Southern Bookman

Novelist Tim O'Brien's reckoning with Vietnam experience, late fatherhood

As the last World War II veterans pass away, the Vietnam generation enters its final years.

Tim O'Brien, as Norman Mailer did for World War II, defined the Vietnam experience in his novels "The Things They Carried" and "Going After Cacciato" and his memoir, "If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home."

At age 74, O'Brien is aware of his mortality not only because of his Vietnam service. He's the father of two teenage sons born when he was in his mid-50s, and he's haunted by the fear that he won't live long enough to know his children as adults.

How O'Brien's war experience and late fatherhood shaped his life are examined in the documentary "The War and Peace of Tim O"Brien,"  which will be streamed on cable TV's on-demand service beginning Tuesday.

Previewing the film, 'Fresh Air's" Terry Gross interviewed O'Brien Wednesday in one of the show's most entertaining episodes recently.

O'Brien told Gross that he's not haunted by the Vietnam War, echoing a claim he made to her in a 1980 interview.

Gross played an excerpt from the earlier conversation, and it was striking how much aging has changed O'Brien's voice. It's clear that the war shadows him.

After the birth of his sons, O'Brien stopped writing for several years to help his wife, Meredith Baker, raise them. In the 2019 memoir "Dad's Maybe Book," O'Brien recounted the lessons he learned as their father.

O'Brien disclosed to Gross that he is writing again, desperate to finish new books and share his sons' lives.

In an amusing/harrowing segment, O'Brien was taken aback by Gross admonishing him for not stopping smoking, although his lungs have been ruined by two serious bouts with pneumonia, one of them almost fatal. O'Brien says he fears he won't be able to write if he gives up cigarettes, admitting the irrationality of his stance.

The interview was conducted soon after the announcement that former Senator, presidential candidate and World War II veteran Bob Dole is suffering from advanced cancer.

Dole, who received life-threatening wounds as a young soldier, is one of the last members of a generation extolled for defeating Fascism.

In contrast, O'Brien's generation faced years of condemnation. O'Brien in his "Fresh Air" interview said that he's not proud of his Vietnam service because he opposed the war, like so many of his contemporaries.

When drafted, O'Brien considered fleeing to nearby Canada, but chose to go to Vietnam because he knew his small Minnesota town would disparage him as a traitor. He believes going to Canada would have been a more courageous decision.

That's "One of the Things They Carried" as O'Brien elaborates in the interview. May the title of the documentary prove true, and O'Brien find peace at last.

 

 

 

 

Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown and Sam Cooke talk things over in "One Night in Miami"

It's a dull party when Malcolm X invites Jim Brown, Sam Cooke and Cassius Clay to his hotel room for talk and vanilla ice cream after Clay wins the heavyweight boxing championship on Feb. 25, 1964, in Miami.

But the dramatic intensity builds to a knockout punch in director Regina King and writer Kemp Powers' "One Night in Miami," showing on Amazon Prime.

The four really did get together after Clay beat Sonny Liston in Miami to take the heavyweight crown at age 22.

But there's little historical record of what they said to each other. Powers, who wrote the screenplay based on his play, imagines an impassioned debate over black civil rights.

A raging dispute between the popular soul singer Cooke and the Black Muslim leader Malcolm brings the film's dramatic climax.

Malcolm accuses Cooke of pandering to white popular tastes and not stirring protest with his music. Cooke defends himself, pointing out that his song-publishing and recording company increases opportunities for black artists.

Brown and Clay - soon to announce his membership in the Nation of Islam and his name change to Muhammad Ali - also express the ambiguities of black fame.

Kingsley Ben-Adir as Malcolm, Eli Goree as Clay/Ali, Aldis Hodge as Brown and Leslie Odom Jr. as Cooke raise the film above an almost fatal profusion of flaws.

After a sputtering, aimless start, the gathering at Malcolm's room brings focus and momentum for a rousing finish. What risks terminal dullness succeeds like a well-made play.

Goree's portrayal of Clay/Ali is uncannily accurate, down to the register of the fighter's famous voice. At times, Goree's too flamboyant, edging toward caricature. He captures Ali's ebullient spirit, with a dose of implausible self-reflection. His increasing qualms about Muslim life make his immediate conversion unconvincing, countering Clay's historical enthusiasm.

As the tormented, introspective Malcolm, Ben-Adir delivers the film's defining role. Alienated from Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammad, he's planning to leave and form his own organization. Ben-Adir portrays Malcolm as a black American Hamlet, torn between intellectual rationality and emotional turmoil.

The film implies that Muhammad conspired with the FBI in Malcolm's assassination almost exactly a year later. Increasingly paranoid, Malcolm keeps glancing at shadowy figures whom he believes are following him.

In one of the film's dramatic highlights, he's shown fleeing with his family when their home is firebombed.

