Southern Bookman

Robert Caro donates extensive archive to New York Historical Society.

Robert Caro's archive will inspire future scholars and history lovers.

The New York Historical Society announced earlier this month the acquisition of Caro's interviews, research materials, notes and writing drafts.

Caro's files for his massive biographies of  New York City public works director Robert Moses and Sen. and President Lyndon Johnson will be open to researchers without restrictions, as stipulated by the 85-year-old Caro, the Historical Society said.

The writer's book on Moses, who transformed New York City and surrounding areas with his massive 20th century construction projects, examines New York history from the 1920s through the 1970s.

Covering Johnson’s origins in rural Texas and his long political career, the multi-volume biography gives an expansive account of American and world history over the same era.

A former investigative reporter for the Long Island newspaper Newsday, the New York City native in his monumental books traces the dynamic eras of World War I, the Jazz Age, the Depression, World War II, the Cold War, the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. Caro's won multiple awards, including the Pulitzer Prize.

Ducuments also will be displayed in a permanent installation, "Robert Caro Working," that will feature rotating materials "allowing practitioners and lovers of history and biography to observe the writer and his craft," according to the Historical Society.

The installation will feature recordings of Caro speaking about his research methods, along with TV appearances.

The collection includes the extensive interviews Caro has conducted. For his biography of Moses, "The Power Broker," Caro carried out more than 500 interviews, including many with the the last people then alive who had known New York Gov. Al Smith and New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia.

He also conducted a multitude of interviews for his Lyndon Johnson biography, of which four volumes have been published.

Along with extensive rewriting, Caro is known for his immersive research methods, such as moving to Johnson's Austin, Texas, for an extended period.

For work on his forthcoming final volume of the Johnson biography, which covers Johnson's presidency, Caro and his wife, Ina, who works with him, moved for a time to Vietnam.

Caro's devotion to old-fashioned writing methods will also be honored. The archives include his outlines, the legal pads on which he's written the first versions of his work, the succeeding drafts hammered out on Smith Corona electric typewriters and galleys of his books, including comments scribbled by his well-known editor, Robert Gottlieb.

"The Power Broker" is receiving a new burst of fame during the Covid-19 pandemic as one of the books often viewed on bookshelves of reporters and analysts when they do TV Zoom interviews from home. Volumes of Caro's Johnson biography are also frequently visible.

Caro said he chose the New York Historical Society as the permanent home of his memoirs because of his warm memories of spending hours there as a child. When his mother was seriously ill, a favorite aunt often took him to the historical society, he said.

As Caro enshrines his legacy, his readers hope that the exhibit eventually will mark the completion of his Lyndon Johnson biography. After detailing Johnson's rise to the leadership of the U.S. Senate, vice presidency and presidency following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the final volume will encompass Johnson's tragic demise.

After the passage of landmark civil rights legislation, Johnson's presidency collapsed over his escalation of the Vietnam War. In striking contrast to Donald Trump's refusal to accept Joe Biden's election as president, Johnson gave up the presidency when his support eroded.

The Caro exhibit will honor historical truth, which Trump and his followers have attacked.

 

 

 

Media acclaim greets new Sally Rooney novel arriving in September

The novel still lives: News that Sally Rooney will publish a new book is drawing widespread media coverage.

Rooney's third novel, "Beautiful World, Where Are You" comes out in September, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the United States and Faber & Faber in Great Britain and Rooney's native Ireland.

At age 30, Rooney is one of the few novelists who still receive such attention in the social media age. Rooney gained enormous popularity among a coterie of fans with her first books, "Conversations With Friends" and "Normal People," which examined the erotic confusions and cultural aspirations of young people coming of age in a socially changing Ireland and Europe. 

She also received acclaim for a steamy Hulu series based on "Normal People," which told of a young Irish couple's troubled love affair.

While some U.S. critics have given Rooney's work tepid praise, she has been acclaimed internationally as "the voice of her generation." She is one of the few "literary" novelists who command a wide readership.

Previews of the new novel indicate it will cover much of the same ground as her previous books. That's not a detriment; Faulkner, Fitzgerald and others revisited the same territory throughout their careers.

