Search Results for: Los Angeles Review of Books

Decolonizing Knowledge: Stefan Bradley on the Fight for Civil Rights in the Ivy League

Yale cheer leaders Greg Parker (L) and Bill Brown give the Black Power salute during the National Anthem starting the Yale-Dartmouth football game in the Yale Bowl. November 2, 1968. Bettman / Getty

Jonny Auping | Longreads | November 2018 | 19 minutes (5,155 words)

Being steeped in tradition, by nature, requires a resistance to change; and, as Stefan Bradley points out in the introduction to his new book Upending the Ivory Tower: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Ivy League, seven of the eight Ivy League schools — often referred to as the “Ancient Eight” — existed before the drafting of the U.S. Constitution, making them perhaps “more American than the nation itself with respect to culture and history.” Attending an Ivy League school is and always has been a marker of status in this country, one boasted by many U.S. Presidents, judges, and world leaders. Racial equality was not something that came naturally to these institutions; it had to be fought for. Upending the Ivory Tower documents the struggles of early black Ivy League students as well as the demonstrations and building occupations students in the 1960s took part in to hold these elite universities accountable for their prejudice.

Dr. Bradley is currently chair of the African American Studies program at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles (and years ago he was also a professor of mine at Saint Louis University). In 2012, he published Harlem vs. Columbia University: Black Student Power in the 1960s, a book about how, as some white student activists worked to radicalize and restructure the university, black students, joining with local activists in Harlem, sought to stop the university from paving over a public park to build a private gymnasium. The perspective of outsiders allowed them to see beyond internal campus politics; to recognize the university as a force in the world which sometimes must be opposed, not just reorganized. Upending the Ivory Tower covers similar ground but has an expanded scope, covering the postwar period through 1975 and all eight Ivies, adding a new layer of nuance to our understanding of the civil rights and Black Power movements, and recounting the stories of young people who had everything to lose but were righteous in their demands for what they had yet to gain. Read more…

When Richard Nixon Declared War on the Media

(Photo by David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images)

More than 40 years ago, Richard Nixon subtly changed the modern presidency. During past administrations, the American news media had always been referred to as “the press,” but Nixon, whose contentious relationship with the nation’s newsrooms was longstanding, tweaked that policy, and began labeling the press as “the media,” a term he felt sounded more ominous and less favorable. As Jon Marshall wrote in 2014 for The Atlantic, Nixon was the first president to exclusively use this term, and while subsequent presidents were similarly at odds with those whose job it is to hold the country’s chief executive in check, none were as vitriolic as Nixon.

Read more…

After World War I, Horror Movies Were Invaded By an Army of Reanimated Corpses

"J'accuse!" 1919.

W. Scott Poole | an excerpt adapted from Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror | Counterpoint | October 2018 | 23 minutes (6,219 words)

The murderous folly of the Great War chilled western Europe to the bone, and the new, gruesome entertainment of the horror film became neither escape nor catharsis but rather a repetition of trauma. Telling these stories sometimes had the effect of ripping the scab from the wound so that it never became healthy, or grieving until grief became an end in itself. At times, the stories included social criticism. In all cases, the horror film included a long, angry procession of unquiet corpses.

Not everyone would agree, or at least believe, that horror films carry so much weight. “You are reading too much into the movies” is a fairly common response to such claims. “They’re just entertainment.” This idea of course has its own history and, paradoxically, it begins with a writer who thought that the films made after the Great War did contain coded messages about the era. He saw in them a dangerous message that explained the path from Germany’s defeat in 1918 to its resurgence as a threatening power twenty years later.

Siegfried Kracauer left Germany in 1933, emigrating to Paris the same year that Adolf Hitler became the German chancellor. After the beginning of World War II and the invasion of France, he fled for the Spanish border with the renegade essayist Walter Benjamin in the summer of 1940. Unlike Benjamin, however, Kracauer found a way to make it to the United States, where a Rockefeller Fellowship awaited him in the spring of 1941, thanks to his fellow exile the philosopher Max Horkheimer. New York City’s Museum of Modern Art offered Kracauer a position that involved studying the German films made between 1918 and 1933, a task he hoped might yield some clue as to what had become of his homeland. Read more…

To Tell the Story, These Journalists Became Part of the Story

Hiroshi Watanabe / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Martha Pskowski | Longreads | October 2018 | 16 minutes (4,194 words)

 

The attention paid to the U.S.-Mexico border seems to ebb and flow like the tide. News coverage spikes and then recedes, giving the impression that migration itself must be doing the same, when in fact the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. has been stable for the last 10 years. In summer 2014, it was the wave of unaccompanied minors arriving from Central America drew our scrutiny. The year 2018, as in so many arenas, brought new horrors, with young children forcibly separated from their parents and the ensuing debacle of reunification.

I spent the first few months of 2014 as a volunteer at a migrant shelter in Ixtepec, Oaxaca. On the side, I was dipping my toes into journalism, pitching to small non-profit websites. On a typically sticky afternoon in Ixtepec, I asked the priest who runs the shelter, Alejandro Solalinde, what changes he had seen so far that year. More children than ever, he said. And more of them coming alone. I wrote about the rising number of unaccompanied minors for the Americas Program that April.

Just a few months later, I watched with a mix of relief and bewilderment as international media flocked to the U.S.-Mexico border to cover the full-blown controversy. Few outlets had bothered to look at what had been apparent in refugee shelters in Southern Mexico for months: minors travelling solo. Only when these adolescents and children arrived on the doorstep of the United States did their situation become a “crisis” meriting media attention and presidential action. But then as now, Central American migrants were compartmentalized, and their stories simplified for easy consumption.

