He is the assistant managing editor and Washington bureau chief of Newsweek, also known for his regular appearances as a news analyst on Sunday morning television. The author of several books, most notably until now, Robert Kennedy: His Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), he spoke recently in his Washington, D.C. office with Naval History Editor Fred L. Schultz about his new book, John Paul Jones: Sailor, Hero, Father of the American Navy, to be released in May, also by Simon & Schuster.
Naval History: In deciding to write this book, you obviously thought previous biographies were lacking in some respects. In what respects were they lacking?
Thomas: [Rear] Admiral [Samuel Eliot] Morison's biography is a great one. He certainly did the research. But Morison was a patrician. You can tell he has a slightly snobbish attitude toward Jones. Jones was a parvenu, an arriviste, and he really was not a gentleman, even though he spent most of his life trying to become one. Admiral Morison was a gentleman. And although he is broad-minded and admires Jones's courage, you can tell he is slightly put off by Jones's character. He doesn't avoid this judgment; he's willing to make it. But you can feel him slightly skating around his character.
So I thought more could be done on Jones's character and on Jones as a self-made man. One thing that really interested me, other than the fact that Jones was a great warrior, was that he was a truly American figure who had to create himself and had to overcome his lower-class roots. His father was a gardener on an estate in Scotland, and a little bitter, I think, about being patronized by the lord of the manor. In the 18th century the world was sharply divided. There was the great chain of being, in which you were born to your caste. Jones was born to a lower caste, and he didn't like it. One way to ascend to a higher caste was by going to sea. he best way to do that was to join the Royal Navy, but he needed connections. So he went into the merchant service and clawed his way up. He became captain of a merchant ship at age 21, but Royal Navy officers still condescended to him. Then he killed a man and had to flee and change his name. He washes up on the shores of the New World, and it's his big chance because the Revolution is about to break out. And there's no better way to become a gentleman than to get a commission in the brand new American Navy. His commission says: John Paul Jones, Esquire.
He generally gets what he wants, although he's never satisfied. He always wants more honors. He's delighted when the French make him a chevalier. I think he has three different coats of arms, all entirely contrived. He's not a democrat, he's not an egalitarian. And he's a great example of social mobility. This is important: He was just ambitious as hell, and thank God he was. All of the founding fathers were ambitious as hell, and it's a good thing they were, because we might be speaking with a British accent otherwise. Their drive for freedom and subsequent personal glory was the reason why they were able to overcome such great odds.
It took guys like Jones to do it. There were damn few of them militarily. There were a lot of good thinkers, but militarily there weren't a lot of great warriors in those Continental armies and navies. Jones was about the bravest. The only one comparable I can think of is Benedict Arnold, but he was a traitor. And Captain [John] Barry is a significant exception. He had a couple of good cruises and there is a view, as you know, that he's the true father of the Navy, partly because of what he did later. In terms of dash, daring, pluck, sheer courage, and a kind of strategic genius, Jones had no peer. The history of the Continental Navy is pretty sorry. Essentially, its ships hid in port. If you look at the won-lost record of ships taken, the British cleaned up, and we didn't do much to them. There were a few single-ship actions, but mostly we were being blockaded.
Naval History: Do you think Jones deserves to be called the Father of the Navy?
Thomas: I do. Jones was absolutely the first warrior who really took it to the British. He understood that we were not going to beat the British Navy mano a mano. We had to take the battle to Britain; we had to raid the English Coast. He was a pioneer in psychological warfare, if you will, and he was, in modern terms, an early terrorist. I have to be careful with that word, because he did not believe in killing civilians. But he was willing to burn their cities if need be, and he actively plotted to do that. He understood psychological warfare well. He didn't use that term, but he understood that you had to scare the enemy; that the British had to understand there was a cost to this revolution, and taking the fight to Britain was the way to do it.
Correspondence between Jones and Robert Morris addresses precisely this subject. Both understood this was the way to stick a needle in the side of the British lion that would make the British lion howl. And it did. The British papers of that era are full of stories about the pirate Paul Jones, this exciting Robin Hood figure who was going to come burn their villages.