Set in Dublin, "Beautiful World, Where Are You" will portray Alice, a novelist, her best friend, Eileen, and their love interests, Felix and Simon. The young adults seek meaning from their lives in a world of declining prospects and increasing environmental devastation.

While upholding the continued relevance of novels, the new book reflects the decline of letter writing. Much of the novel's plot consists of emails between Alice and Eileen instead of the ink-and-paper letters that once carried narratives. Rooney also used emails and text messages in her other novels.

But book lovers can rejoice: Rooney once again shows that novels still matter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mimi Swartz takes aim at Ted Cruz

I'm always glad when Mimi Swartz publishes an essay from Texas on The New York Times op-ed page.

Swartz, a Houston resident and executive editor of Texas Monthly magazine, writes mini-essays that touch upon personal experience to illuminate the state's curious blend of urban sophistication and anti-intellectual conservatism.

In a Times op-ed piece Tuesday, Swartz slams the despicable Texas Sen. Ted Cruz for advancing his political career by cynically appealing to the Republican Party's most primitive elements. Swartz emphasizes that Cruz's effort to attract Donald Trump's extremist followers clashes with Cruz's Ivy League education. "A thug in a sharp suit with an Ivy League degree is still a thug," Swartz concluded.

Along with Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, who also boasts of an elitist education, Cruz led Senate opposition to Joe Biden's certification as president. Their support of Trump's false claims of fraudulent voting led to last week's mob invasion of the U.S. Capitol.

Hawley in a notorious photo is shown raising his fist in support of the Trump supporters as they gathered to attack the Capitol while Congress was in session to accept Biden's electoral college victory.

After the riot, the Houston Chronicle called for Cruz to resign, and an effort is gaining force to remove him and Hawley from the Senate.

With their prestigious educations and analytical abilities, Hawley and Cruz might have formulated the philosophical basis for a new, more progressive Republican Party.

Instead, they seek political power by pandering to the party's reactionary, violent forces of racism and white supremacy.

 

AJC correspondent Tia Mitchell's heroic reporting in wake of Capitol riot

Applause for AJC Washington correspondent Tia Mitchell, who braved the Trump mob's invasion of the U.S. Capitol last week and carried out her mission.

Mitchell and other Capitol journalists were endangered in their own workplace by an attack like those associated with totalitarian countries. She and several colleagues gave The New York Times first-person accounts of their ordeal. The Sunday article revealed courage under fire in performing their First Amendment duties.

Along with several colleagues, Mitchell was covering the debate over certifying Joe Biden's election as president when the vandals broke into the Capitol corridors and attempted to enter the House chamber. As Mitchell told the Times, she was reporting on Georgia's House Republican delegation protesting the state's electoral votes going to Biden. As the threat worsened, she was given a gas mask, and taken to a safe location.

After the looters were at last cleared and Congress resumed its debate late Wednesday night, Mitchell returned to report on Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler's speech announcing that she would change course and not oppose Biden's certification, turning against an effort led by Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. Defeated the day before by Democratic candidate Raphael Warnock, Loeffler told the Senate that she made the choice because of the riot.

Mitchell, who had begun work the morning before, stayed until Biden's confirmation was completed early Thursday morning. Members of Georgia's Republican House delegation continued to support Trump even after the riot.

In an aside in the Times article, Mitchell mentions seeing Loeffler on the Senate subway as both left the Capitol after the long, stressful day. Even then, Mitchell sought to interview Loeffler, who understandably had nothing more to say.

Mitchell when she began work Wednesday morning didn't realize she'd have to display a war correspondent's valor in the U.S. Capitol. Despite the personal threat, she gave AJC readers essential news about what will be remembered as a dark day in U.S. history.

 

Farewell, Neil Sheehan

Neil Sheehan stood tall among reporters revered in newsrooms across the nation.

Sheehan, who died Thursday at age 84 from Parkinson's disease complications, was one of the famous New York Times reporters whom young idealistic journalists sought to emulate.

Best known for initiating the Times' publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, Sheehan won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for his epic account of the Vietnam War, "A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam."

