts and decline to evaluate them, but after looking at them, I encourage you to do the same and see for yourself what unremitting schlock they are. The spirit of Shakespeare is nowhere to be found in De Vere's published poetry. He comes across as what he was, an extraordinary Renaissance man and adventurer living life to its fullest, but far, far from a man of letters.
So what are we left with? Shakespeare's plays seem to be about De Vere's life, but there seems to me no way that he could have written them. I don't know who actually wrote them, maybe it was the Bard of Stratford, but to me they are clearly the coordinated work of two people. Shakespeare never left England and had little access to books. As great as his imagination was, he would have needed content from somewhere. I think De Vere provided that content to the writer of these plays. Even though De Vere's mark is all over the Shakespeare works, it is the writer "Shakespeare", him or herself, who is the true genius here, not De Vere.
I don't think this kind of collaboration is either unprecedented or unheard of. Goodness knows, there was plenty of mystery about authorship in those days.
In Mark Anderson's book, one gets the continual sense that he is reaching just a bit beyond himself to make a case for something he wants to be true. He may have come closer to the truth of the matter if he had just been satisfied with seeing De Vere as a content provider for Shakespeare. The role of Edward De Vere in the Shakespeare plays was indispensible, but the genius of the plays lies somewhere else.
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Shakespiracy theory.(books on William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe)(Book review): An article from: New Criterion
David Propson
Manufacturer: Thomson Gale
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ASIN: B000FIGK60
Release Date: 2006-04-25 |
Book Description
This digital document is an article from New Criterion, published by Thomson Gale on February 1, 2006. The length of the article is 3145 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Shakespiracy theory.(books on William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe)(Book review)
Author: David Propson
Publication:
New Criterion (Magazine/Journal)
Date: February 1, 2006
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 24
Issue: 6
Page: 23(5)
Article Type: Book review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Book Description
"Remember, you are not going out there to start a war," Rear Admiral Frank Johnson reminded Commander Pete Bucher just prior to the maiden voyage of the U.S.S. Pueblo. And yet a war--one that might have gone nuclear--was what nearly happened when the Pueblo was attacked and captured by North Korean gunships in January 1968. Diplomacy prevailed in the end, but not without great cost to the lives of the imprisoned crew and to a nation already mired in an unwinnable war in Vietnam.
The Pueblo was an aging cargo ship poorly refurbished as a signals intelligence collector for the top-secret Operation Clickbeetle. It was sent off with a first-time captain, an inexperienced crew, and no back-up, and was captured well before the completion of its first mission.
Drawing on thousands of pages of recently declassified documents from President Lyndon Johnson's administration, along with dozens of interviews with those involved, Mitchell Lerner provides the most complete and accurate account of the Pueblo incident yet available. He weaves on a grand scale a dramatic story of international relations, presidential politics, covert intelligence, capture on the high seas, and secret negotiations. At the same time, he highlights the personal struggles of the Pueblo's crew--through capture, imprisonment, indoctrination, torture, and release--and the still smoldering controversy over Commander Bucher's actions. In fact, Bucher emerges here for the first time as the truly steadfast hero his men have always considered him to be.
More than an account of misadventure, The Pueblo Incident is an indictment of America's Cold War mentality. Lerner argues that had U.S. policymakers regarded the North Koreans as people with a national agenda, rather than as serving a global Communist conspiracy, they might have avoided the crisis or resolved it more effectively. He also addresses such unanswered questions as what the Pueblo's mission exactly was, why the ship had no military support, and how damaging the intelligence loss was to national security.
With North Korea still seen as a rogue state by some policymakers, The Pueblo Incident provides key insights into the domestic imperatives behind that country's foreign relations. It astutely assesses the place of gunboat diplomacy in the modern world and is vital for understanding American foreign policy failures in the Cold War.
This book is part of the Modern War Studies series.
Customer Reviews:
Good Book, Good Read.......2005-09-21
Lerner has written an important. As the author of two books, I am here to tell you that no book is without mistakes. The critics that harp on things that are truely minor are failing to look at his central argument. The N. Koreans had and still have their own agenda. They were waging a series of raids across the DMZ in the late l960s that got about 400 Americans killed and several thousand S. Koreans. The crew was treated in shabby fashion by the USN in an effort to cover their rear ends. This book is an award winner and it shows. Buy it. You will enjoy it.
Very Many Factual and Unfortunate Errors in this Work.......2003-02-23
It is always discouraging to eagerly open a newly purchased book, only to find it contains errors of fact which, from personal experience, one immediately identifies. I have no idea of the authors expertise as an historian or university professor at a minor campus of a land grant university, but it is clear, from the first chapter, that he has no experience, and little understanding of the world of electronic information gathering as practiced in the 1960s.
He begnis, early on, to lament the failures of the "KW-7 Transmitter". True enough...the KW-7 was a dog, but it was a dog of an encryption system, not a transmitter. One would indeed be hard pressed to raise a shore station on a KW-7! The '7 encrypyed radio teletype signals which only then were fed to a transmitter...on Pueblo, a AN/URT-32, manufactured by Collins Radio in Texas. He later refers to a crew member as a "Seaman First Class"....a rate which was disestablished in the late 1940's. You can be a seaman recruit, seaman apprentice or a seaman, but no seaman first class sailed on Pueblo, or any ship in the Vietnam era. There are many other errors, both describing procedure and policy, which are cause for disappointment.