Britain really had not been invaded in 700 years. I think the last time a British town had been burned was by the Dutch at the end of the 17th Century. And the British very much believed in their wall of wood, which was the Royal Navy. So it was a real shock when Jones broke through that wall. The admiralty minutes indicate they were meeting in the middle of the night on Sunday. They want to catch this guy but they can't catch him. After Jones's battle in the Bonhomme Richard, they sent out a significant number of ships to catch him. But they couldn't find him. He had waited until the wind shifted and blew strong out of the east before he made his break.
According to his diaries and other papers, he took great, exuberant joy in thumbing his nose at the Brits. And he loved sailing past Spithead and by the British Fleet, straight down the middle of the English Channel, and not getting caught. He was the fox, and they just could not catch him.
Naval History: After reading this book, it is obvious you know your way around sailing vessels. How important was that in getting to know your subject?
Thomas: I don't pretend to be a great seaman, but I think having sailed is important. I grew up sailing small, 14-foot boats on Long Island Sound, and cruising with my parents on charter boats off of the coast of Maine and around Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts Bay, and Long Island Sound off New York.
That does not qualify me as a hardcore sailor. But I spent a lot of time in boats as a kid, and I know which way the wind is blowing. It's a little bit like skiing; if you learn it young, you do it instinctively. I instinctively know how to sail a boat. I haven't done that much big-boat sailing, except a couple of Vineyard races when I was a kid. But I do know how to sail. And it just helps; I can feel it. I've been in storms, I've been in terrible nor'easters that blew 50 and 60 knots, and I've seen the terrible power of the sea. So I think it's useful when writing about the power of the sea if you've felt it and you've seen it, even to a limited degree.
The Providence Foundation kindly took me along for a couple of nights on its replica of the Providence, a single-masted, gaff-rigged sloop. We sailed out past Block Island, which is where Jones actually fought his first naval battle, when a motley group of American ships failed to capture the Glasgow, a British man-of-war. I sailed near the site of his hearing his first shot fired in anger, on a beautiful night, probably not very different from the May night he first saw action. I've never sailed a great length on a square-rigger, so I don't pretend to have that knowledge.
Naval History: How did your visit to Jones's native Scotland affect your perspective?
Thomas: It made a much bigger difference than I expected. To tell you the truth, I went to Scotland thinking this was sort of a token visit. In the back of my mind I was thinking, "Well, at least I can say I went there." But there was something about walking around Saint Mary's Isle, to the beach where Jones landed on his way to try to kidnap the Earl of Selkirk. That was very moving, and it gave me a feel for his day.
The Scottish countryside where he grew up can't be much different; the gardens laid out by his father still exist. Not much has changed in Dumfries in the last 250 years. You can go to the little town of White Haven—which he tried to burn—a little Georgian town on the northwest coast of England. They've done some engineering on the inner harbor, so I didn't get an exact feel for it. But the parapet Jones climbed is still there. The fortifications are still intact. And to my surprise and delight, I found it inspiring and moving and useful to be walking around there.
Naval History: What was the reaction of the locals when you told them what you were doing?
Thomas: They laughed. They still think he's a pirate. I ran into a guy walking down to the beach, and he looked up and said, "John Paul Jones? Wasn't he the guy who stole the silver?" It's true, Jones did steal the Earl of Selkirk's silver when the Earl was not home.
Naval History: What did you find in the research that surprised you most?
Thomas: What Jones's letters convey is his tremendously lonely struggle to make it, and his grappling with his own ego. He's a creature of the enlightenment. He read enlightenment authors, such as [Joseph] Addison. He read that mankind is perfectible and that reason and virtue will banish your demons. But of course he never can banish his demons; his pride and his love of glory always come back. He knows he should not sulk and pout over honors that have been denied him. But he can't help himself. And you can feel this turmoil in him, of his trying to rise above his own base instincts, but he routinely fails.
When he is on dry land, he's very unhappy a good deal of the time; he is feeling slighted and thwarted and that his true worth is not recognized. I don't say this in the book, but I suspect he was a manic depressive. In battle, he's euphoric. He has tremendous highs; he is gleeful. But of course, over the course of his lifetime, he's only in battle for several hours.
I think this is often the warriors' fate, that what they were bred and born to do, they do only for maybe a day in their life. It is one magnificent day, but the rest of the time they're feeling thwarted and, in some ways yearning for war. I think Jones is in that small category of people who can honestly be called war lovers. He really did love war and missed it when he wasn't partaking in it.
Naval History: If you had been a reporter during the Revolution, what would you have asked Jones in an interview?
