Saturday, March 23, 2024

D.W. Buffa

D.W. Buffa's new novel is Lunatic Carnival, the tenth legal thriller involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and, most recently, America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Here is part II of Buffa's take on Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series:
In 1964, Lyndon Johnson won the Presidency in a landslide against Barry Goldwater, with more than 61 percent of the vote. Four years later, in 1968, Richard Nixon was elected President of the United States with only 43.4 percent of the vote, and yet, according to Theodore H. White, Nixon’s election was also a landslide, a negative landslide, the first one in American history. Adding the vote for George Wallace, an extreme conservative, to that of Nixon, a traditional conservative, the conservative vote against Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic candidate, was 56.9 percent. What had happened?

The war in Vietnam had happened. What became known as the Tet offensive, had broken “the confidence of the American people in their government, their institutions, their leadership….” The enemy “had astounded the world with a force, a fury, a battlefield presence that gave the lie to all that America has been told for months,” that America was winning the war. It is one of the ironies of history that the Tet offensive had been “a complete failure,” with a third of the enemy forces killed, and none of its objectives achieved, but failure on the battlefield was a victory in the domestic politics of the United States.

Opposition to the war was led by university students, a group that had become, in White’s description, “the largest working-class group with a single interest in the United States - or any other country.” There had been 1,350,000 college students in l939; there were 6,900,000 in 1968. Political compromise, the idea that it takes time to change things, was seen by university students as nothing more than an “excuse for postponing the inevitable, for denying the truth. If a certain goal is accepted by the best thinking as an unchallenged good, why cannot it be made real now?” What was considered the “best thinking” was itself a reflection of a remarkable revision, and sometimes an outright rejection, of traditional values. “On stage, on screen, in letters,” American intellectuals “created a world without heroes.” The “new avant-garde has come to despise its own country and its traditions as has rarely happened in any community in the world; American institutions, customs and laws are regarded as the greatest system of restraint on that individual self-expression which it sees the highest right of man.”

Free from all restraint, and appalled by what the future seemed to offer, American students mobilized against the war. Convinced that the war would not be ended so long as Lyndon Johnson was still President, the question was who among the Democratic politicians who opposed the war would be willing to challenge him for the Democratic nomination. Eugene McCarthy, the Senator from Minnesota who owed his start in politics to Hubert Humphrey, decided it should be him. McCarthy did not doubt he was qualified. “You can put it down that I’m the best prepared man who ever ran for the Presidency of this country,” he told White. McCarthy had no political allies and few personal friends. He “lived by truth and principles of his own soul, with a courage that was to change American history. He owed no one anything, recognized no political obligation - not even to his own movement, or his own constituency.” And then White adds, in one of the most subtly devastating lines ever written about a candidate for the nation’s highest office: “All through the year, one’s admiration of the man grew - and one’s affections lessened.”

McCarthy came within a few votes of winning the Democratic primary in New Hampshire, and Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not be a candidate for re-election. Bobby Kennedy entered the race, and the McCarthy students felt they had been stabbed in the back. Martin Luther King was murdered, two months later Bobby Kennedy was killed, and the world seemed to be spinning out of control. The choice for Democrats was now between McCarthy and Lyndon’s Johnson’s vice-president, Hubert Humphrey, but when the Democratic convention that met in Chicago became a study in televised violence, the nomination was almost not worth winning. White insists that, “The revolt in the streets was an attempt of the alienated to express their desire for an identity, an attempt to control their environment by protest.” It may have been that, but it was also an attempt at intimidation, an attempt by the anti-war forces to win in the streets what they could not win in the convention, an attempt to overturn the result of an elective process by threatening to destroy everything in their way, an attempt which brought the police into open conflict, which, witnessed by tens of millions on television, seemed at the very least to cast doubt on the ability of the Democrats to govern even their own party.

In all the turmoil, no one paid much attention to a minority report that, in a moment of absent mindedness, the Democratic Convention adopted directing the formation of a reform commission to take up the question of how the party could become more open and more responsive. After nearly a year of hearings, the Reform Commission decided that it was not enough to prohibit the exclusion of blacks and other minorities from participation in the Democratic Party; they must, as White describes it, “be guaranteed their mathematical proportion of representation….” This meant quotas, and it would become, four years later, one of the major reasons for George McGovern’s massive, inglorious defeat.

Scorned by conservatives and hated by liberals, Hubert Humphrey never had a chance. With their protests, with their open contempt for American traditions and American power, liberals made it possible for George Wallace to become a serious candidate. His followers, like those who follow Donald Trump today, had “a nearly religious faith that everyone was against them but the people, and that the saving of white America from the pointy-heads was a cause greater than politics.” The phrase ‘pointy-heads’ was George Wallace’s contribution to the American political vocabulary, a more colorful reference to the government bureaucrat who decided everything and knew nothing, the over-educated, narrow-minded, unelected government official who, as Wallace joyfully added, carried only a ham sandwich in his otherwise empty brief case.