And here's the rub. I'd be willing to give any author the benefit of the doubt on areas I've never experienced personally...say, the policy making, geopolitical or even historical factors surrounding Pueblo's capture. (I was working at Navcomsta Guam that afternoon, by the way, so my interest is more than casual). But, if he gets basic things, which I DO understand, wrong, how could I believe the other arguments he makes? Too bad. Lots of brave guys suffered when Pueblo was taken....and the skipper, XO and NavSecGru guys have all written pretty darn good books about the event...perhaps this "historian and college professor" might do well to go back and check out the primary source data before talking about things about which he obviously knows little.
Keven Memori, RMCM USN (retired)
Impressive Debut.......2002-10-30
Mitch Lerner has written an impressive debut work on the North Korean seizure of the U.S.S. Pueblo that reads like a spy novel. This book is even better, because it really happened and is no boring academic treatise. Lerner is a gifted writer and is able to bring his subject alive.
As someone who has lived and traveled to Korea many times, I am amazed at how ignorant Americans are about that country. In 1950 two regimes went to war to determine which one of them would be the sole government of the entire nation. The Korean War was a civil war that settled nothing. To this day, both capitals claim to be the only government of Korea, want unification on their terms, and are still willing to use force to reach their goals. Lerner shows that policy makers in the 1960s were ignorant of these basic facts and looked at Korea from the perspective of the American-Soviet confrontation that was the Cold War. Simply put, Americans looked at North Korea as a Soviet puppet rather than as a free agent that might take actions without telling their "friends" in Moscow.
Lerner gives the reader an even-handed account of the various players that influenced the course of events. He gives President Lyndon Johnson good marks for handling a difficult crisis in which he had a weak hand and the North Koreans held all the aces. He explains the North Korean perspective without offering apologies for the nasty fellows that govern the northern half of the peninsula. He also does justice to the crew of the Pueblo, recounting the beatings and torture they endured at the tender hands of their hands.
Many people in the U.S. Navy will not like this book. The Pueblo was sent out on a fool's errand. The Navy provided no escorts or air cover to protect this ship. The admirals expected that as long as the ship stayed in international waters, the North Koreans would respect the unwritten rules of the Cold War that allowed the Soviets to send "fishing boats" to sail off the coast of Florida and Virginia. The only problem was that the North Koreans were not the Soviets. In the two years before the Pueblo sailed, North Korea was waging an undeclared border war with the South, attacking and killing American and South Korean soldiers. The Joint Chiefs of Staff considered Korea a war zone and were giving out hero medals for combat engagements with the enemy. The Navy apparently thought nothing of this little war and sent the Pueblo out without any protection. In a covering exercise, the Navy tried to court martial the captain of the ship to cover up the fact that the service had failed to provide any protection or even any means to destroy all the sensitive material on board. Lerner stays balanced as he covers this disgraceful period and refuses to blast the high command of the Navy for its shameful treatment of the crew. Still, there is no hiding who the heroes are in this story. Read this book; it is a good story; it is an important story.
The Story of the USS Pueblo!.......2002-09-28
I decided to read this book after I saw the author on a Fox News special about the Pueblo. I had been stationed in Osan, South Korea, a few years after the incident, so I knew a little bit about the Pueblo, but not very much. This book answered all my questions, and more. I think anyone with an interest in American foreign policy should read it.
The book really has 3 parts. In the first section, Lerner looks at the background of this intelligence program (operation clickbeetle), the history of the program, the specific preparation of this ship and mission, the background of the men who operated the ship, and the situation in Korea. Then, in the next part, he looks at the mission itself, focusing mostly on the events the day that North Korea captured the Pueblo on the high seas, and what that meant for the US and the Cold War. Finally, he looks at the way the Lyndon Johnson administration decided to turn to diplomacy rather than a military response, and how that developed over a year of negotiations, until the men were finally released just before Christmas in a somewhat bizarre solution in which the US signed an apology letter that they had already publicly denounced. The ship, shockingly, still is in North Korea, serving as a tourist attraction.
This is really a good book. First of all, Lerner writes beautifully. This book reads so smoothly, and the story is so intense, that you almost can't put it down. His research is also very impressive. It looks like he has been to every archive, and talked to every person, related to the event. And he looks at every aspect of the incident. There is a look at the military side of the story, a lot about the diplomacy, a chapter about the public reaction in the US, details about the treatment of the men in captivity (one year in North Korean prisons--just brutal stuff), even a discussion of the intelligence loss involved here.