The film in one of its most glaring inaccuracies implies that Ali followed Malcolm, when the boxer turned against his mentor and remained loyal to the Nation of Islam founder.

Known for his stunning portrayal of Aaron Burr in "Hamilton," Odom gives the most in-depth performance. His Cooke ranges from hip show-biz self-indulgence - he, in contrast to Malcolm stays at the ritzy Fontainebleau - to reflective self-doubt.

Suggesting that Cooke went on to greater success, the movie neglects to mention his death less than a year later in a sordid murder at a seedy Los Angeles motel.

Hodge as Brown gives the most conventional performance, showing signs of the violence that has marred Brown's career. He expresses Brown's primitive attitudes toward women that match his history of sexual abuse.

All of the talk of black dignity clashes with the group's dehumanization of Liston. Clay taunts Liston as an ugly bear, and Malcolm and the others also view the fighter as a brutal beast.

While several references are made to contemporary events - Clay's meeting with the Beatles in Miami a short time before the fight, the killing of four young girls in the Birmingham Church bombing - no mention is made of Martin Luther King and his civil rights movement, despite its prominence.

Outside of the controlled space of the hotel room, King's direction is uneven. The play is enlivened by secondary performances by Beau Bridges as a family friend of Brown who shockingly displays his racism, Michael Imperioli as a bizarrely ebullient Angelo Dundee, Ali's manager, and Lance Reddick as a menacing Black Muslim bodyguard.

The movie takes even more historical liberties than Aaron Sorkin's Netflix production "The Trial of the Chicago 7." The two films, both streaming after limited theatrical runs, give alternating visions of 1960s protest movements.

"One Night in Miami" is similarly flawed, but more coherent dramatically. At the end of the film, Odom's stirring performance of Cooke's anthem "A Change Is Gonna Come" renews the promise of the '60s.

 

Christopher Hitchens' widow, agent seek to stop independent biography of writer

Christopher Hitchens is still stirring controversy, nearly a decade after his death.

In a hyped-up literary feud that Hitchens would have mocked, his widow and literary agent are seeking to halt a planned biography of the writer.

Carol Blue-Hitchens and Steve Wasserman sent an e-mail to Hitchens' associates asking them not to cooperate with author Stephen Phillips, who has a contract with W.W. Norton to publish "Pamphleteer: The Life and Times of Christopher Hitchens" in 2022.

The rarefied dispute gained momentum with a New York Times article Tuesday, following biographer David Nasaw's condemnation of Blue-Hitchens and Wasserman in a recent essay in the Nation.

Nasaw, the award-winning biographer of Andrew Carnegie and Joseph P. Kennedy, accused Blue-Hitchens and Wasserman of engaging "in a kind of censorship" and pointed out that efforts to control a subject's image through authorized biographies often backfire.

Calling Hitchens a significant figure of his times, Nasaw defended Phillips' effort to present opposing views of him.

A longtime writer for the Nation, Hitchens broke with his leftist colleagues over his support for the Iraq war and his increasingly misogynistic writing. A gifted raconteur, Hitchens frequently appeared on TV and as a public speaker.

As a leftist writer earlier in his career, Hitchens gained notoriety for books exposing Mother Teresa and Henry Kissinger. A noted atheist, Hitchens reportedly shunned religious conversion while dying of cancer in 2011.

The email by Blue-Hitchens and Wasserman sounds like something from a satirical novel by David Lodge or Richard Russo, or even Evelyn Waugh, if e-mails had existed during his life.

"Dear Family, Friends, Colleagues, Fellow Scribblers, Brothers & Sisters, Comrades:

We are aware that a self-appointed would-be biographer, one Stephen Phillips, is embarked on a book on Christopher. We read his proposal and are dismayed by the coarse and reductive approach. We have no confidence in this attempt at the man in full. We are not cooperating and we urge you to refuse all entreaties by Mr. Phillips or his publisher, W.W. Norton.

Feel free to contact us with any questions as you may have.

In solidarity,
Carol & Steve

Carol Blue-Hitchens, Executor of the Estate of Christopher Hitchens
Steve Wasserman, Literary Agent"

As The New York Times article pointed out, the email is self-defeating because it would silence those with the most favorable views of Hitchens. And those close to Hitchens are resisting; Hitchens' brother, Peter, a British conservative columnist, talked with Phillips, the Times article said

It's unlikely that Phillips can find many new revelations about Hitchens. He himself wrote the revealing and entertaining memoir "Hitch" before his death and has appeared in memoirs and a recent novel, "Inside Story," by his close friend Martin Amis. Former colleagues like Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn attacked Hitchens in print.

Phillips' title, "Pamphleteer," does seem limited. Hitchens was much more than that. But he wrote in the spirit of old-time pamphleteers like Thomas Paine. Perhaps the title is metaphorical.