Wallace was a racist, pure and simple, the Governor of Alabama who had declared with willful pride, “Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” His appeal in the North was to the white working class, the union member in Michigan who had moved to the suburbs so he and his family could live in safe neighborhoods and send their children to safe schools, and had then discovered that the government thought it necessary, in the interest of racial balance, to open their neighborhoods to public housing and bus their children thirty or forty miles away to a school in a crime-ridden inner city. While the children of the affluent white professional class were protesting the war they did not want to fight, the white working class was voting for Wallace to protest a liberal government that would not leave them alone; a government, as Wallace was quick to point out, made up of people who could afford to send their own children to private schools.

McCarthy had been defeated in Chicago, and Humphrey was defeated in November, but the student movement continued to protest the war. Nixon was concerned about this, not with the protests as such, but the absence, among young people, of “a sense of common challenge.” Sitting with Teddy White in the Oval Office, days after his inauguration, Nixon said he agreed with what John F. Kennedy has said in his inaugural, that famous line, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” The nation “needed a sense of purpose, a sense of a binding ideal.” He asked White if he remembered the phrase he had used in the campaign: “‘the country needs the lift of a driving dream.’ That is what he was looking for.”

Lyndon Johnson had spoken of the Great Society, and had promised to find the experts who would discover what the American purpose should be. Nixon agreed with what Kennedy had said, but he had no more idea than anyone else what anyone should be told who asked what they could do for their country. Nixon knew it was important, and White thought it important as well; not just important, but a matter more complex than what Lincoln or FDR had faced, because, “it defied definition, thus it was graver.” This, to be polite, is almost insane. Something is missing, without it the country can never be what it should be, and no one, at least no one elected President, has any idea what it actually might be!

Four years later, in l972, the Democratic Party, now led by George McGovern, did not have any doubt about the purpose of the United States, or, rather, the purpose of the United States government. It was to oppress the American people. The government, which did nothing but lie, supported a “corrupt clique in Saigon against a peace-loving regime in Hanoi,” and murdered innocent civilians. McGovern’s army was not just out to win an election; they were going to change politics and make it, finally, democratic, everyone able to participate at every stage in the choice, and the election, of candidates. The quotas of the Reform Commission of l969 were applied in full vigor. Blacks, women, and youth, defined as anyone between the ages of l8 and 30, were represented at the Democratic convention in proportion to their percentage of the population. Every trio of speakers contained a man and a woman, a black and a white. Democrats thought this progress; Nixon thought it helped him win the election. Accepting the Republican nomination, he insisted that “the way to end discrimination against some is not to begin discrimination against others. Dividing Americans into quotas is totally alien to the American tradition.”

In 1968, as has been noted, Nixon and Wallace together had 56.9 percent of the vote. In l972, Nixon alone got 60.7 percent of the vote. The Democratic share went from 42.7 percent for Humphrey to 37.5 percent for McGovern. Lyndon Johnson had gone from the “greatest mandate, the greatest personal triumph of any election year, the election of l964, to the greatest personal humiliation of any sitting President.” Until Richard Nixon, who, less than two years after winning re-election by almost the same percentage of the vote Johnson had been given, became the first American President to resign in disgrace.

For all his fascination with the personal character and the political style of candidates for the Presidency, Theodore H. White has a deep concern for the underlying forces that were changing American politics by changing America. The students who organized to protest the Vietnam War and made Eugene McCarthy their temporary hero, constituted a new phenomena made possible by an increasing prosperity that, by allowing millions of young people to avoid the necessity of work, gave them the opportunity to spend four or more years in college. There was another large segment of the American population who, with nothing like the same advantages, had faced problems of a kind difficult for anyone who has not faced them to understand. It is impossible, White tells us, “to understand any of the domestic politics of the United States…without understanding how deeply…goes the cleavage of race.”

Unlike most writers on American politics, Theodore H. White knew his history, both ancient and modern. It is, for him, almost a commonplace that no one in American history understood better than Abraham Lincoln what would happen to race relations unless white citizens changed they way they thought. “Now when by all these means you have succeeded in dehumanizing the Negro; when you have put him down and made it forever impossible for him to be but as the beasts of the field; when you have extinguished his soul, and placed him where the ray of hope is blown out in darkness like that which broods over the spirits of the damned; are you quite sure the demon which you have roused will not turn and rend you?”