I stayed in touch with some of the young men and women I met in Ixtepec, meeting up in person when possible. In strip malls in Northern Virginia and Van Nuys, California, I have caught up over pupusas with young Salvadorans who made it across the border after passing through Ixtepec. Instead of writing about just a snapshot of individual border crossings, I wanted to fit together the disparate pieces of their shared stories into the bigger picture; leaving home, the dangerous journey through Mexico, and now, adjusting to the United States.

When I needed more substance, and a respite from flash-point news coverage of the border this summer, two books satisfied my desire for depth, context and nuanced empathetic storytelling: Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown by Lauren Hilgers and The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life by Lauren Markham. Both trace the stories of families migrating to the United States and explore the gap between the myths the immigrants had heard before arriving and the reality of the life they experienced in America. Hilgers and Markham unravel the complicated circumstances that led their subjects to come to the United States, and the unexpected barriers they faced once arriving in their respective destinations. Read more…

Hating Big Pharma Is Good, But Supply-Side Epidemic Theory Is Killing People

Jose A. Bernat Bacete / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Zachary Siegel | Longreads | September 2018 | 20 minutes (5,459 words)

After breakfast each Sunday we had the option to attend a spiritual group. The facility’s spiritual counselor was a tall woman with greying frizzy hair who collected vaguely heart-shaped rocks, and always had several on her desk that she’d gift to patients who stopped by her office.

She wouldn’t give you just any old rock; no, the rock she’d choose for you had a story: its color, unique dents and chips resembled resilience, an ability to withstand harsh elements while retaining your heart’s shape. She insisted the Sunday group wasn’t religious. “Religion is for people who’re afraid of going to hell,” the popular saying around Alcoholics Anonymous goes. “Spirituality is for people who have already been there.” So we sang along to “Let it Be” by The Beatles.

We had mostly blamed ourselves for what landed us inside an addiction treatment facility. But we were young, so we also blamed our parents (thanks Obamacare!). The reason why we were all in treatment and not quarantined in jail is because we were mostly white and upper-middle class. It was the summer of 2012 and young people like me all over the country were developing opioid addictions. The difference between us and the vast majority of others was our family’s resources, namely insurance that covered the $1,000 per day cost for a residential stint at a spiritually tinged hospital-meets-lake-house just outside the Twin Cities (the land of 10,000 treatment centers). The campus edged Medicine Lake, which I always found cruel because the facility didn’t much like to use medicine at the time, medicine that would’ve eased my withdrawal and given me the best chance at kicking for good. “We don’t do that here,” I recall a nice Minnesota doctor saying.

Addiction experienced in the first-person feels like watching a movie shot entirely in extreme close-ups. No matter how hard you try, you can’t see the world beyond the frame. A tolerance builds after a while and you grow used to the shaky, nauseating ride. We couldn’t have possibly known it at the time, that we weren’t the stars in our very own drama. The content of our stories differed in the details, but the tone was uncannily similar: how prescription painkillers first took hold; after pharmaceuticals became scarce and expensive, how we, as a generation in unison, playing a fucked up game of Red Rover, beelined toward heroin. Another thing we had in common was a lot of dead friends. Read more…

Putting a New Stone on the Grave: Sjón Brings the Golem to Iceland

Door to attic of the Old New Synagogue where according to myth the golem rests. Slowcentury / Getty

Adam Morgan | Longreads | September 2018 | 10 minutes (2,560 words)

In the summer of 1990, an Icelandic writer named Sigurjón Birgir Sigurðsson traveled to Czechoslovakia with his friend, the singer-songwriter Björk. Their alternative rock band, The Sugarcubes, was performing in Prague because of the city’s folk status as the birthplace of the sugar cube. But while they were in town, Sigurðsson made a pilgrimage to the Old Jewish Cemetery, where the legendary creator of the Golem of Prague had been buried more than four centuries earlier. After placing a stone on his grave, Sigurðsson asked the rabbi for help solving a personal problem, and in exchange, promised to bring the golem into Icelandic literature.

Today, Sigurðsson goes by the name Sjón. In 2013, when his surreal novels were first translated into English by Victoria Cribb, critics compared him to Borges, Calvino, and Kafka. Most of his books are less than 200 pages, but this week sees the publication of CoDex 1962, a labyrinthine epic that invites comparison to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. Originally published as three separate novels in Iceland in 1994, 2001, and 2016, CoDex 1962 is Sjón’s fulfillment of the pact he made in the Old Jewish Cemetery almost three decades ago. Read more…

An Inquiry Into Abuse

Corbis Historical / Getty

Elon Green | Longreads | August 2018 | 16 minutes (4,019 words)

Roger Morris was standing on the South Lawn of the White House. It was early 1969, and Richard Nixon had only been in office for three or four weeks. Morris was a holdover on the National Security Council from Lyndon Johnson’s administration, staying on at the behest of Henry Kissinger. Morris and his colleagues had been invited to fill empty spots on the lawn during a ceremony involving a visiting head of state. “I was suddenly aware of this figure, very close to me on my right,” Morris said. “I looked over and it was Pat Nixon.” Morris decided that, though he’d never met the first lady, as a courtesy he ought to say hello.

When the event concluded, Morris turned to Nixon. “I just want you to know how much I am enjoying my work. It’s a pleasure to work for a president who is so well-informed in foreign affairs,” he said. Morris wasn’t just blowing smoke. He found Nixon quite knowledgeable about his own portfolio — Africa, South Asia, and the United Nations. As Morris told me, “[Nixon] knew a lot of heads of state in Black Africa, personally and well, for years.” And it wasn’t uncommon, he said, for Nixon to point out mistakes made by Richard Helms, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, during briefings.