Hitchens was a public intellectual who courted controversy. Blue-Hitchens and Wasserman's dubious campaign against Phillips runs counter to Hitchens' ideals.

A trip to Castleberry Hill

The young black woman behind the plastic divider at the driver's license bureau had a lovely smile and long purple fingernails.

I drove down to Whitehall Street south of downtown Atlanta to renew my driver's license. Because I had to pass an eye test - no worries after my cataract surgery a couple of years ago - I had to appear at the Georgia Department of Driver Services office in Castleberry Hill rather than renew my license online.

Working 26 years in downtown Atlanta, I'd never ventured to Castleberry Hill, an industrial area just west of the city center. Castleberry Hill had been frequently written about as undergoing a renaissance, with art galleries, restaurants and bars in old lofts and warehouses.

The neighborhood looked desolate on the gray, chilly morning as I left I 85/75 and passed under I-20 to find the driver's license bureau.

On the way, I passed the sign for another community I'd often read about in my Atlanta years - Mechanicsville. A lot of the ferment of the civil rights movement had happened there.

A long line had formed outside the door when I arrived, but a cheerful woman with a clipboard directed me to the front of another line because I had made an appointment.

Those getting their driver's licenses were predominantly black and working class, all wearing masks. The agents firmly enforced social distancing.

After a few stressful moments filling out an application standing at a computer whose wi-fi connection kept going out, I at last finished and was given a ticket with a number. I sat in one of the chairs laid out in rows, and waited for my number and station to be called.

When my number came up, the lovely young woman greeted me to her station. She patiently gave me my eye test, took my photo, and helped me to pay with my credit card.

The picture was horrible, as expected, but I'm good to drive for another eight years. By then, we'll probably have driverless cars. I hope I haven't received my ultimate number.

As I said goodbye, the young woman smiled when I told her I liked her purple nails with their little white stars. Warmed by her cheerful spirit, I walked into the cold, clutching the temporary license that she had printed out. A longer line waited to go inside.

Honoring Henry Aaron's life

Henry Aaron's "homecoming" service Wednesday was one of those Atlanta moments when business, race, education, religion and politics intersect.

Unlike the memorial service the day before at the Braves ' suburban "Truist Park," no ballplayers participated in the event Wednesday at Friendship Baptist Church in southwest Atlanta.

Instead, former presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, civil rights leader and former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, former Major League Commissioner Bud Selig, Braves executive Terry McGuirk and TV sports announcer Bob Costas gave remembrances of Aaron, who died last week at age 86.

The most inspiring talk came from Quianna Lewis, a young woman currently working on a doctorate at Johns Hopkins after earning degrees at Fisk University and Yale thanks to a scholarship from Aaron's foundation.

She thanked Aaron on behalf of the hundreds of children he helped to achieve educations and successful careers.

Also noteworthy was Dr. Valerie Montgomery Rice, president and dean of Morehouse School of Medicine, who told of Aaron's $3 million gift to the school, in coordination with his wife, Billye Suber Aaron.

Young and Clinton in succeeding talks echoed Southern Protestant rhythms, the zest for storytelling shared by blacks and whites in the region.

The former mayor was amusing with his anecdote about white "country boys" watching Aaron in a parade down Spring Street in downtown Atlanta when the Braves first arrived in 1966, at the height of the civil rights movement.

Young recalled overhearing one of the group admit that Aaron should be allowed to buy a house anywhere he wanted in the then segregated city. Thus, Young said, Aaron changed Atlanta for the better even before playing a game.

While Carter in a Zoom appearance sounded frail, Clinton displayed vitality in his in-person address. Lord, that man can talk.

Clinton mentioned, a bit too many times, about Aaron's taking credit for Clinton winning Georgia in his first presidential campaign, when Aaron endorsed Clinton during an appearance with him at a suburban high school stadium.

At age 74, four years younger than Joe Biden, Clinton sounded rejuvenated by the Democrats' recent victories for the presidency and control of the Senate. As Clinton talked about his warm friendship with Aaron, he gave an image of the good, benevolent Clinton, not the self-destructive one.

While I like many others have long suffered from Clinton exhaustion, his speech made me wish that Biden would find a place for him in his administration. After all, John Kerry at age 77 is serving as the climate change adviser.

In his appreciation of Aaron as a ballplayer and humanitarian, Clinton spoke movingly of Aaron prevailing over the racial hatred he suffered growing up in segregated Mobile, Ala., and when approaching Babe Ruth's career home run record.

The service highlighted how much good Aaron did for Atlanta, the nation and the world after his stellar baseball career.