Starting in the early sixties, there were riots, demonstrations, and protests in the South, and then riots, demonstrations, and protests in the North, for civil rights. In l940, 77 percent of blacks lived in the South; thirty years later, in l970, 65 percent of blacks lived in the industrial states of the North and West, mainly in the major cities. This changed politics. The black vote was now an essential part of the Democratic coalition. But there were other changes as well, one of which White considered a serious threat to political stability. The movement from the South to the North brought with it “a decomposition of family life and family discipline which simply cannot be contained in the traditional form of American democracy or orderly politics.” One fifth of black children were illegitimate in l960; nearly 29 percent in l970. The riots, according to White, “were not race riots.” They were instead “a revolt led by wild youth against authority, against discipline, against the orderly government of a society that had taken too long to pay them heed.” And then he adds, “Despair incubated the riots, but dogma created the thought climate which realized them: the dogma that all ills within the Negro bit-city community are the fault of white men alone….”

It is our great misfortune that black despair at their condition, and white resentment at the remedies that have been tried, are not only still with us, but have, if anything, become more pronounced, intensified by the dangerous rhetoric of our times; rhetoric that, instead of leading us toward a sense of common purpose, something we can believe in, something that challenges our imagination, threatens to divide us even more. In that threat, however, some instruction may be found - the need for a different rhetoric, one that defines what Teddy White thought defied definition, but what both John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, jr. understood: that it is not what we want to achieve, but rather what we want to be, what kind of human being, that is important, and that in a republic, a nation of free men and women, the pursuit of human excellence is the one true common endeavor.
Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Third reading: The Great Gatsby

Third reading: Brave New World.

Third reading: Lord Jim.

Third reading: Death in the Afternoon.

Third Reading: Parade's End.

Third Reading: The Idiot.

Third Reading: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Third Reading: The Scarlet Letter.

Third Reading: Justine.

Third Reading: Patriotic Gore.

Third reading: Anna Karenina.

Third reading: The Charterhouse of Parma.

Third Reading: Emile.

Third Reading: War and Peace.

Third Reading: The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Third Reading: Bread and Wine.

Third Reading: “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities.

Third reading: Eugene Onegin.

Third Reading: The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay.

Third Reading: The Europeans.

Third Reading: The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction.

Third Reading: Doctor Faustus.

Third Reading: the reading list of John F. Kennedy.

Third Reading: Jorge Luis Borges.

Third Reading: History of the Peloponnesian War.

Third Reading: Mansfield Park.

Third Reading: To Each His Own.

Third Reading: A Passage To India.

Third Reading: Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

Third Reading: The Letters of T.E. Lawrence.

Third Reading: All The King’s Men.

Third Reading: The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus.

Third Reading: Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt.

Third Reading: Main Street.

Third Reading: Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I.

--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, March 18, 2024

Chris Nickson

Chris Nickson is the author of eleven Tom Harper mysteries, eight highly acclaimed novels in the Richard Nottingham series, and six Simon Westow mysteries. He is also a well-known music journalist. He lives in his beloved Leeds.

Nickson's newest Simon Westow mystery is The Scream of Sins.

Recently I asked the author about what he was reading. Nickson's reply:
At the moment, a variety of things seems to be the answer, and it's all re-reading. A few favourite Georgette Heyer titles: The Grand Sophy (even with its moment of outmoded anti-Semitism) and Veneita. I love that she has strong heroines, and the dialogue between her female and male lead characters is like watching masters fencing, a masterclass in how to do it. I came later to her, but for the most part I'm very much a convert.

Right now, however, I'm on The Investigator by John Sandford, the first in a series featuring Letty Davenport, the daughter of Lucas, the lead in many of Sandford's books. It's an undemanding read, with plenty of action and violence (typical Sandford), good, breezy dialogue and strong characters. I've long been a fan of his work; everything flows, and he's enough of a pro that you accept the big plot leaps. But this brings in some fresh blood - she's featured to a small degree as a minor character in some of the Davenport novels - and gives the writer a chance to do something different. One thing about Sandford, at least for me: he never disappoints.
Visit Chris Nickson's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Constant Lovers.

The Page 69 Test: The Constant Lovers.

The Page 69 Test: The Iron Water.

The Page 69 Test: The Hanging Psalm.

Q&A with Chris Nickson.

The Page 69 Test: The Molten City.

My Book, The Movie: Molten City.

The Page 69 Test: Brass Lives.

The Page 69 Test: The Blood Covenant.

The Page 69 Test: The Dead Will Rise.

The Page 69 Test: Rusted Souls.

The Page 69 Test: The Scream of Sins.

--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, March 4, 2024

Cara Black

Cara Black is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of 21 books in the Private Investigator Aimée Leduc series, and two World War II-set novels featuring American markswoman Kate Rees. Black has received multiple nominations for the Anthony and Macavity Awards, a Washington Post Book World Book of the Year citation, the Médaille de la Ville de Paris—the Paris City Medal, which is awarded in recognition of contribution to international culture—and invitations to be the Guest of Honor at conferences such as the Paris Polar Crime Festival and Left Coast Crime.

Black's new novel is Murder at la Villette, the 21st installment of her mystery series featuring Parisian private investigator Aimée Leduc.