Nixon looked at Morris rather quizzically. “Oh dear,” she said. “You haven’t seen through him yet.” Morris, stunned, could only nod.

Pat Nixon was formidable. That year, during a visit to Vietnam, she became the first first lady to enter an active combat zone since World War II. But her relationship with the president could be a challenge. “No question it was a tough marriage,” Bob Woodward would tell Nixon biographer Fawn Brodie in 1980. “Even the people we talked to, who were very defensive about him, just felt that he didn’t treat her very well.”

Alexander Butterfield, the Nixon aide who revealed the president’s secret taping apparatus, told Woodward not long ago that the first lady was “borderline abused.” Nixon would ignore her when they were together. “I wanted to shake him. ‘Answer her, goddamn it; she’s your wife!’”

There have also been darker reports, many of which were rounded up in Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan’s 2000 Nixon biography, The Arrogance of Power. For instance: Allegations that Nixon “kicked the hell” out of Pat in 1962. That, after telling America that the country would not have him to “kick around anymore,” the former vice president “beat the hell” out of her. That, in fact, she had been so injured “she could not go out the next day.” That, on an unspecified occasion, one aide or perhaps more “had to run in and pull [Nixon] off Pat,” who sustained bruises on her face.

That Nixon struck his wife while he was president.

‘Oh dear,’ Pat said. ‘You haven’t seen through him yet.’

The allegations have, for the most part, been in the public record for decades. (The Nixons’ daughter, Tricia Nixon Cox, unequivocally denied the allegations made in The Arrogance of Power in 2000.) But they remain relatively unexamined, particularly considering the severity. The scrutiny is not commensurate with the accusations.

For years, journalists and historians have mostly danced around the reports, gently poking and prodding. Nixon chroniclers tend either to acknowledge that the reports exist without assessing their reliability, or they ignore them altogether. A conspicuous absence of specifics in the public record — dates, locations, and documentation — may be to blame for this, and, especially when writing about allegations of abuse, one must write with care and caution.

What can be said with confidence is the truth of the matter has not been been satisfactorily resolved. With the benefit of distance and perspective, it’s worth giving the alleged incidents a second look and considering their sources more closely, because allegations of abuse are taken more seriously today than they were a half-century ago — or even more recently, when this history was being written.

***

In 1962, Nixon was running for governor of California against Edmund “Pat” Brown. He’d spent the previous eight years as Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president. Nixon was suited to the position. “Eisenhower radically altered the role of his running mate by presenting him with critical assignments in both foreign and domestic affairs once he assumed his office,” wrote Irwin Gellman, one of the great Nixon chroniclers. “Because of the collaboration between these two leaders, Nixon deserves the title, ‘the first modern vice president.’”

The gubernatorial campaign was contentious. “Nixon had charged that Brown was soft on communism and crime, while the governor claimed that the former vice president was interested in the governorship only as a stepping stone to the White House,” the Los Angeles Times recalled years later.

Brown told Fawn Brodie, in her Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character, that during the campaign he heard that Nixon “kicked the hell out of her, hit her.” The book was published in 1981, which makes this, I suspect, the earliest on-record accusation of its kind.

In a recording of the interview from July 1980, which is held with Brodie’s files at the University of Utah, Brodie and the loose-talking former governor wonder if the alleged abuse — they had both heard the rumors — was physical or purely emotional; they’re uncertain. This is what follows:

BRODIE: Were you aware of Pat as a campaigner, in the campaign, at all? Was she —

BROWN: I don’t think she campaigned. She may have gone to a few women’s parties. But we got word, at one stage of the campaign, that he kicked the hell out of her. He hit her or some damn thing. Did you ever hear that?

BRODIE: That story keeps surfacing.

BROWN: Some of the guys that were on the plane with the campaign came to me confidentially and said, “Nixon really slugged his wife. He treated her terribly. He hauled her out in the presence of people.”

BRODIE: He slugged his wife in front of people?

BROWN: Well, in front of one of the press that was supposed to be friendly to him. He got so angry.

BRODIE: He hit her.

BROWN: But I can’t prove that. I never used it.

Brodie disliked Nixon. As Newell Bringhurst recounted in Fawn McKay Brodie: A Biographer’s Life, Brodie called her subject a “shabby, pathetic felon,” “a rattlesnake,” and a “plain damn liar.” When, in November 1977, Brodie’s husband, Bernard, was diagnosed with cancer, she paused her research, quoting her husband saying: “That son of a bitch can wait.” (Brodie herself would die of lung cancer in January 1981, never entirely finishing the manuscript.)

In a recent conversation, Bringhurst called Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character Brodie’s weakest book. “It’s not a balanced biography at all,” he said. “She went into that — into the research and the writing — with a biased perspective.” It’s true, and understandably so: After Nixon was elected president in 1968, after promising to end the war in Vietnam, Brodie’s son was nearly drafted. When Nixon, several years later, attempted to smear the leaker of the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg, a RAND Corporation colleague of Bernard Brodie’s, it was salt in the wounds.

Brodie had for many years taught college classes on how to write a biography. And yet, said Bringhurst, “she violated, in many ways, the very canons that she tried to teach her students: You have to have some empathy and perspective for the person you’re writing the biography on.

The allegations have, for the most part, been in the public record for decades. But they remain relatively unexamined, particularly considering the severity.

