Books: Mr. Madison's War

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Brant concedes all this. In rebuttal, he argues that Madison deserved credit for the victory because he pushed through the construction of the heavily armored ships that won the battles on the Great Lakes and Lake Champlain, and backed the rise of young generals such as Winfield Scott, who finally stopped the British armies. Brant blames historians' low opinion of Madison as President on a failure to appreciate his "quiet methods" and "an underestimate of the titanic difficulties heaped on him by the refusal of New England to take part in the war."

Where's Jemmy? Brant began his spirited defense of Madison in 1938 while he was working as an editorial writer for the now defunct St. Louis Star-Times. The biography soon came to take so much of his time that Brant gave up his journalistic career. "If anyone had told me in 1938 that I would be working on Madison for 23 years, I would have been appalled," says Brant, now a spry, white-thatched 76. "I should never have started it."

Brant can still whack out a crackling paragraph in the style of his old newspaper days. But in his sixth volume, as in the previous five, he smothers this talent by his pack-rat compulsion to drag in everything pertaining to Madison and his times, no matter how deadening it may be. Even so, the main weakness of his final book is Madison himself, who was far too small a man for the heroic role that Brant would have him play. At times, in fact, even Author Irving Brant seems to forget about little Jemmy, as page after page goes by without a mention of James Madison.