Recently I asked the author about what she reading. Black's reply:
I've been reading The Propagandist by Cécile Desprairies in the English translation.

To me, historical fiction matters and it's a way of how to breathe life into forgotten moments, lost voices little told women's stories and the timeless human experience.

Published in French as La Propagandiste, written by Desprairies a historian, this is her first novel.

I've read several of her historical books and this story, her first fiction, pulled me in from page one.

It's the story of Lucie, the narrator's mother. who we meet in Paris during the Trente Glorieuses, the Thirty glorious years of de Gaulle after WW2. Lucie's daughter, as a child, attends the meetings of the women of the family organized at their apartment. They gossip. Underneath the conversations, one thing leads to another, piercing the lies and unsaid things of this enigmatic mother.

The masks fall, and the story of this woman, a zealous collaborator, in France, under the Occupation, is revealed in full, in the image of a collective past of which we have, even today, not finished to take inventory. La Propagandiste takes an uncompromising look at the France of collaboration and its imprint on our collective memory.
Visit Cara Black's website and follow her on Twitter.

The Page 69 Test: Murder at the Lanterne Rouge.

My Book, the Movie: Murder at the Lanterne Rouge.

The Page 69 Test: Murder below Montparnasse.

The Page 69 Test: Murder in Pigalle.

My Book, The Movie: Murder in Pigalle.

My Book, The Movie: Murder on the Champ de Mars.

The Page 69 Test: Three Hours in Paris.

The Page 69 Test: Night Flight to Paris.

Writers Read: Cara Black (March 2023).

--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, March 1, 2024

Wendy Church

Wendy Church is the author of the Jesse O’Hara and Shadows of Chicago Mysteries series. The first book in the Jesse O’Hara series, Murder on the Spanish Seas, was named one of Booklist’s Top Ten Debut Mystery/Thriller novels of 2023, and received a starred review.

Church's newest books are Murder Beyond the Pale, the second Jesse O’Hara mystery, and Knife Skills, the first Shadows of Chicago mystery.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Church's reply:
When I'm in the middle of a project I limit my reading to primarily nonfiction (as part of book research), and these days it seems like I'm constantly in the middle of a project! But I always make time for the latest from Val McDermid, and am very excited to finally get my copy of Past Lying, the latest Karen Pirie novel. For some reason I've gravitated towards more UK and Irish crime fiction over the last few years, and also try to make time for Dervla McTiernan's Comac Reilly books, or Brian McGilloway's Lucy Black series. Anyone who's read my books knows I'm not heavy with description, but these authors have such a great command of the language, and manage to keep the pacing up even as they work wonders with verbal illustration, it inspires me to do better in that regard.
Visit Wendy Church's website.

The Page 69 Test: Murder on the Spanish Seas.

Q&A with Wendy Church.

My Book, The Movie: Murder on the Spanish Seas.

The Page 69 Test: Murder Beyond the Pale.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, February 27, 2024

Ellen O’Clover

Ellen O’Clover writes stories about finding your people, falling in love, and figuring it all out (or trying to, anyway). Her debut novel, Seven Percent of Ro Devereux, came out in 2023 with HarperCollins/HarperTeen, and her second book, The Someday Daughter, is just out in bookstores.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. O’Clover's reply:
The last book I read and can’t stop thinking about is Samantha Markum’s Love, Off the Record. I love Markum’s voice: her YA romances are swoony and sincere, with complex characters who feel big, love hard, and navigate coming of age with all the messiness of the genuine human experience. Love, Off the Record follows college freshman newspaper staffers Wyn and Three as they compete for a coveted reporter spot. It’s everything I love in a rivals-to-lovers romance, and I can’t recommend it enough.

I also just finished Krystal Marquis’s The Davenports, a Bridgerton-esque historical romance that follows four young women navigating life and love in 1910 Chicago. This book is an irresistible escape into the lush world of servants, lavish parties, and carriage rides—but also illuminates a period of African American history that’s often overlooked: in the early 1900s, the Davenports are one of the few Black families of wealth and status in the US. This one’s a must-read for anyone who enjoys historical fiction!
Visit Ellen O'Clover's website.

Q&A with Ellen O'Clover.

--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, February 24, 2024

Suzanne Redfearn

Suzanne Redfearn is the #1 Amazon bestselling author of six novels: Where Butterflies Wander, Moment In Time, Hadley & Grace, In an Instant, No Ordinary Life, and Hush Little Baby.

Her books have been translated into twenty-four languages and have been recognized by RT Reviews, Target Recommends, Goodreads, Publisher’s Marketplace, and Kirkus Reviews.

Redfearn has been awarded Best New Fiction from Best Book Awards and has been a Goodreads Choice Awards Finalist.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Redfearn's reply:
This prompt caught me at a moment when I have four books going at once, which is not entirely unusual.