Brown wasn’t the only source for accusations leveled against Nixon during that period. There’s a quote from Frank Cullen in The Arrogance of Power by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, who, to their great credit, explore the allegations in greater detail than any biographers before or since. Cullen, a Brown senior aide, said he had heard that Nixon “beat the hell [out of]” Pat in the wake of the gubernatorial loss.

By the 1962 campaign, Cullen was an old hand at politics. He’d volunteered on John F. Kennedy’s congressional campaigns in 1948, and stayed on for the Senate run in 1952. In 1960, during Kennedy’s campaign for president, Robert Kennedy introduced Cullen to Brown, who would appoint Cullen assistant legislative secretary. (In 1972, Cullen helped coordinate the visit to the United States by China’s table tennis team that was later famously called “ping-pong diplomacy.”)

***

Other people have made accusations about Nixon. In March 1998, in a talk he believed to be off-the-record, Seymour Hersh told an audience of Harvard’s Nieman fellows about “a serious empirical basis for believing [Nixon] was a wife beater. … I’m talking about trauma, and three distinct cases.” Hersh would reprise the charge three months later during appearances on CNBC and NBC.

More recently, Hersh wrote about it in his memoir, Reporter. A couple hundred pages in, he writes that a few weeks after the resignation:

I was called by someone connected to a nearby hospital … and told that Nixon’s wife, Pat, had been treated in the emergency room there a few days after she and Nixon had returned from Washington. She told her doctors that her husband had hit her. I can say that the person who talked to me had very precise information on the extent of her injuries and the anger of the emergency room physician who treated her.

After receiving the tip, Hersh called John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s White House counsel. Ehrlichman not only declined to wave Hersh away from the story, but said he knew of two other instances of abuse: one from 1962 — presumably the instance referenced by Cullen — but also one that occurred during Nixon’s presidency. (Hersh, in an interview with me for the Columbia Journalism Reviewsaid his hospital source was a doctor.)

The biographers Summers and Swan, who interviewed Hersh, also talked to John Sears, who worked for Nixon in 1968. With Sears, who was suspected of being Deep Throat, it’s essentially a high-level game of telephone: Sears heard from Waller Taylor, a senior partner at Nixon’s law firm, that in 1962 Pat Nixon was hit so hard “he blackened her eye” and “she threatened to leave him over it.”

Sears, now 78, told me he was surprised by Taylor’s story because he himself had neither seen nor, until that point, heard of such abuse. Still, he said, “I saw no reason [Taylor] would make up such a thing. He was a friend of theirs.” This seems to be true. Summers and Swan note that Taylor’s father had been an early supporter of Nixon’s, and Taylor himself introduced Nixon to trickster Donald Segretti. Segretti, however, disputes the latter point. “I’ve had a lot of things over the years made up about me that are just complete fantasy. This sounds like one of those stories,” Segretti said. “I do not know who this Waller Taylor was, [and] I never met President Nixon.” (For good measure, without prompting, Segretti also denied authorship of the “Canuck letter.”)

Sears recalled telling the story to Patrick Hillings, who succeeded Nixon in Congress: “He said it was quite possible; the whole business of the loss in California had made them both upset, and that Nixon had finally agreed to move to New York and get out of politics. But there was a lot of problems in and around that.” Hillings, said Sears, didn’t attest to the truth of the allegations, “but he thought it believable.” (I asked John Dean, who succeeded Ehrlichman as White House Counsel, if he knew about the abuse allegations. Dean’s name doesn’t come up in any of these stories, but historically he’s been quite critical of his old boss — he cooperated with the Senate Watergate investigators — so I assumed he would be candid. “I have zero knowledge of RN striking his wife,” he emailed.)

Seymour Hersh told an audience about ‘a serious empirical basis for believing [Nixon] was a wife beater. … I’m talking about trauma, and three distinct cases.’

The game of telephone continues with a quote from William Van Petten, a reporter who covered the ’62 campaign. Van Petten told a writer named Jon Ewing that he found Nixon to be “a terrible, belligerent drunk” who “beat Pat badly … so badly that she could not go out the next day.” Van Petten, Summers and Swan write, was informed this had happened before, and that Nixon aides, including Ehrlichman, “would on occasion have to go in and intervene.”

What to make of it all? For his part, John Farrell, author of last year’s Pulitzer finalist, Richard Nixon: The Life, dismisses much of this, asserting that the sources are not to be trusted. “Richard Nixon fired John Ehrlichman. Nixon fired John Sears, too,” he said. (Sears said he left under a “mutual understanding.”) However, he allows, “Pat Hillings would have known. Pat Hillings was incredibly close to the Nixons. But he’s not with us anymore.”

Summers, who conducted the interviews with Ehrlichman for The Arrogance of Power, doesn’t believe that Nixon having fired Ehrlichman tainted the source. “In the sense that one assesses the credibility and character of someone who’s talking to you, I found Ehrlichman a credible interviewee, and not a vindictive interviewee.”

***

On August 8, 1974, 61-year-old Nixon resigned the office of the presidency. He was in poor health, exhibiting persistent phlebitis and shortness of breath. In September, he would be admitted to Long Beach Memorial Hospital, where he was given a blood thinner. Scans revealed evidence of a blood clot that had moved from his left thigh to his right lung.

Then, in October, after what one of his doctors later described as “groin pain and the persistent enlargement of the left leg,” Nixon went back to the hospital. He would remain there for three weeks and lose 15 pounds.

Sometime during this period, again according to Hersh, Pat Nixon was taken to a local emergency room. Evidently, her husband had attacked her at their home in San Clemente, California.

