East Cobb Attorney Writes His Way Into History

East Cobb resident Jonathan Jordan is in New Orleans this week, speaking at the National World War II Museum about his new book, “Brothers, Rivals, Victors: Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley, and the Partnership That Drove the Allied Conquest in Europe.”

The book has gotten several positive reviews from prominent military historians and authors in publications including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Jordan, 44, a commercial bankruptcy attorney at King & Spalding, has been surprised by the critical acclaim.

“I’m just a guy who lives in the suburbs with three kids and two dogs, and when I read some of the reviews it almost sounds like they’re talking about somebody else’s book,” Jordan said over lunch at an East Cobb deli. “It’s taken a while to really dawn on me that there might be people who are truly respected, put-on-a-pedestal historians who would actually take note of a book that I had written.”

Jordan met his wife, Katherine, at Vanderbilt Law School, and in 1992 they moved to Texas to start their careers. They moved here in 2001 and settled in East Cobb, “principally for the schools, and loved it ever since.”

 Jordan will speak about his book June 16 at the East Cobb Library, a place where he did research for “Brothers, Rivals, Victors.”

How did you make the step from lawyer to published author?

“During my college years I read a lot of popular military history magazines. They were just fun subjects to read about. You could read them very quickly. Eventually I realized I could do this myself. So I began writing magazine articles in the mid-90s on a bunch of different topics.

 “One topic that stuck out to me was the navy of the Republic of Texas, which I didn’t know anything about. I read a little bit about it, realized it hadn’t been done in a serious way since the 1930s. So I wrote a magazine article about it to see if it would be a possible book idea, and turned it into [his first] book. That was really the start of  it. After that, writing kind of took on a life of its own. It’s now moved in with us. It's set up shop, props its feet up on the coffee table just like my kids do.”

How do you balance that – home life, work and writing?

“It’s a matter of taking the time for what’s important without gutting the other important things in your life. In my case writing means getting up early and working late, during the times that my children are asleep or doing other things.

 “It means working weekends, and instead of taking vacations to the beach it means going to really sexy places like Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania [the U.S. Army War College], rummaging through box after box of handwritten notes.

 “The writing process is something that I just fit in where I can. I fit in writing and editing on sidelines of soccer fields, courtside of basketball games, while giving blood.

 “I’m serious. There a lot of down time when you give blood. You have them put the line into your non-dominate hand and you can sit there and get about 20 or 30 minutes of editing done.  And nobody going to ask you to take a call or work on a memo if you’re there giving blood.”

 Where did the idea for this book come from?

 “This one was kind of a resurrection – this one probably harkens back to the days when I built model airplanes and would crash them into the sandbox. I watched “Patton.” It was kind of background at that point.  I knew about some of these movies about larger- than-life people – the Technicolor heroes.

“The idea – looking through the literature that was out there – was how do you take somebody who’s a legend, or three legends in this case, and make readers understand that they’re real people? They had some extraordinary talents. But they also were people with insecurities and gripes.

“And I look back over my life and see, here are places that I’ve got a strength, or here are places where I’ve got a weakness or insecurity. And I thought the idea of showing how these guys who were stars were not very different from the rest of us was intriguing.

 “The other [theme] of this book was the fact that these guys had to get along with each other but they were very different. You’ve got three people with different philosophies, different backgrounds, but they nonetheless worked together. They put aside their differences. It was kind of bipartisanship that we complain about not having now. That’s essentially what they were doing.”   

It’s a buddy book?

“In a lot of ways it’s a buddy book.  They were fren-emies at times. If they had Twitter they probably would have tweeted some complaints about each other from time to time but fundamentally they got the job done.

“They are no different in many, many ways to a group of typical soldiers in a platoon or a squad. They just fight with telephones and pens rather than mortars and M1 rifles.”

Where did you think you learned how to write?

“Writing nonfiction has two components, the writing and the research part. And really both those come together in the book. I learned a lot of that from practicing law, strangely enough.

“I started out [in Texas] as a bankruptcy lawyer but then our firm needed help in its products liability group. I got dragged kicking a screaming to the products liability group, basically defending General Motors in car-wreak cases. 

“The goal of that kind of litigation – personal injury litigation – is to look under every rock you can find, to find pieces of a story. You take all those fragments and put them together into a format that a lay audience will understand and enjoy listening to.

“So, that litigation approach, taking pieces and compiling them into a story and then making that story a narrative really is the driving philosophy behind how I write.”

Do you travel a lot or do you do a lot of research online?

“There’s quite a bit you can do online. For research you can’t do online you can often get enough of a roadmap to what you need so that you go in a more efficient manner. I handle trips to archives almost like a military operation. Literally block out time:  I need to get through these boxes by the end of this day. Being away from your family, being away from work, is difficult. It’s expensive. You have to make the most of the time you’re there.”

 In your acknowledgements for this book you thank many libraries, including the Cobb County Public Library, where you will be speaking June 16 [the East Cobb branch].

 “I’m looking forward to that.  They gave me a lot of help when I was researching by facilitating inter-library loans with the Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kansas. So every couple of weeks I’d go out there [the east Cobb Library] and bring in a box and order another box.  They were extremely cooperative.”

What’s your next project?

"Roosevelt’s wartime people. In the same way that one of my favorite authors, Doris Kearns Goodwin, wrote about Lincoln’s “Team of Rivals” during the Civil War, Roosevelt brought together a similar team of rivals.“His traditional enemies in the New Deal years were big business and Republicans. But during the war, and those two years leading up to Pearl Harbor, on foreign issues Roosevelt’s tradition enemies were his friends. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party – a lot of isolationists there – were his enemies on those issues. So he swept part of his cabinet out and brought in Republicans who were the classic reach-across-the-isle types that Roosevelt invited to come into what was essentially a coalition government.

“I like military history, but simply talking about battles gets somewhat uninteresting.  It’s interesting at some level but the juncture of politics and military issues to me is where it becomes more fascinating.”

More on Jonathan Jordan:

Author's Website

Author's Facebook Page

Book Excerpt

Speech at Pritzker Military Library