On Audible, I am listening to The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid. This book has been huge for a while, but I mistakenly believed it wasn’t my cup of tea. Based on the cover and title, I thought it was going to be all fluff and romance. One of my book clubs chose it, which is the reason I picked it up, and I’m very glad I did. It has surprising depth and underlying meaning. Reid is an outstanding storyteller, and I am completely caught up in the tale.

On my Kindle, I am reading The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon (author of Code Name Helene). She is a fantastic writer and a master at writing about the past with such detail that I am completely immersed, and I feel like I’m in Maine in 1789 as I’m reading it. There’s also a surprising dash of mysticism, which I enjoy, and the protagonist is wonderful, a strong woman kicking but at a time when women in America were mostly relegated to the sidelines.

On my phone is Hector and the Search for Happiness by Francois Lelord. This book’s been out for a while, and I’m not sure how I stumbled upon it, but it’s a hoot and the perfect book for reading when I’m standing in line or sitting at the car wash. Kooky and heartwarming, I’m in love with Hector and look forward to the next time I get to join him on his quest.

On my bedside table is Jill Hannah Anderson’s latest, Closer to Home. I’ve just started this. It doesn’t release until March, so I am reading an advanced copy. So far it’s fast-paced and suspenseful. The synopsis makes me think it’s going to be a little like Safe Haven by Nicolas Sparks, suspense meets romance.
Visit Suzanne Redfearn's website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

Coffee with a Canine: Suzanne Redfearn and Cooper.

My Book, The Movie: Hush Little Baby.

The Page 69 Test: Hush Little Baby.

The Page 69 Test: No Ordinary Life.

My Book, The Movie: No Ordinary Life.

My Book, The Movie: In an Instant.

The Page 69 Test: In an Instant.

Q&A with Suzanne Redfearn.

My Book, The Movie: Hadley and Grace.

The Page 69 Test: Hadley & Grace.

The Page 69 Test: Moment in Time.

My Book, The Movie: Moment in Time.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, February 22, 2024

David Menconi

David Menconi is an author, critic and journalist in Raleigh, North Carolina. A longtime newspaper writer, he has also written for Billboard, Rolling Stone, the New York Times, and Spin. His fifth and newest book is Oh, Didn’t They Ramble: Rounder Records and the Transformation of American Roots Music, a history of the venerable folk/bluegrass label that has been home to everyone from Alison Krauss to Buckwheat Zydeco.

Recently I asked the author about what he was reading. His reply:
Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

In many ways, Yellowface is a crime novel – and the crime in question is perfect, at least at first. But this story of stolen literary glory eventually mutates into a fascinatingly twisted portrait of a mind unraveling. It stars a first-person anti-hero whose justifications, rationalizations and outright fabrications bring on madness even as she tops the best-seller lists. After she is inevitably found out, she spirals further downward, her grasp of reality broken. But by the end, she’s still plotting one last comeback. Throw in some darkly funny dish about the publishing industry’s uneasy relationship with racism, and it’s a great yarn that manages to cover most of the seven deadly sins.
Visit the David Menconi’s blog.

The Page 99 Test: Ryan Adams: Losering.

My Book, The Movie: Ryan Adams: Losering.

The Page 99 Test: Step It Up and Go.

The Page 99 Test: Oh, Didn't They Ramble.

My Book, The Movie: Oh, Didn't They Ramble.

--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, February 21, 2024

D.W. Buffa

D.W. Buffa's new novel is Lunatic Carnival, the tenth legal thriller involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and, most recently, America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Here is Buffa's take on Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series:
Graduating summa cum laude from Harvard in 1938, Theodore H. White received a fellowship which allowed him to travel to China, where he became correspondent for Time Magazine and then, a few years later, chief of Time’s China bureau. Toward the end of the war, he attended a meeting of the Chinese Communist Party where, in an “unheated, draft-leaking, mud-chinked assembly hall,” he met Mao Tse-tung and knew immediately “who was master, always had been master, always would be master.” Mao had not been elected by the Communist Party; he had chosen himself, but there “was no doubt in l944…that authority was his alone” and “that succession of leadership would pass at his will to whomever he chose.”

Years later, in The Making of the President 1960, White showed how different things were here. Power was not held by one man or one party; power was transferred by frequent and regular elections, and “no people has succeeded at it better, or over a longer period of time, than the Americans.” John F. Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon by a mere 112,000 votes out of nearly 69 million votes cast, but even before the vote had been counted, White knew with complete certainty that, “Good or bad, whatever the decision, America will accept the decision - and cut down any man who goes against it, even though for millions the decision runs contrary to their own votes. The general vote is an expression of national will, the only substitute for violence and blood. Its verdict is to be defended as one defends civilization itself.”