I called Hersh to see if he could shed more light on this. “That’s ridiculous,” he said, “I’m not interested. Bye bye.” Mentioning that he had a guest in his office, he hung up.

So I asked Anthony Summers for more information, anything really, about that hospital visit. Did he and Swan attempt to verify Hersh’s source? “I have a very vague memory that we looked for a doctor at the San Clemente hospital.” Did he find the doctor? “I don’t recall.” He suspects the answer is buried in his notes, which aren’t retrievable.

***

Something to consider, when assessing the plausibility of the abuse allegations, is there’s little doubt that Nixon struck others. According to Farrell’s biography, during Nixon’s 1960 campaign for president, on a swing through Iowa, the strained candidate

vented by violently kicking the car seat in front of him. Its enraged inhabitant, the loyal [Don] Hughes, left the broken seat, and the car, and stalked off down the road. At an otherwise successful telethon in Detroit on election eve, Nixon once again lost his temper, and struck aide Everett Hart. Furious, Hart quit the campaign. “I was really mad,” Hart recalled. “I had had a rib removed where I had had open heart surgery, and that is where he hit me.”

Hart, said Farrell, spoke to Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s secretary, over the phone about the incident, and said he could not forgive the man. Woods summarized the phone conversation in a memo currently in Nixon’s archives.

More than a decade later, in the summer of 1973, Nixon, mired in the Watergate scandal, visited New Orleans to give a speech to a veterans group. It was expected to be a friendly audience. As Nixon walked toward the convention hall, reported the Washington Post’s magazine, “he wanted nothing in his way, in front or in back, before he got at the crowd inside.” However, “breathing on him from behind was [Ronald] Ziegler and the clump of TV cameras, mics, and newsmen that inevitably followed.”

An angered Nixon, as Michael Rosenwald wrote last year, “stuck his finger in Ziegler’s chest, turned him around, and then shoved him in the back hard with both hands, saying ‘I don’t want any press with me and you take care of it.’” It was even caught on tape, which was fortuitous because a Nixon aide later denied the incident had occurred at all.

***

The earliest chronological firsthand accusation is also the most shocking. In 1946, Nixon ran against Jerry Voorhis, a five-termer in California’s old 12th congressional district. Despite his incumbency, or perhaps because of it, Voorhis ran a terrible campaign. To boot, there were reportedly phone calls to prospective voters from an anonymous caller inquiring, “Did you know that Jerry Voorhis is a communist?”

Nixon destroyed him. In his account of the defeat, Farrell includes a quote from Zita Remley, a Democratic campaign worker of whom a Long Beach paper enthused in 1960 that, were she to ever faint, “it’s certain that she could be immediately revived by fanning her with a political brochure.” Remley found Voorhis “very white and sort of quiet. … He just sort of put his head in his hands.”

Something to consider, when assessing the plausibility of the abuse allegations, is there’s little doubt that Nixon struck others.

Farrell mentions Remley once more in the book, in the endnotes, where he accurately describes her as a “Democratic partisan” who claimed to have “firsthand knowledge of the anonymous phone calls.” However, he writes:

Remley, at least, is a troublesome source: a Nixon hater who fed at least one demonstrably false story about Nixon’s taxes to the press and claimed (more than 20 years later) that Nixon slapped her outside a public function — an assault that, if verified, would have ended his career but that she didn’t report to the police at the time.

Remley talked about the slap in question with Fawn Brodie, who wrote about the knotty tax business:

[Remley] had become a deputy assessor of Los Angeles County with the job of checking veterans’ exemptions. In 1952, just after the election, Nixon sent a notarized letter to her Los Angeles office requesting a veteran’s tax exemption, which was granted only to veterans who, if single, had less than $5,000 worth of property in California or elsewhere, and if married, $10,000.

As Brodie (who misspelled Remley’s first name as Vita) tells it, Remley knew that Nixon bought a pricey home in Washington, D.C., and denied the request. The powerful political columnist Drew Pearson found out and published a damning story.

Nixon was upset about it. In RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, he wrote that Pearson’s column was “teeming with innuendo and loose facts” and claimed that Pearson retracted the column three weeks after the 1952 election.

That sets the scene for what followed later that year. Brodie writes:

When Nixon was speaking in the Long Beach auditorium, Mrs. Remley went to hear him. Arriving late, she listened from near the open door. As he emerged he recognized her. In a sudden fit of rage, he walked over and slapped her. His friends, horrified, hustled him away in the dark. There were no cameras or newsmen to catch the happening, and Mrs. Remley, fearful of losing her job, told only a few friends.

Farrell doesn’t buy it. “She really detests Nixon,” he said. “She could have ended his political career right there by filing a complaint. And yet she never did. There’s no hospital report. There’s no police report from that incident. It’s just her talking, years later, to Fawn Brodie.”

Those doubts are among the reasons Farrell chose to exclude the Remley incident from the book’s text, “to signal to the reader that I didn’t believe it.”

Of the allegations more generally, Farrell continued: “In the period after Watergate, Nixon was accused of everything — some of it quite fanciful — and it’s significant, I think, that you had three of the greatest investigative reporters, Woodward and Bernstein and Hersh, and not one of them put it in print in their long investigations on Nixon.” Neither Woodward nor Bernstein responded to repeated interview requests.