Sheehan received the Pentagon Papers, a massive U.S. government report on America's escalation of the Vietnam War through the years, from Daniel Ellsberg, a government analyst who had illegally copied the document.

As a Times article accompanying Sheehan's obituary in the Times Thursday discloses, Sheehan himself used subterfuge and deception to duplicate Ellsberg's copy of the report.

Fearful of governmental prosecution, Ellsberg forbade Sheehan from copying the report, allowing him to read it. But he gave Sheehan the key to his apartment in Cambridge, Mass., and Sheehan took the report and copied it when Ellsberg left on a trip. The Times article tells a harrowing story of Sheehan and his wife copying the report at neighborhood print shops, then transporting the pages to New York City, buying an airplane seat for the several suitcases needed.

After the Times began publishing the report, the Nixon administration went to court to stop the newspaper, citing national security. When a judge halted the Times' publication, the Washington Post began printing the document. The U.S. Supreme Court on June 30, 1971, ruled in favor of the newspapers, finding the government sought unconstitutional prior restraint of publication.

Sheehan took 15 years to complete "A Bright Shining Lie," which viewed the career of Lt. Col. John Paul Vann in Vietnam as the paradigm of America's disastrous involvement in the war. The book with its complex portrait of the U.S. military and Vietnamese society unveils the war's tragedy with the narrative power of a Homeric epic.

The understanding of Vietnam came from personal experience; Sheehan was one of the reporters whose slow disillusionment with the war led to critical articles and increasing public opposition. First reporting for United Press International, then the Times, Sheehan along with the Times' David Halberstam, the Associated Press' and Times' Malcolm Browne  and CBS' Morley Safer uncovered the U.S. military's deceptions.

Publication of the Pentagon Papers and the Washington Post's unraveling of the Watergate scandal represented the high point of American newspapers' power.

Such a massive commitment of resources is hard to imagine today, even with the newspapers' revival from online subscriptions.

With the Internet and cable TV, the media environment is more fragmented today, although the Times and Post still hold immense power to set the national agenda. The Trump administration has attacked the media even more vociferously than Nixon's.

But young idealistic reporters still arrive to follow Sheehan's bright, shining example, whether they know it or not.

 

 

 

The Republic stands, after day of mayhem

In 1968, student radicals took over Columbia, Berkeley and other universities.

But, despite the ambitions of would-be revolutionaries like Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, Vietnam War protesters never breached the U.S. Capitol. That was accomplished by members of Donald Trump's "law and order" party Wednesday as a shocked nation watched. The revolution was televised after all.

Following Donald Trump's exhortation, a group of his armed yahoo followers invaded the capitol with surprising ease, vandalizing the cathedral of American democracy and leaving four dead. The minimal opposition by the Capitol Police raised rumors of collusion.

The New Yorker's Masha Gessen pointed out that more arrests were made during protests of Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation to the Supreme Court. And, women abortion protesters received harsher treatment for shouting from the Capitol gallery several years ago.

After the leering loons were at last cleared from the Capitol, the Congress returned Wednesday night to resume certifying Joe Biden's election as president. Despite billowing outrage against Trump, 121 representatives and six holdout senators voted to support the declining president's baseless claims of a rigged election.

Grabbing dubious mantles of courage, GOP worthies like Lindsey Graham turned away from their Trump sycophancy to support the constitutional process.

The most ludicrous moment came when freshly defeated Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler recanted her vow to support Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz's seditious scheme to protest state electoral college results.

Claiming to have rediscovered the conscience she'd abandoned during her scurrilous campaign against Democratic winner Raphael Warnock, Loeffler said that because of the Capitol incursion, she would reverse course on protesting Biden's Georgia victory. Loeffler looked shell-shocked at losing the election, despite spending millions of her own money and that of national GOP power brokers.

After long dreary hours of parliamentary maneuvering, the new day dawned on Joe Biden's confirmation as president.

With impeachment or 25th amendment action unlikely, despite swirling rumors of those possibilities, Trump has another two weeks to generate more mayhem.

 

 

Warnock victory echoes MLK's dream

Raphael Warnock's Senate victory is one of those rare moments of historic fulfillment.