Beginning with the election of 1960, in which he reports how John F. Kennedy was elected, to the election of l980, in which he reports how Jimmy Carter was defeated, Theodore White wrote about every Presidential campaign. No one, before or since, has written about American politics with as much breadth of coverage or depth of understanding. For White, the question was more than the strengths and weaknesses of the candidates; it was the changes that were taking place in the country. He did not just write about the Black vote for Kennedy, or the White vote for Nixon; he wrote about the movement of the Black population from the South to the North, and what that meant for the two races in the nation’s major cities. He had an eye for the small detail that is too often overlooked, and the intellectual honesty to write about what he saw. Watching a crowd of working class voters who had come out for George Wallace in the campaign of l968, he was reminded of the soldiers he had seen in the Second World War, not the soldiers who believed in what they were doing, but the soldiers who had hated their generals and were, more than willing, eager, to kill.

The Making of the President 1960 had an effect on everyone who read it, and gave at least one person the idea that he might one day run for President himself. In the hospital recovering from hepatitis in the fall of 1962, George McGovern read it and thought that “the book, written in a romantic style, made a more serious impression than the later books written by the same author, which McGovern felt ‘missed the story.’ Yet the first story of how a Presidency was won seemed reasonable and simple.” McGovern was on to something. The Making of the President 1960 does read like a romance; mainly, perhaps, because it is written about John F. Kennedy, but also because of how well it is written. Not many writers could describe, the way Theodore White does, what it was like in Hyannisport the day John F. Kennedy waited for the election returns:
Now in November, the New England hardwoods - oak, elm and maple - had given up their color with their leaves, and the scrub pines of the Cape were beginning to show branch tips wind-bored and hurricane-scorched to a rust brown. A slight offshore breeze blew off the surf less waters; the dune grass and the feather-gray tufts of beach rushes bent gently to the breeze. A single gull wheeled over the house and the beach most of the morning, dipping toward the water when a glint suggested food. The sky was pure, the weather still a comfortable few degrees above freezing; the scudding white clouds were to break up by evening as the breeze freshened.
The first chapter of The Making of the President is about what happened on election day. White then goes back to the beginning, to show how it all came about, how much depended on planning and calculation, and how much on things no one could have anticipated, on chance. Kennedy was forty-three years old. No one that young had ever been elected President. And he was Catholic He was, in the judgement of the power brokers of the Democratic Party, unelectable. He had to prove them wrong, and the only way to do that was to win in the primaries. The first was Wisconsin, where he would have to go up against Hubert Humphrey, a liberal’s liberal, from neighboring Minnesota.

A comparison White draws between Humphrey and Kennedy tells much of the story. When Humphrey finished talking, “there were no mysteries left; nor was he a mystery either. He was just like his listeners. There was no distance, no separation of intrigue, none of the majesty that must surround a king.” He was “just like everyone else.” Kennedy, on the other hand, presented himself, “as a young Lochinvar running against the big bosses…as a man summoning all of his listeners to consider the nature of the Presidency: that the Presidency is the key office in American life…and that therefore they, who in Wisconsin were privileged to have first voice in this selection, should take it as seriously as did he.”

Kennedy won in Wisconsin, but it was close, which meant that he would have to go through all of the remaining primaries - West Virginia, Maryland, Indiana, and Oregon - and win them all. This, as it turned out, was the best thing that could have happened. Had the result in Wisconsin not been as close as it had, Humphrey would probably not have run in West Virginia, and Kennedy, unopposed in a state 95% Protestant, would have not been able to demonstrate his ability to win Protestant votes. But Humphrey ran, and Kennedy was able to deal with the religious question in what White thought the “finest TV broadcast I have ever heard any political candidate make.”

Kennedy explained that “when any man stands on the steps of the Capitol and takes the oath of office of the President, he is swearing to support the separation of Church and State; he puts one hand on the Bible and raises the other hand to God as he takes the oath. And if he breaks his oath, he is not only committing a crime against the Constitution, for which the Congress can impeach him - and should impeach him - but he is committing a sin against God.”

Kennedy won the West Virginia primary, and, with that eye for the small detail that tells the larger story, White reports that the morning after the primary, Humphrey woke up to find that his campaign bus had been ticketed for illegal parking.

White learned early that Kennedy not only “saw politics differently from other men,” but that it was “the range, the extent, the depth and detail, of information and observation that dazzled, then overwhelmed, the listener.” Sitting with Kennedy on his plane, someone mentioned that a bookstore in a town they had just visited had sold out all their copies of Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage. Kennedy began to talk about books. He corrected a quotation about something Lincoln had said, then “quoted with amusement” a passage from Churchill’s biography of his ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough, “In his youth he prized money more than passion, in his age money more than fame.” He asked the others if they had read what he had just finished, Theodore Roosevelt’s report on the funeral of Edward VII. “From Marlborough and the writing of history to the personality of Adlai Stevenson and the quality of American intellectuals. Then to a long, tender and perceptive disquisition on the Irish and the Jews in American life. From that to the American Negro and what their problems were - and their search for leadership.”