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***

Farrell is right that, given the opportunity to thwack Nixon about this, the otherwise fearless trio declined. Maybe that means something. After all, if “Woodstein” and Hersh couldn’t nail him, who could? But maybe it just says something about the nature of investigative journalism; chasing dozens of consequential stories at any given time, and they don’t all pan out. Which doesn’t, of course, make them false. It just means the threshold for publication — a hospital report or a doctor’s testimony, perhaps — wasn’t met by deadline.

Decades later, we’re left having to deal with a handful of hazy stories, and wondering about the motives of the men and women telling them.

Of all the allegations, it’s Zita Remley’s that really gnaws at me. I am willing to concede, as Farrell contends, that Remley lied about Nixon’s taxes, even if there’s evidence she just made a dumb mistake. What I keep returning to is this: What did this obscure campaign worker stand to gain from accusing the still-living Nixon of slapping her? It certainly wasn’t fame. From what I can tell, Remley’s death in 1985 didn’t even merit an obituary in the local papers.

As we’re seeing now, the women who accuse powerful men — Donald Trump, Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes — do not reap windfalls. Their lives do not seem measurably improved by sticking their necks out. (Quite the contrary. Stormy Daniels, for instance, was recently arrested for touching undercover detectives in a strip club — charges that were later dismissed.)

Now, imagine doing this 40 years ago — which is to say, 20 years before Monica Lewinsky was dragged through the mud and Bill Clinton left office with an approval rating of 66 percent.

What’s the upside?

***

“This is an agonizing subject for me, because I heard some of the same stories, from a much earlier period,” said Roger Morris. A source suggested I talk to Morris, who resigned from the National Security Council in 1970 when Nixon ordered the bloody Cambodian “incursion.”

Morris wrote 1991’s Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician, which charts Nixon’s life and career through the election of 1952. He heard stories in Whittier, California, where Nixon moved at the age of 9, and Washington. The tales, always off-the-record, were passed along by friends and acquaintances, often elderly Quakers. (I asked if there was anyone I could talk to; Morris said they were all dead.)

As we’re seeing now, the women who accuse powerful men — Donald Trump, Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes — do not reap windfalls.

“I had heard stories about the physical abuse of Pat Nixon as early as the Congressional years, which would have been ’47, ’48, ’49, and much of 1950,” Morris continued. “They had these terrible, raging fights, at high decibel.” Per the descriptions he heard of altercations at the Spring Valley home, Nixon had “manhandled” his wife, “not necessarily beaten. It was a violent relationship, in that respect.”

Morris didn’t hear the stories when he was in government, but only much later, starting in around 1983, when he began work on the book. He could never nail down the details, so, while his book includes accounts of the marriage becoming increasingly strained, there’s no reference to physical abuse. “I didn’t have any real, solid verification. I did not have any eyewitnesses.” Which is not to say his sources were bad, or distant; among them, Morris said, were in-laws of the Nixons. “They were plausible people, serious people.” He believed the stories, but lacked what he felt would be necessary for inclusion — eyewitnesses, testimony from doctors, or hospital records. (That’s to be expected, and it’s one of the inherent difficulties in writing about abuse.)

“If you ask me if this is probable — could it have happened? Absolutely. It is consistent with too much testimony of what we know about their relationship. It was stormy. It was given to outbursts of anger, profanity. It was not based on abiding, mutual respect,” Morris said. There had once been a great deal of love between them, “but as in many marriages, it was depleted and exhausted.”

Just before we hung up, Morris added: “We’re living in a very different era now, and I do think historical figures ought to be judged whole, as it were, against the setting of their times, but also against the setting of posterity.”

Elon Green is a writer in Port Washington, New York.

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Editor: Kelly Stout
Fact-checker: Samantha Schuyler
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

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Every Mission is a Suicide Mission

Midway / Namco

Nicholas Mainieri | Longreads | August 2018 | 25 minutes (6,273 words)

A tall man — mustard-yellow face paint, blackened eyes, Slurpee-blue mohawk, ripped denim, fingerless leather gloves, baseball bat on his shoulder — stalks past. He’s what they call a juvieganger, one of the cyberpunks who haunt the nearest interdimensional video arcade. He sneers: “Everyone’s looking around like it’s not 2038 or whatever.” Twelve-foot-tall columnar lamps emanate soft neon blues, pinks, and purples throughout the room. The dark walls bear bright geometric decals that look like 1980s fever visions of space-station Rubik’s cubes. On a row of LCD screens, space fighters zig and zag through cascades of extraterrestrial insects. Music pulses in the air, hypnotic beats threaded with the repurposed tones of old Commodore 64 games. An overwhelmed fighter explodes with a pixelated starburst. We groan, but enemies keep coming. The juvieganger guffaws, then prods a spectator: “You got any quarters, man?”

It’s 2018, and I’m in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for the World Championship of Galaga, the 37-year-old arcade game whose anchor sunk deep into the cultural eddies of arcades, bowling lanes, pizza parlors, dive bars, and — at one time — fried-chicken joints, supermarkets, drugstores, and laundromats. In Galaga, a player’s control of the avatar is restricted to lateral movements along the screen’s bottom border. The gameplay itself bears the player irrevocably forward across a universe of multicolored stars. The triangular space fighter, red accents on its white wings, faces squadrons of Galagas. The Galagas are mostly space bugs: bees, butterflies or moths, dragonflies, scorpions, and cicadas (perhaps), but also, on several mildly perplexing stages, things that look like the Starship Enterprise. Dodge their missiles and kamikaze dives, mash the fire button. Once nothing remains but the austere depths of flickering space, advance.

