The Bully Pulpit by Doris Kearns Goodwin

When I turned 50 and started realizing that I had been out of school for a very long time indeed and that it might be prudent to do something about my education that went beyond reading the paper and a good magazine or two, I started to pick up non-fiction books, mostly things that were recommended by people who actually like non-fiction.  In the handful of years since that started, the one person I have read more about than anyone else is Teddy Roosevelt.  But this book is not so much about him but about his role in the time that he lived.

The subtitle of the book is 'Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism'.  I knew little about Taft and absolutely nothing about the journalists that wrote at the time they were rising to their respective golden ages, and it is a very good story that is well told here. The thing that is best about the book is that it reminds the reader that there was a time in the not so distant past that public opinion about social injustices perpetrated by companies who owned politicians could change the way those industries wer regulated.  The change agent in Roosevelt and Taft's time was a combination of the President and investigative journalists.  The catuionary tale here is that it appears that the hey day of investigative journalism is well behind us.  The advent of the internet and with it people who write content at no charge has led to the decline of people who write content for a living, and those are the people we need on the job in order to uncover irregularites.  Now that the Supreme Court has lifted any cap on how much a company can openly contribute to a Congressional candidate (not to mention what they get behind closed doors), we are going to need investigations into accountability.