The Democratic Convention was held in Los Angeles. White notes that four years earlier, in l956, the flight from New York had taken between nine and eleven hours, but now, in l960, only five. “The continent had been cut in half.” The size of the audience for Kennedy’s acceptance speech had also changed. A hundred million Americans watched it on television. What they heard was the announcement of something new in American politics, a New Frontier, “not a set of promises - it is a set of challenges. It sums up, not what I intend to offer the American people, but what I intend to ask of them. It appeals to their pride, not their pocketbook - it holds out the promise of more sacrifice instead of more security….” Among those watching on television was Richard Nixon, who “thought it a poor performance, way over people’s head, too fast. He could take this man on TV - so he felt.”

Of all the changes that had taken place in America, television may have been the most important. In l950, only 11% of American homes had a television set; now, in l960, 88% had one. When Nixon and Kennedy agreed to a series of four televised debates, American politics was changed forever. The most famous debates in American political history, before the age of television, were the Lincoln-Douglas debates in l858. Each debate lasted three hours. The first speaker spoke for one hour, the second speaker an hour and a half, and then the first speaker had half hour to reply. When Kennedy and Nixon debated, each had eight minutes for an opening statement and two and a half minutes to reply to the questions they were asked. That candidates today are given only two minutes for an opening statement and only one minute to respond to questions tells something about what has happened to our ability to concentrate in this new, electronic, age in which we now live.

Between 115 and 120 million Americans watched one or all of the the four Kennedy-Nixon debates, this at a time when the population of the country was a little more than half of what it is now. Those who heard it on radio thought the candidates about even; those who watched it on television thought Nixon did poorly. Part of this was because television distorted Nixon’s look. In person, he was “a handsome young American, attractively slim, and as lithe as Kennedy.” On television, his face “glowered on the screen darkly.” For Kennedy, on the other hand, the televised coverage of the first debate gave him the “‘star quality’ reserved for television and movie idols.” The crowds that ‘erupted for Kennedy in the…last few weeks of the campaign were, and remain, unbelievable.” In New York, 1,250,000 people turned out to see him when he rode in a motorcade in Manhattan. Television decided the election. Fifty-seven percent of those who watched, said the debates influenced their decision; six percent, or over four million voters, said their vote was based entirely on what they saw, and of these, seventy-two percent, or almost three million, voted for Kennedy.

The election of John F. Kennedy made Theodore White wonder whether it was the beginning, or the end, of an era. The nation “sensed crisis - but crisis locked in the womb of time…crisis whose countenance was still unclear.” The famous phrase from Kennedy’s inaugural, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” was an uncertain call, a challenge to sacrifice for something that was not yet defined, and when he was assassinated three years later, television, which had made him President, made him a legend, and legends have no answers of their own. The assassination only intensified the feeling of unease, the belief that the country had lost any real sense of direction. Everything seemed to be falling apart. It was a problem both candidates for the presidency in l964 tried to address.

Accepting the Republican nomination for President, Barry Goldwater insisted that, “Tonight there is violence in our streets, corruption in our highest offices, aimlessness among our youth, anxiety among our elderly, and there’s a virtual despair among the many who look beyond material successes toward the inner meaning of their lives….” Lyndon Johnson, seeking to replace Kennedy’s New Frontier with something of his own, insisted that a Great Society would meet “the challenge of the next half century…whether we have the wisdom to use [our] wealth to enrich our national life - and to advance the quality of American civilization…. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products our labor….” Where would the wisdom necessary to meet the challenge of the next half century be found? “We are going to assemble the best thought and broadest knowledge from all over the world to find those answers. I intend to establish working groups to prepare a series of conferences and meetings…. From these studies, we will begin to set our course toward the Great Society.”

This was like a ship sailing for a destination the captain had never heard of, but hoped some of the passengers might help him find. John F. Kennedy had spoken of the pursuit of human excellence; Lyndon Johnson spoke of using the bureaucracy to develop a policy about what it meant to be a human being. Whatever his failings, Kennedy had understood that a country, a people, was what it looked up to; Johnson, and most of those who succeeded him in the office, saw, or thought they saw, only what was right in front of them. And then came the Vietnam War, which ended the Presidency of Lyndon Johnson and began the Presidency of Richard Nixon, as Theodore H. White chronicles in The Making of the President l968, the third volume of his remarkable series on the Presidents we, in our wisdom or ignorance, have chosen to elect.
Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Third reading: The Great Gatsby

Third reading: Brave New World.

Third reading: Lord Jim.

Third reading: Death in the Afternoon.

Third Reading: Parade's End.

Third Reading: The Idiot.

Third Reading: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Third Reading: The Scarlet Letter.

Third Reading: Justine.

Third Reading: Patriotic Gore.

Third reading: Anna Karenina.

