The author, most recently, of “The
Invisible Bridge,” would like Chekhov to write his life story. “Sometimes I
think he knows me better than I know myself, even when he’s ostensibly writing
about Russian ladies over a hundred years ago"What books are currently on your nightstand?
Do people still read before bed? I play Words
With Friends. Be that as it may, the book that’s been most monopolizing my
attentions is the massive chronicle by the conservative movement activist Craig
Shirley on the campaign that elected our 40th president, “Rendezvous With
Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America.” Also (though not
a book; they’re online) I’ve been reading all the “Doonesbury” strips from the
fall of 1976 through January of 1980, seriatim. I once heard that Anthony
Trollope, after writing the last page of a novel, would immediately whip out a
new sheet to start writing the next. I suppose that’s what I’m doing with these
books I’ve been writing on the history of conservatism — “The Invisible Bridge,”
which tells the story through the summer of 1976, is the third, and now I’m
starting in on the fourth and last, which goes through November 1980.
What was the last truly great book you
read?
A volume of Chekhov’s short stories. I don’t
read many popular histories like the ones I write. The building blocks for my
research are scholarly monographs, and the inspiration for my storytelling style
are folks like Chekhov. His masterful long short story “A Woman’s Kingdom,”
about a forlorn heiress saddled against her will with the job of running the
family business, precisely exemplifies what I’m aiming to accomplish in my
history writing: to sympathetically reimagine the points of view of people from
all genders, ideologies and social identities.
Who are the best historians writing
today?
I look to historians for their power to
illuminate not just the invisible lineaments of the present, but also that which
is not present. What are the roads that were not taken that most shape our own
time? Lately, the historian who’s been doing that best is Nelson Lichtenstein,
who parlayed a career writing about midcentury capitalism and industrial
unionism into extraordinarily penetrating accounts of why the economic regime we
live under today is so deeply unsatisfying. One abandoned idea documented in his
most recent book, “A Contest of Ideas: Capital, Politics, and Labor,” haunts me.
Powerful people in the Democratic Party, like Senator Robert Wagner of New York,
used to insist that the job of liberalism was to penetrate the “black box” of
the corporation and turn the workplace into a more democratic institution. They
believed that to leave decision-making in the great firms that dominate our
lives merely to owners (as opposed to, say, the system of “co-determination”
between labor and management under which the German economy now thrives) was no
less than a violation of the Constitution’s 13th Amendment, which outlawed
involuntary servitude. Now that such thinking is rare as a unicorn — and workers
all but belong to their bosses during their working day — no wonder it’s hard to
win the allegiance of the white working class to the Democrats.
And who today are the best writers on
American politics?
There are two, and they both are bloggers.
One, Corey Robin of Brooklyn College, is also a political theorist; his book
“The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin” provides
the most convincing account about what right-wing habits of mind are ultimately
all about. His humane and erudite blog — and its spirited commenters — deepen
that conversation. A favorite theme is the emptiness of right-wing notions of
“freedom” that actually leave us less free. See, for instance, his work on
“Lavatory and Liberty,” which points out that the government doesn’t even
enforce the right to bathroom breaks at work. What could be a greater insult to
liberty than that?
My other favorite political writer, Heather
Parton, blogs under the name “Digby.” Daily for over 10 years she’s been
unleashing a fire hose of brilliance on the fecklessness of the Democrats, the
craziness of the Republicans and especially the way that what we now call the
“culture wars” has been seared into our national DNA at least since the Civil
War. In the acknowledgments to “Nixonland,” I called her the other half of my
brain.
In researching your latest volume of
history, which books were most useful to you? Any unexpected gems you came
across during the process?
There’s this lovable old curmudgeon who’s been
kicking around Washington Republican circles since the 1960s, Victor Gold — he
was deputy press secretary for Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign — who
published a marvelous behind-the-scenes account of the 1976 campaigns, “PR as in
President,” that revealed the back-room mechanics of politics more revealingly
than any book since Joe McGinniss’s “The Selling of the President” (1969). I
don’t think very many people read it — this I know because he reveals a secret
about Ronald Reagan’s performance at the Republican National Convention that
year that even the most die-hard Reagan obsessives don’t seem to know about,
which let me end my book with a surprise kicker. (I could tell you what it is
here, but that would be a spoiler.)