The pastor of Martin Luther King's Ebenezer Baptist Church defeated the robotic incumbent Kelly Loeffler with a late rush of votes from DeKalb County early Wednesday morning.

Only months after conducting the funeral for civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis at the famed Atlanta church, Warnock will be the second black elected to the Senate from the deep South since Reconstruction, joining Republican North Carolina Sen. Tim Scott.

Warnock's stunning victory over an onslaught of negative ads funded by GOP power brokers followed Joe Biden's surprising win over Donald Trump in the presidential election. Reversing years of GOP blowouts in state races, Warnock's breakthrough validated Georgia's emergence as a progressive Democratic state.

The state Democratic Party flexed its new organizational power with an overwhelming turnout of minority voters, aided by Loeffler's self-defeating ads perceived as assaults on the black church. Former state Rep. Stacey Abrams' years-long voter registration campaign laid the foundation for Warnock's win.

With all of the millions spent on advertising by both sides, Warnock's simple "I humbly ask for your vote" proved that the political basics still apply. Countering Loeffler's hypnotic attempts to paint him as a radical, Warnock's ads showed him as an empathetic everyday person. Unlike Loeffler, he also presented what he wants to accomplish as a senator.

Fellow Democrat Jon Ossoff forged ahead of incumbent David Perdue early Wednesday morning, and claimed victory. He was declared as the winner on Wednesday afternoon.

As a longtime Atlantan, I was amazed at MSNBC's indefatigable Steve Kornacki calling Cobb, Gwinnett and Henry counties Democratic strongholds. A few years ago, heavily Republican Cobb and Gwinnett wanted total separation from Atlanta, seen as a liberal island in a red sea. More and more, Atlanta and its suburbs grow closer together demographically.

My joy at the Warnock/Ossoff victories is tempered by the Republican's intransigent charade to protest Joe Biden's victory. The seditious crew's stunt indicated that Biden and the Democrats will battle hardened GOP opposition. After the Georgia debacle, the GOP will intensify its bunker mentality.

Warnock in his charming post-election appearances repeatedly characterized his triumph as the dawn of a new morning. Much work remains, he pointed out.

Like former Democratic presidents, Biden will begin his presidency having to clean up Republican messes. The vandal Trump storms away leaving an out-of-control pandemic, economic devastation, environmental destruction and authoritarian ineptness. He has trashed constitutional norms and weakened American prestige across the globe.

In restoring America, and setting a new course, Biden will have a narrow edge in the Senate, and a small House majority.

The GOP, which remains in control of state legislatures, will do everything in its power to halt Democratic gains. Democratic control of Congress looks vulnerable with midterm elections coming in two years, and Republicans manipulating reapportionment of congressional districts.

Let's hope Warnock's election brings a new day, when MLK's dream draws closer to realization.

Hoping for decision in momentous Georgia Senate election

I hope today ends Georgia's time in the political spotlight.

But with the races close, the state's U.S. Senate elections are unlikely to conclude today, especially if Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff win. Democratic victories will bring GOP protests, lawsuits, recounts.

The millions spent on the barrage of TV ads show the need for campaign spending limits. That much money burned by special interest groups seeking political power. For months, Georgians witnessed from their living rooms the erosion of American politics. Many no doubt escaped into streaming.

On Wednesday, the Republicans, now the party of sedition, carries out their protest of Joe Biden's election. Trump, who probably will be fighting the election even after the inauguration, may try to launch a military coup. Former defense secretaries, led by Dick Cheney, recently signed a Washington Post op-ed piece warning against such action.

The Senate shenanigans reveal the deterioration of that once august institution. Once, the country had senators like Lloyd Bentsen, Barry Goldwater, Everett Dirksen, Sam Nunn, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Ted Kennedy, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Russell Long. Now we have intellectual and moral fools like Kelly Loeffler, Tommy Tuberville, Josh Hawley, David Perdue and Ted Cruz.

Georgia's election will determine the nation and world's fate. I hope for a decisive Democratic win, but fear a protracted battle. I trust the republic will stand after tomorrow, but the GOP traitors are playing with nuclear fission.