The championship is the main event of the inaugural ScoreWars, an event organized by the arts collective Meow Wolf. It is held in a redesigned wing of their New Mexico headquarters, alongside the collective’s immersive, otherworldly exhibit, “The House of Eternal Return.” Beyond the row of ten Galaga machines hooked up to monitors, the arcade room features dozens of other classics tuned to free play for spectators, as well as a roped-off section of games including Track & Field, Ms. Pac-Man, Centipede, Robotron, and Nibbler, where well-known players will attempt to break their own high scores. ScoreWars, mindful of aesthetics and propelled by a reverence for the past, strikes a different tone than the contemporary competitions of big-business eSports. There’s something here that, even with the underlying finances, cuts more directly to the heart of what it means to play a game with one’s friends.

Music pulses in the air, hypnotic beats threaded with the repurposed tones of old Commodore 64 games. An overwhelmed fighter explodes with a pixelated starburst. We groan, but enemies keep coming.

Mark Schult, a friendly Hoosier and IT technician, is one of 10 pro-level qualifiers for the championship, where the winner will receive $10,000. Mark wears close-cropped brown hair. There are laugh lines at the corners of his mouth and blue eyes. His cheerful disposition brings the word “Midwestern” to mind. He loves the film WarGames. “A great technology movie,” he says, with bonus points for the scene in which Matthew Broderick plays Galaga. Mark and I work together back in Indiana, at the University of Notre Dame, where he supports the technology in my department. I didn’t know Mark that well yet when, one February morning this year, I overheard him recall eating a corn dog at the mall and listening to the electronic sounds from the arcade’s shadowed entrance like 8-bit sirens in a cave. It slung me back to the fifth grade, the corner of Skate U.S.A., and the frenetic theme of the Street Fighter II cabinet.  Read more…

Behind The Writing: On Interviewing

Sarah Menkedick | Longreads | July 2018 | 18 minutes (4,817 words)

I am slightly embarrassed to admit that for a long time I thought of writing in its strictest, most cinematic sense: as the act of sitting before the proverbial blank screen and conjuring meaning word by word, occasionally pounding a fist on the desk for emphasis or stretching to pet the cat. In grad school, I took the maxim that She Who Wrote the Most Became the Best Writer very literally, churning out pages upon pages that yellowed and blew around my apartment. I remember sitting down with one of my advisors for a thesis meeting and expressing some frustration about how research or the logic puzzle of structuring was eating into my writing time. He looked at me a little like how everyone in the Amelia Bedelia books always looked at Amelia. “But that is writing,” he said. I was flummoxed. “It is?” That seemed like cheating. Writing in my mind was only a mystical, pure struggle of sentence-conjuring; everything else was superfluous, a stretch before the race.

As my career has advanced and I’ve published an actual book and written for various magazines and cobbled together a living as a freelancer, my notion of writing has finally expanded to encompass my professor’s definition. In nonfiction, I’ve come to see writing as the whole process of bringing a piece to life and all of its component parts: the interview preparation, the interviews themselves, the transcriptions, the reinterviews, the careful chiseling and combining and rearranging of all this material. Writing is the broad research and the winnowing of broad research into narrower channels and tangents; the notes scribbled in reporting; the random quotes encountered in poetry or everyday life; the highlighting and mapping and organizing; then, finally, the actual word-by-word construction of sentences into story, which is more akin to building a nest from a thousand disparate twigs than conjuring a vision straight from one’s genius literary brain. It is all, in summary, much more humbling than it seemed at the outset.

Last year, I embarked on a project of new depth and scope: a book which entails a great deal of research and interviewing, and whose backbone is reconstructed narrative. As I delved full-time into the work, I realized I was as interested in the particular skills and techniques required to get and shape the material as I was in the material itself. I had focused for so long on the importance of the meaning of the sentence that I hadn’t thought about the art behind the rest of nonfiction writing. Part of the goal of this column, then, is to shine a light on some of those aspects of writing — interviewing, research, structuring, and more — that could be defined as “craft” and are often hidden behind the actual prose.

To tackle this column, I took the standard approach I’ve developed over my early career as a writer: look to the women. Women writers still face entrenched stereotypes and biases, underrepresentation in reviews, and a significant byline gap in publishing. I have found that one silver lining to this discrimination can be women writers’ commitment to helping one another out, supporting one another’s work, and navigating what often feels like an inscrutable insiders’ network together. With that spirit in mind, for this first column on the subject of interviewing, I looked to three women writers whose work I deeply admire: Lauren Markham, Sarah Smarsh, and Jennifer Percy. I read and reread their remarkable books, then spoke with each of them about the skill, art, and technique of the interview.


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One reason I chose these three women’s work was because each of their books leans heavily on reconstructed narrative: scenes from characters’ pasts that the writer didn’t witness and that need to be put together in vivid detail from interviews. Much of my work as a journalist has relied on reconstructed narrative, and I am fascinated by the puzzle of interviewing the same subject over and over again in order to flesh out the shape and texture of their life. It is not a linear process. It does not proceed like: Tell me about the day you did X. How did that feel? What did it look like? What happened next? Now tell me about the day you did Y. For me, it often involves getting a big gush of information in the first interview, then going through it to highlight areas of particular interest or ambiguity, then going back and asking more about those areas, then repeating this process ad infinitum until the information becomes a story.