Third reading: The Charterhouse of Parma.

Third Reading: Emile.

Third Reading: War and Peace.

Third Reading: The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Third Reading: Bread and Wine.

Third Reading: “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities.

Third reading: Eugene Onegin.

Third Reading: The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay.

Third Reading: The Europeans.

Third Reading: The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction.

Third Reading: Doctor Faustus.

Third Reading: the reading list of John F. Kennedy.

Third Reading: Jorge Luis Borges.

Third Reading: History of the Peloponnesian War.

Third Reading: Mansfield Park.

Third Reading: To Each His Own.

Third Reading: A Passage To India.

Third Reading: Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

Third Reading: The Letters of T.E. Lawrence.

Third Reading: All The King’s Men.

Third Reading: The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus.

Third Reading: Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt.

Third Reading: Main Street.

--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, February 16, 2024

Margot Livesey

Margot Livesey was born and grew up on the edge of the Scottish Highlands. She is the author of a collection of stories and nine other novels, including Eva Moves the Furniture, The Flight of Gemma Hardy, and The Boy in the Field. She has received awards from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and is on the faculty of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Livesey's new book is The Road from Belhaven, her tenth novel.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:
I am reading The Blue Window by Suzanne Berne. The novel takes place over a few days when Lorna, a therapist, drives to Vermont with her son Adam to visit her taciturn mother, Marika. All her adult life Lorna has grappled with the inexplicable fact that her mother left the family and completely ignored her children for many years. Now Adam has come home from university barely speaking because of some trauma he won’t reveal. As for Marika, in her eighties she now needs help but refuses to admit it. The chapters revolve between the three main characters to splendid effect. Adam’s gloom and doom - he refers to himself as A - makes him surprisingly sympathetic with his grandmother. Part of the skill of this wonderfully intelligent novel is that it knows which secrets to keep and which to reveal. And did I say that it’s wonderfully funny?
Visit Margot Livesey's website and Facebook page.

The Page 69 Test: The Flight of Gemma Hardy.

The Page 69 Test: Mercury.

Q&A with Margot Livesey.

The Page 69 Test: The Boy in the Field.

The Page 69 Test: The Road from Belhaven.

--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, February 14, 2024

David Handler

David Handler is the Edgar Award-winning, critically acclaimed author of several bestselling mystery series.

In 1988 he published The Man Who Died Laughing, the first of his long-running series of mysteries starring ghostwriter Stuart Hoag and his faithful basset hound Lulu. The newest entry in the series is The Woman Who Lowered the Boom.

Recently I asked Handler about what he was reading. The author's reply:
Whenever I’m working on a new novel, which I happen to be doing right now, I rarely read novels by anyone else. It isn’t fair to the author, because my reading window is limited to the thirty minutes that I read in bed at night before I fall asleep. That’s no way to read a novel.

So, quite a few years back, I turned my attention to short stories. My favorite short story writer is John O’Hara, whom I consider America’s master chronicler of the first half of the last century. O’Hara was a very successful novelist who wrote such bestsellers as Butterfield Eight and From the Terrace, but his greatest gift was short fiction. He was incredibly prolific. Wrote hundreds of them – many, but by no means all, for The New Yorker. And he cut a wide swath from Gibbsville, the fictionalized Pennsylvania coal town where he grew up, to New York to Hollywood. He was not considered a crime writer, although there is quite a bit of crime in his short stories. He was simply an ex-reporter who had no illusions about people. He wrote about bad behavior, and its consequences.

His Hollywood stories are my favorites, partly because I grew up there and partly because I spent twenty years in the movie business before I decided to devote myself to books full time. Right now I’m reading “Natica Jackson,” which can be found in a collection called Waiting for Winter. It’s a long short story, practically a novella, that I return to again and again. I can’t get enough of it.

Natica is a young actress whose career is really taking off – stardom beckons -- but she’s lonely, bored and restless. One evening she breaks her standard route home from the studio, takes a street she’s never taken before and happens to get into a fender bender with a middle-aged married man. After they get done being huffy at each other she realizes she’s a bit shaken and asks him if he’d mind driving her home. A quick fling ensues, and that’s that. Except it isn’t. They end up having a serious affair and his wife, who is pregnant with their third child, begins to sense that something is up.

What happens after that never fails to take my breath away. “Natica Jackson” is a truly haunting story. I’m getting goose bumps just telling you about it. But don’t take my word for it. Read it for yourself. I guarantee you it will knock you flat.
Visit David Handler's website.

Writers Read: David Handler (October 2011).

Writers Read: David Handler (October 2012).

Writers Read: David Handler (August 2013).

Writers Read: David Handler (March 2014).

Writers Read: David Handler (February 2015).

Writers Read: David Handler (March 2016).

Writers Read: David Handler (September 2017).

Writers Read: David Handler (March 2023).

--Marshal Zeringue