Rereading James Joyce’s “The Dead”

I once again reread James Joyce's "The Dead" to start the new year, although I'd thought I would give up my annual ritual.

After all of these years, I suppose I thought Joyce's story had no more to tell me.

But with the pandemic overwhelming hospitals, political turmoil boiling and the impending climax of momentous Senate elections in Georgia, I turned once again to the timeliness of the Misses Morkans' annual Christmastime dance in early 20th century Dublin.

Once again, I found the story new. It's changed over the years.

Almost as long as a novella, "The Dead" concludes Joyce's "The Dubliners," the brilliant short story collection that began his evisceration of his native city that continued with "The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man," "Ulysses" and "Finnegan's Wake." For me, "The Dubliners" is his most precise portrait of the Irish city and its people.

I first read "The Dead" when I was Joyce's age when he wrote the story while in exile in Rome. I nurtured similar youthful ambitions.

As I grew older, I more and more identified with the story's main character, Gabriel Conroy, as he enters middle age.

Now, I have reached the age of the elderly sisters who give the party each year, looking back on their lives.

The story opens with a wide lens on the gathering at the Morkan sisters' house, then closes in on the intimacy of Gabriel and Gretta Conroy's marriage.

In the final scene, in a Dublin hotel room as snow falls outside, Gabriel's sexual longing for his wife is frustrated by her memory of her first love, a young man whom she believes died for her.

Her memory of the young Michael Furey is triggered at the party's end by the tenor "Mr. Bartell D'Arcy" singing "The Lass of Aughim," the same song that Furey sang for her when he caught pneumonia.

The story closes with Gabriel contemplating human mortality as he watches the snow fall beyond the hotel room window:

"A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

When I read the story this time, I found a new poignancy in the conversation between Gabriel and Gretta at the party after he's had a confrontation with his colleague Molly Ivors. Ivors accuses him of being a "West Briton" for not wanting to travel in Ireland.

"Were you dancing?" asked Gabriel.

"Of course I was. Didn't you see me? What row had you with Molly Ivors?"

"No row. Why? Did she say so?"

"Something like that. I'm trying to get that Mr. D'Arcy to sing. He's full of conceit, I think."

"There was no row," said Gabriel moodily, "only she wanted me to go for a trip to the west of Ireland and I said I wouldn't."

His wife clasped her hands excitedly and gave a little jump.

"O, do go, Gabriel," she cried. "I'd love to see Galway again."

Gretta's simple reference to her native region shows Joyce's genius, foreshadowing the story's conclusion by signaling a depth of associations.

The story is a meditation on history and how it intersects with our lives. During the story, issues of the day surface, many long-forgotten, others still weighing upon us, such as British-Irish relations.

Reading the story, I was reassured that political crises reaching a climax this week will subside.

"The Dead" affirms the enduring power of love and art.

 

New year's arrival brings hope of better days

Last year on this date, I and other LSU fans had just gathered in downtown Atlanta for the Tigers' Peach Bowl victory over Oklahoma en route to a national championship.

The huge crowds at CNN Center and Mercedes-Benz Stadium mashed together as vague reports arrived about a virus in China. In a few months, the newly identified Covid-19 halted such massive gatherings.

A tumultuous year comes to a close with political discord, mourning and despair over the pandemic's resurgence, and glimmerings of hope and joy.

Sports have fitfully carried on. Movie theaters try to hang on, but streaming now dominates. Restaurants and bars barely survive. Billionaires enriched themselves further as millions of Americans lost their jobs and homes. The pandemic's death toll soars as hospitals end the year again overwhelmed with Covid patients. Hunger spreads, as Mitch McConnell kills a plan to give distressed families $2000.

A new administration gives hope that America can at last take action on long-ignored problems. The arrival of vaccines raises optimism that the pandemic will at last end. Children will return to school. Restaurant tables will ring with laughter. Fans will fill stadiums. Broadway will sing again.

The new year's arrival recalls the old verse from Ecclesiastes.

To every thing there is a season,
and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate;
A time of war, and a time of peace.

May be new year be a time to love, and a time of peace.