‘Ulysses S. Grant’ Hails a Complex Chief

If asked to name the most popular U.S. figure of the 19th century, most Americans would probably answer Abraham Lincoln. Yet one after another, experts in a fine new PBS documentary hand that distinction to the man buried in Grant’s tomb.

The usual facile definition of Ulysses S. Grant as a gifted Civil War general and inept president is transcended in this two-part effort spanning four hours.

He was neither unflawed as a warrior nor without strengths as a peacetime leader, we learn from an account enhanced by striking photos, savage political cartoons and reenactments as seamless and well-produced as you’ll find in historical documentaries.

“Ulysses S. Grant,” which begins Sunday, is another masterwork from “American Experience,” although it doesn’t start quite that way, as producer-director Adriana Bosch’s necessary early attention to the North-South conflict takes us to killing fields that are surely familiar to even casual students of U.S. history.

Yet even here, the account of unrelenting battle is especially powerful as well as poignant, following a trail of blood leading to Appomattox, where tall, regal Robert E. Lee surrenders to his shorter, mud-splattered adversary, as if their roles were reversed.

Pictures of battles, from Vicksburg to Wilderness and Cold Harbor, remind us again that anonymous dead lumps in the field link warfare across centuries, even millenniums.

And this portrait of Grant as a soldier who enjoyed war but despised the slaughter rises far above the usual TV biography, affirming him as a complex man of ironies and contradictions.

But he is seen, above all, one of great character, his reputation as a whiskey-head notwithstanding. He’s recalled here as one of history’s tragic heroes, the skillful warrior who defeated the great Lee in battle but was often overmatched by the generals of politics and capitalism he encountered in eight years as president.

The consensus here is that Grant was plenty tough, smart and determined. But “sneakiness just wasn’t on his radar screen,” says historian David Bradley.

The U.S. was already a speeding industrial engine--surely needing a leader with different skills--when the reluctant Grant took the presidency in 1869, much less decisively than his old colleague, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, took Atlanta. “I’m afraid I’m elected,” Grant informed his wife when the ballots were counted.

Part 2, produced and directed by Elizabeth Deane, offers a stronger sense of Grant as a man. Just picture this strong advocate of Reconstruction being confounded by Southern die-hards who resist black political power. When historian Donald L. Miller says the South lost the war but “won the peace,” he’s speaking of an apartheid that would endure perhaps another 90 years.

After election to a second term, moreover, the cigar-smoking president appears just as perplexed by crooks in his administration who taint him with scandal, his despondency and the cancer in his throat growing simultaneously.

He spent his last days in financial ruin but still beloved, racing against death to complete his memoirs. Historians here praise both volumes and the intellect of their author. “He was a reasonable man in an unreasonable time,” one of them says.

Grant was 63 when he died in 1885. The Union army’s former commander in chief was buried in a plain, dark suit, viewers are told. He had sold his uniforms to pay his debts.

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“American Experience” will be shown Sunday night at 9 on KCET and KVCR. Part 2 will be shown May 12. The network has rated it TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children).