Ulysses S. Grant

Event Details

Josiah Bunting III has written what The New York Times calls a “vivid, enjoyable and well-written” book about “one of our most enigmatic historic giants,” Ulysses S. Grant. While rubbing “some tarnish off the idol,” Bunting follows Grant's career from superb horseman to professional soldier to two-term president of the United States. He finds that Grant's reputations for drunkenness, battlefield butchery, and general seediness, are all overdone; that the scandals plaguing his administrations, in an era of small government, were mainly small beer. Bunting, now president of The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, is a 1963 graduate of Virginia Military Institute who studied military history at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes scholar and at Columbia University as a John Burgess Fellow. Following active duty in the regular army, where he attained the rank of major, serving in Vietnam, he taught history at West Point. He was also president of Briarcliff College, Hampden Sydney College, and VMI. He has written four novels, and is working on a biography of George C. Marshall. A book signing will follow his Forum.