Thomas: How can you possibly make a dent in the Royal Navy? I think he would have answered: "You have to be clever, you have to get the French on your side, and you have to take the battle to the enemy and take chances. You must use subterfuges and ruses de guerre to raid their coasts and to outsmart them."
Naval History: Jones comes off in the book as insecure and in near-constant need of ego massage.
Thomas: Constant, yes.
Naval History: How does Jones compare to the military officers you've known since you've been in journalism?
Thomas: The classic model of the modern military officer, I would say, is the anti-Jones—cautious, careful, risk averse. Right now there's a tremendous struggle going on in the Pentagon. At the top, [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld sees a culture of risk aversion in military leadership, and he's trying to overcome it. He says he's had some luck at the very top, with [Air Force] General [Richard] Myers and [Marine Corps] General [Peter] Pace, the Chairman and Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. And he's had luck with some junior officers, who are more eager to take risks and go into combat. But he's run into resistance in-between with senior officers who may remember Vietnam and who are very much into force protection. A lot of the military is devoted to force protection now; not seeking out the enemy, but protecting our own forces.
I'm not casting a value judgment on this. I really am not, because Jones took some foolhardy risks. And it may be that the modern military is prudent in its risk-aversion. We're on the verge, as we speak, of an engagement that may test all this. Let's see how that turns out. But I do know that the Pentagon is trying to work on risk-aversion. Jones is a model of somebody who completely ignored risk and plunged into battle. He famously wanted to sail only in harm's way, and he did.
Naval History: Academic historians, I predict, will look down their noses at your book. Why do you think that is?
Thomas: There is a tension between journalists and academic historians. Academic historians, to some degree, have left the arena; they don't write for popular audiences. So that's a vacuum that journalists and popular historians naturally have filled. Somebody's got to write history for the masses. I think there's a natural resentment that amateurs like me come in and start writing about a subject an academic may have spent his whole life studying. I'll spend two or three years. How can I possibly know enough to get it right? I'm mindful of that, and I think I was careful. I did a lot of research on this book. And I actually showed it to some academics to save me from my stupid mistakes. I hope they did. They certainly did see mistakes, and I tried to correct them.
Naval History: What would you suggest we do to get young people interested in history—naval history and maritime history, in particular?
Thomas: One of the tragedies of history, generally, in the last 20 or 30 years—and I say this as the father of college-age kids—is that academic history has conspired to make it dull in an effort to be politically correct. Much of this effort is positive. It is true, history has neglected the downtrodden and oppressed. And that imbalance needed to be corrected. But the historians have gone overboard, and they've thrown out all the dead white males. In the process, they've taken out too many figures who are interesting.
People like to read about people. If you can't write about all those dead white males, you've killed much of the cast of your play; there's not as much to read about. Yes, you can make a history of cats in Paris in the 1800s interesting, but understandably, most ordinary people want to read about heroes, and they want to read about the people who made this country. It is a fact of history that, by and large, this was done by people who are now dead white males.
So it's a shame history has just plain gone in a different direction and left it to the popular historians. But I'm only too happy to write about dead white males, even if the academy is not.
Naval History: Besides Jones, who are your heroes?
Thomas: My heroes are people who have overcome fear. It's not people who are necessarily or automatically brave, but people who are afraid and overcome their fear. I wrote an article in Newsweek about [11 September's] Flight 93, and I wept as I wrote it. The courage that it took for those ordinary citizens, in 15 minutes, to overcome their fear and attack their hijackers I found to be profoundly moving—scenes of men in the back of the plane reciting the 23rd Psalm, and Todd Beamer saying the Lord's Prayer to some telephone operator. That was very affecting to me. The piece I wrote is a little over the top, to tell you the truth, because I was so moved by it. Those kind of ordinary heroes are, I think, the greatest heroes. But there are plenty of ordinary heroes all over the place.
In terms of famous folks, I have pretty conventional heroes. For instance, I like it that [Winston] Churchill was in the wilderness before he came back. One of the things that makes him heroic is that he was a has-been, that he was washed up. And that makes his coming back on the world stage more heroic than if he'd been on top all the way through.
John F. Kennedy is a hero to me, because he was sick and in pain all the time. The fact that he functioned as a president when he was in such terrible pain and apparently full of drugs I find to be heroic. It's the overcoming of fear and pain that, to me, defines great heroism.