There are a few things that I liked particularly. He brings North Korea into the picture, showing how they were not simply taking orders from the Soviets but were a nation struggling with their own problems, and in order to distract the people from his failed communist leadership, Kim Il Sung tried to show them how tough he was by going after America. Lerner also shows how Americans everywhere: in the government, in the military, in the general population, in congress, saw this as part of the cold war, and refused to recognize that North Korea mattered. So I was shocked to see how Johnson immediately tried to solve the problem by going to the USSR, and the UN and China, but not to North Korea. He also does a good job showing how the Navy let the men down, and then tried to scapegoat the officers by blaming them for not going down with the ship, when Lerner shows that the Navy had let the men down on so many support levels. For example, the condition of the ship was horrible, it didn't even have a reliable steering system or a good self-destruct system or a working communication system, the Pueblo was slow and unstable, had bad navigation equipment, and almost no guns. Pre-mission trials showed this to everyone in the Navy, but still, they ignored the commander's requests to fix anything. Finally, as a former soldier, I was really impressed by his discussion of the crew. He shows how the Navy let them down by not giving them the right support, training, and information. He also shows how they hung together in North Korea, despite some pretty rough times.
There are a few problems I should mention. Some maps would have been helpful. The military details were fine for me, but people without a military background might find some of it tough reading. And I did wonder if Lerner could have told us more about the views of the common soldier who was wondering if we were going to go to war over this, especially the grunts in Vietnam. Still, this is overall a really, really, good book. It shows how the US during the Cold War sometimes overlooked the complexity of the world, and just looked for easy answers that saw everything as part of a Soviet conspiracy. I would recommend it highly to anyone.
Tale of Pueblo Incident Sails Wide of the Mark.......2002-09-04
This book is well wide of the mark in its attempt to argue that the loss of the USS Pueblo was a result of a failed US foreign policy.
Prof. Lerner has made some useful contributions to our understanding of the Pueblo incident. In addition, he has proven to be both a careful researcher and presents a most convincing case that Pueblo was ill suited for both the open sea and for a hazardous mission in hostile waters.
The central thesis of this work, however, is badly flawed. Lerner argues that the Pueblo's loss can be attributed to US myopia during the Cold War, a vision that saw a Soviet conspiracy behind the action of every communist nation. "In designing the Pueblo's mission," Lerner writes, "preparing the ship for launch, and attempting to resolve the crisis, American policy makers consistently failed to treat the North Koreans as North Koreans, instead viewing them as one cog in a greater communist conspiracy that consisted or virtually interchangeable parts . . . . they clung to this comfortable worldview that reduced complex events to simplistic shades of black and white and saw everything as a zero-sum contest for world domination."
As such, Lerner argues that the loss of the ship and the imprisonment of the crew represented a foreign policy failure.
Unfortunately, Lerner has made a jumble of grand strategy, policy, operations, strategy and tactics. American grand strategy during the Cold War era, and arguably a successful strategy, was one of Containment. Regardless of the American perceptions of the Soviet Union that shaped the strategy, its implementation resulted in the adoption of several foreign policies. One of those pollicies was to collect foreign intelligence information on the Soviet Union, the Soviet Bloc and on communist nations. This policy was made operational with the use of intelligence collection aircraft and ships.
One strategy for the operation was to outfit nondescript ships for signals intelligence (SIGINT) missions. The Pueblo, its SIGINT refit, and mission, was simply the tactical implementation of that strategy.
Pueblo's loss was attributable to flawed risk assessments of the mission and a now classic case of an intelligence warning failure. In short, Pueblo was lost -- not because of a massive failure of US foreign policy -- but because of tactical errors made in attempting to implement a sound strategy.
There are other shortcomings in this book, too. Lerner's discussion and assessment of the loss of Pueblo's intelligence gear and publications is limited to five paragraphs. He fails to probe and examine the severity and consequences of the loss in the detail really required or offer any new assessments. The chapter devoted to an terribly out-of-place discussion of American culture in the 1960s - replete with its meandering references to the Beatles, Broadway plays, and Star Trek episodes - should have been excised to make room for an insightful analysis of the severity of the intelligence losses from the incident.
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Citation Details
Title: The Pueblo Incident: A Spy Ship and the Failure of American Foreign Policy. (Net Assessment).(Book Review)
Author: Capt Gilles Van Nederveen
Publication:
Air & Space Power Journal (Refereed)
Date: June 22, 2003
Publisher: U.S. Air Force
Volume: 17
Issue: 2
Page: 120(2)
Article Type: Book Review
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Citation Details
Title: The Pueblo Incident: A Spy Ship and the Failure of American Foreign Policy.(Book Review)
Author: Malcolm, Jr. Muir
Publication:
The Historian (Magazine/Journal)
Date: June 22, 2004
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 66
Issue: 2
Page: 356(2)
Article Type: Book Review
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The Pueblo Incident: a Spy Ship and the Failure of American Foreign Policy.(Book Review): An article from: Presidential Studies Quarterly
Douglas A. Borer
Manufacturer: Center for the Study of the Presidency
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Citation Details
Title: The Pueblo Incident: a Spy Ship and the Failure of American Foreign Policy.(Book Review)
Author: Douglas A. Borer
Publication:
Presidential Studies Quarterly (Refereed)
Date: December 1, 2002
Publisher: Center for the Study of the Presidency
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Article Type: Book Review
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