Taking Liberties, Though Wittily, With History

Ulysses S. Grant was 46 when elected president of the United States for the first time, and only 54 upon leaving office.

“Grant was a young guy, not that doughty face we know from a $50 bill,” says Ev Ehrlich, the author of a new book about our 18th president.

Bill Clinton was 46 when first elected, and will likewise be 54 come the next president’s inauguration day.

Alike in few other ways--it’s hard to picture Clinton capturing Vicksburg--each of these historical figures is a colorful and compelling character to Ehrlich, who served in the first term of Clinton’s administration as undersecretary of commerce.

Colorful enough, in fact, that if either president hadn’t existed, a fiction writer might have felt an urge to invent him.

And that is more or less what Ehrlich has done, penning U.S. Grant’s make-believe autobiography.

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A number of people believe a recent biography of Ronald Reagan should be sold from the fiction shelf, inasmuch as imaginary beings pop up in it.

“I feel better that at least mine comes with the word ‘novel’ on the cover,” Ehrlich says.

Earlier there was the Clinton-inspired roman a clef, “Primary Colors,” written by a guy (Joe Klein) who didn’t even put his own name on the cover.

Literary license knowing no bounds, fact and fiction continue to blur, with more than one wordsmith seeming to have graduated with a doctorate in E.L. Doctorow.

Everett Ehrlich is a trained economist out of the University of Michigan, who has put his PhD to good use in the private sector for Unisys Corp. and for the public good in the Congressional Budget Office, among other things. He provides economics commentary for National Public Radio and runs a Washington-based consultancy advising everything from Fortune 500 firms to the Major League Baseball Players Assn.

It is in the oxymoronic role of historical novelist, however, that Ehrlich has been able to best utilize the years he spent (1993-97) in and around the White House.

No shrinking violet, Ehrlich was so self-satisfied with his first satirical novel, “Big Government,” that he alludes to it as “the funniest writing to come out of Washington without Ken Starr’s signature on it.”

Yet the fact of the matter is that Ehrlich’s prose is genuinely witty--with the stipulation that it is a columnist’s license to cite something funny as a fact.

Because unless one takes umbrage at digs made at Robert E. Lee as a “sanctimonious little mama’s boy,” or at Abe Lincoln’s being portrayed as God’s yokel, coming out of Grant’s own quill, then what Ehrlich has done is clever indeed.

The premise is that “Grant Speaks” (Warner Books, $25.95) is actually a wild first draft of the president’s memoirs that Grant and collaborator Mark Twain put aside. Add to this a twist that there were two boys who came to be called Ulysses Grant--one eventually nicknamed “Useless”--and it’s all pretty off the wall.

Ehrlich poaches liberally from Grant’s authentic autobiography, published in 1886, attempting to capture the old soldier’s syntax as realistically as possible.

But as the celebrated author Sherwood Anderson, who, like Grant, was born in Ohio in the 19th century, once wrote: “The one thing that cannot be satirized is human dignity.” This is what Ehrlich kept in mind while confronted with an uphill struggle worthy of Teddy Roosevelt--how to treat a real hero humorously yet honorably.

He succeeded, as long as no one confuses fabrication with fact.

“My book is to history,” Ehrlich jokes, “what [the film] ‘JFK’ was to the Warren Report.”

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Grant died at 63. His was a life that spanned frontier days and industrialization, valor on the battlefield and abject failure in business, popularity in elections and scandals in office.

How history--or fiction--will ultimately treat Clinton is of similar interest to Ehrlich. Will the ex-president trot the globe as Grant did? Go broke? Be remembered for the wrong reasons? Write a tell-all or a tell-some?

Time will tell, just as it will identify Clinton’s successor. George W. Bush leads in the current polls, but Stephen Douglas was favored over Lincoln once, too, until they stood side by side. “I watched Bill Bradley debate Al Gore,” Ehrlich says, “and Bradley just stood there like Salieri looking at Mozart.”

Maybe so. Then again, not all of Mozart’s biographers stuck to the facts, either.

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Mike Downey’s column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Write to: Los Angeles Times, 202 W. 1st St., Los Angeles, CA 90012. E-mail: mike.downey@latimes.com