On an entirely different note, I somehow
stumbled on “Bare Feet, Iron Will: Stories From the Other Side of Vietnam’s
Battlefields,” an obscure book by James G. Zumwalt, the son of none other than
the admiral who commanded naval forces in Vietnam, Elmo (Bud) Zumwalt. It’s a
revelatory oral history of what everyday life was like on the North Vietnamese
side of the war. He says he wrote it in the interests of helping American
veterans heal, by humanizing the enemy, which may not work: It drives home
better than any book I’ve read why the war was such a futile, impossible waste.
Both the North Vietnamese and the insurgents in the South simply believed
themselves to the depths of their souls to be fighting for the very survival of
their way of life. Every American bomb dropped on the North, and every village
the U.S. “pacified” in the South, only made them more determined: We lost when
we “won.” It helped me shape a major theme of my own book: that America’s blunt
confrontation with the ravages Vietnam wrought upon America’s civic soul, after
the fall of Saigon in 1975, was a very healthy thing — and that the forces
associated with Ronald Reagan’s rise did our nation no favors by helping
citizens turn their back on that reckoning.
What kind of reader were you as a
child?
A late reader. I picked up “Go, Dog. Go!” and
started reading aloud from it when I was 6 or 7. Been working on catching up
since then.
If you had to name one book that made
you who you are today, what would it be?
It might just be “The Marxist Minstrels: A
Handbook on Communist Subversion of Music” (1974), by the fundamentalist
minister David Noebel. Back when I was 16, when I should have been doing normal
high school things, I availed myself of my brand new driver’s license to spend
as much time as possible in Milwaukee’s Renaissance Book Shop, a tumbledown
five-story warehouse that the city was finally able to close down in 2011 for
safety reasons. It was my teenage paradise. There, I perused Black Panther
manifestoes that spelled America with a “KKK” in the middle, and treatises like
“The Marxist Ministrels,” which argued that the Beatles were a Communist plot.
(Dr. Noebel is still a fixture on the Tea Party circuit.) Inhaling texts like
these — along with lots and lots of Renaissance Book Shop dust — first ignited
my passion for studying America’s culture wars.
If you could require the president to
read one book, what would it be?
The Book of Job, maybe. It’s the best story I
know at driving home the fact that the world just isn’t always a reasonable
place. Not grasping that, I think, is Barack Obama’s tragic flaw: He still seems
to stubbornly believe that if he just explains clearly and calmly enough to his
friends across the aisle why his ideas will bring the greatest good to the
greatest number, there’ll finally be no more Red America and no more Blue
America. But my 18 years studying conservatism has convinced me the right just
doesn’t work that way — they’re fighting for civilization stakes, and he’s a
liberal, so, Q.E.D., he’s the enemy. His longing to compromise with them just
ends up driving the political center in America further to the right.
Disappointing, overrated, just not
good: What book did you feel you were supposed to like, and didn’t? Do you
remember the last book you put down without finishing?
I have a weird habit — I’m not proud of it —
of putting down novels 50 pages or so before the end. I did it most recently
with Sinclair Lewis’s “Main Street” (though I made it all the way through the
book he ripped off, Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary”). I even did it with George
Eliot’s “Middlemarch” — what’s up with that? Perhaps a question for the
psychoanalyst’s couch.
What’s the one book you wish someone
else would write?
I used to think some history graduate student
looking for a dissertation topic should do a biography of Robert Welch, the
founder of the John Birch Society. Back then I thought of it as akin to studying
some middling Romantic poet: worthy but slightly marginal. Now I think it’s a
project ripe for some top-shelf biographer’s plucking. The Birch Society is
thriving within the conservative “mainstream” — did you know, for instance, that
the Muslim Brotherhood has thoroughly infiltrated the Obama White House? You can
read all about it in National Review 50 years after its founder, William F.
Buckley, purged Birchers and their crazy conspiracies from his pages in the
1960s.
Whom would you choose to write your
life story?
Is Anton Chekhov available? Sometimes I think
he knows me better than I know myself, even when he’s ostensibly writing about
Russian ladies over a hundred years ago.
What do you plan to read
next?
“Mad About the Seventies: The Best of the
Decade,” by “the Usual Gang of Idiots.” The second half. I’ve already read the
first part, up to the fall of 1976.
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