Unlike the students and others he helped, Aaron did it on his own, a poor black kid from the deep South who didn't have to be taught how to hit a baseball or love his neighbor. He was truly a natural, in baseball and in life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Happiness is a warm puppy for Raphael Warnock, Democrats

Let's hear it for Alvin the Beagle, who made Snoopy proud in aiding Raphael Warnock's Senate victory in Georgia.

Alvin was the star of Warnock's endearing TV ads that effectively countered incumbent Kelly Loeffler's hysteric attacks about the pastor of Martin Luther King's Ebenezer Baptist Church.

Rivaling Naomi Klein's Intercept piece about the significance of Bernie Sanders' Inauguration Day mittens in analyzing pop political images, The New York Times' Shane Goldmacher Monday examined how Alvin came through for Warnock.

Mittens and beagles are the new progressive images as the GOP already plots to derail Joe Biden's administration.

Before the strident Loeffler unleashed her first scare ad, Warnock was shown embracing Alvin, assuring voters that he loves puppies.

Later, in one of the most effective ads in recent political campaigns, Warnock compares the GOP's racist and inflammatory claims to the dog's poop. The secondary message: Democrats unlike Republicans clean up after their pets and will also help the average Georgian.

In contrast to Alvin, GOP ads showed ranting Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi and AOC. Georgians liked Alvin's floppy ears better.

The victories of Warnock and fellow Georgia Democrat Jon Ossoff gave the Democrats control of the Senate, or at least we thought so until Miserly Mitch McConnell brought up his filibuster dead skunk.

Keep Alvin away from Mitch and the other Republicans. They like Rotweilers.

I liked the Alvin ads, and their composition is a legitimate news story. Yet, as one who cut his teeth on Theodore White, Haynes Johnson and Timothy Crouse's "The Boys on the Bus," I shook my head reading it, over the decline of American political discourse.

One question the New York Times piece didn't cover: Was Alvin named for the chipmunk?

 

 

 

 

Joe Biden begins a new American chapter

After all of these years, I most remember the inauguration of John F. Kennedy.

Our class at Glasgow Elementary School in Baton Rouge, La., watched the event on television, hearing our new leader with his Boston accent herald the rise of a new generation with the stirring words, "And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country."

Kennedy was 43 years old, taking over from the aged Republican Dwight Eisenhower.  Our new president, Joe Biden, is 78, a member of a generation that has been in power in Washington for three decades.

Yet, after the devastation of the Trump years, today feels like a new beginning for the country.

Kamala Harris, our new vice president, sets a historic legacy and holds the standard for a new America.

Biden has announced an ambitious agenda to tackle problems neglected during years of stalemate.

The times are daunting, with the country torn by political turmoil and losing thousands a day to the Covid epidemic. 

After many years of joy and sorrow, Joe Biden's hour has come. Like Kennedy, he's uplifted by his Irish heritage and Catholic faith. As on that bitterly cold day in 1961, the nation begins a new chapter.

 

U.S. remains divided over Martin Luther King's dream

On Martin Luther King's holiday, I think about the contrast between his March on Washington and the recent mob invasion of the U.S. Capitol.

On that sweltering day in August 1963, King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech to 250,000 mostly black citizens gathered on the National Mall before the Lincoln Memorial.

The nonviolent "march for jobs and freedom" sought equal rights for the country's black citizens. King's vision of racial unity and economic opportunity inspired landmark voting rights and civil rights legislation.

Violence and conflict during the 1960s gave the counterpoint to King's message.

John F. Kennedy was killed in Dallas months after King's eloquent appeal. Lyndon Johnson, the champion of civil rights legislation, saw his presidency destroyed by his escalation of the Vietnam War.

After expanding his message to oppose the war, King was killed by a right-wing assassin in 1968. Soon after, Robert Kennedy was murdered. The 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago disintegrated into rioting, leading to the election of Richard Nixon.

On Jan. 6, of this year Trump in a crude divergence from King's speech exhorted his followers gathered in Washington to march to the Capitol and disrupt the certification of Joe Biden's election as president.

Answering Trump's incitement to violence, the white supremacist mob invaded the capitol, threatening the lives of Vice President Pence, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and members of Congress. Five people, including a Capitol police officer, were killed.

As Trump slinks away, impeached for a second time, he leaves Washington an armed camp for Biden's inauguration. Presidential inaugurations through the years have celebrated the country's open democratic society and peaceful transfer of power.

This week's presence of troops recalls Lincoln's first inauguration on the cusp of the Civil War. A century after the war's end, and the abolition of slavery, King called for the country to fulfill the promise of full citizenship for black citizens.

Trump and the GOP have sought to cripple the racial progress King inspired. After the destructive Trump years, Biden promises to restore America's commitment to justice and equality.

The Jan. 6 violence and presence of armed troops in the nation's capital expose a vast chasm in fulfilling King's dream.

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.

 

 

 

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.