5 books to read this summer from Bill Gates

Bill Gates books to read for summer have some great reads.

The first cross-cutting theme is that being Commander in Chief is by far the hardest part of the hardest job in the world. It takes good judgment, moral courage, emotional stability, and curiosity (especially a willingness to learn from previous wars). Based on these criteria, I think we were lucky to have Abraham Lincoln in charge during the Civil War. But Beschloss shows that even Lincoln made significant mistakes and struggled mightily under the strain of war. Lincoln wrote to various friends that he was “wrung by the bitterest anguish,” felt almost ready to “hang” himself, and “I have a strong impression that I shall not live to see the end.”

Similarly, we were lucky to have FDR at the helm during World War II. But Beschloss shows that his moral compass was often on the fritz. I had already known that FDR was responsible for the internment of Japanese-American families and chose not to act to save European Jews even after he was absolutely clear that the Nazis were systematically exterminating them. But I hadn’t realized that FDR engaged in Nixon-like spying on political enemies; his son Elliott later acknowledged that his dad “may have been the originator of the concept of employing the IRS as a weapon of political retribution.” (Eleanor Roosevelt comes across with her reputation fully intact based on her moral and physical courage during the war.)