Lauren Markham spent two years reporting The Far Away Brothers, a beautiful, devastating nonfiction epic that follows twin brothers Ernesto and Raul Flores (not their real names: Markham used pseudonyms to protect their identities) from El Salvador as they embark on a perilous journey across Central America and Mexico to the United States, fight their way through immigration limbo, and struggle to build a new life for themselves so far from home. Markham described her interviewing process as “entering through the side door.” She gave an example from the powerful opening scene in her book: her main characters, the young Salvadoran twin brothers, are in a car en route to a court appointment in downtown San Francisco. They are late, and they are stressed: If they miss this court date they could ultimately be deported. They are driving around in circles with their older brother. First Markham got the information about the times, the streets, the weather, the basics of how they were feeling. But the details that give the scene the poignancy necessary to open a book about American immigration came through the side door: Long after her initial interviews for the car scene, she and the twins were chatting about something else when one mentioned casually that he’d always thought of the United States as a land of skyscrapers, these big beautiful buildings, but once he was here, he realized it wasn’t really like that. Markham asked him how he felt under the skyscrapers in San Francisco that morning, and out of that conversation arose this passage:

At seventeen, the twins have never been to a city before — unless you count San Salvador, which they’d been to only a few times to visit relatives, or Mexico City, where they were practically shackled to their coyote, hunkered down in the spectral underbelly of the pass-throughs. San Francisco looms like no other place they’ve ever seen. Raul used to picture these buildings in the quiet night back home, rising upward like ladders, like possibilities. But now that he’s under them, they’re just endless, indistinguishable boxes. They make him feel, as most things in the United States of America so far do, small and out of place.

These moments, Markham suggests, are not ones you can necessarily ask about directly. “If you say to any of us,” she told me, “‘What are some of the most foundational memories from your childhood?’ we’re like, ‘wahhhhh?’” But if you’re willing to make the investment of time, you eventually find a way in through the side door.

Another day, Markham went on a bike ride with the twins and they told her a story about how when they were little in El Salvador they’d stolen corn and used it to buy a bike; it was such a perfect memory to encapsulate their childhood. To elicit this type of early experience in particular, Markham relied much more on the coefficient of time spent with her subjects than on the expertly crafted interview question. She told me, “I think building real, honest, genuine relationships from your heart with whomever you’re interviewing makes for better journalism and more humane journalism. And of course there have to be boundaries and there has to be the clarity of OK we’re not friends and I’m still a journalist, but you can still be operating from a place of deep compassion and connection with someone.”

Writing about immigrants who attended the high school where Markham works in Oakland, California, posed an ethical dilemma that terrified her initially. She did not want the twins to feel obligated to participate in her project; she did not want to seem like she was taking advantage of her position; she didn’t want to blend her role coordinating services and programs at the school with her role as a journalist. She agonized over this with her boss at work until finally she told her, “Listen, we let journalists in here all the time to connect with immigrant communities, and we are constantly making a calculation of do we feel this person is trustworthy and do we feel that we trust them enough to connect them with students or families. Of all the people I’d want to write this story, it’d be you.” Markham was still uncertain about putting an undue burden on the twins until finally, she told me, she realized, “I was so freaked out about these young people’s ‘inability’ to make a decision and understand the kind of nuances of my dual role, that in fact I was infantilizing them. They walked from El Salvador to the United States, and I was sort of projecting on them this inability for them to understand or to make a decision on their own.” She sat down with them, explained her project, and told them they didn’t have to make a decision right away. By this point, they were no longer students and were 18 years old. She was surprised when they immediately agreed. They wanted to tell their stories. They wanted to be heard.

Throughout the entire writing process Markham was hyper-aware of the clichés inherent in writing about immigrants: painting them as the perfect, sad heroes, as one-dimensional victims. She wanted to include all the complications of their lives, their shitty decisions, their adolescence. They were teenagers, after all, living by themselves in a foreign country. “Showing them in their roundness was a way to crack open the trope of immigration,” she told me.

Her commitment to showing her characters’ full, complex humanity comes through in so many details of daily life and personality: the way the twins’ faces form “matching masks of dread” when they are late for an appointment; the bright red the Mexican snack food Takis stains their lips; the comfort they feel as they cuddle in a pilled blanket with their brother’s girlfriend’s chihuahua; the movies they watch (Finding Nemo) contrasted with their Facebook posts (tough-guy proclamations and shirtless pics); the way each holds a baby (Ernesto, “cautiously, like a bowl filled with water,” and Raul comfortably, “his face soften[ing] into an old expression something like innocence or wonder”). The most potent information, Markham said, came from just talking to and observing them, but it should also be said that her interview process was extensive and methodical. She had a regular interview schedule with the twins and over the course of years developed a “crazy mosaic” of information: details related to the car and the court date, to the journey northward from El Salvador, to the desert, to their time in an immigrant detention center. She knew that the power of the narrative would ride on detail, and whatever she didn’t glean from observation over time, she tried to ask about: What color was the sofa? What about so-and-so’s shirt? Maybe they didn’t remember the sofa or the shirt, but they did recall the wallpaper, and she’d write that down.

The technique Markham relied on most was asking the same question over and over: Tell me again about this.

The technique Markham relied on most was asking the same question over and over: Tell me again about this. “We already told you!” the twins would say, but they would tell it again, and when a detail changed she’d ask about it. She learned this in a workshop with Rebecca Skloot, who said that if you only have the testimony of one person and can’t corroborate, interview that person over and over and see where there are discrepancies. These discrepancies, Markham told me, are often “portals into more complex questions and realities of the story.”

Jennifer Percy also relied on this technique during the three years she spent reporting and writing Demon Camp: A Soldier’s Exorcism, the harrowing story of a soldier who, after a traumatic event in Afghanistan that resulted in the death of his best friend, returns home to the United States with PTSD and attempts to cure himself and other suffering vets using exorcism in small town Georgia. Percy found herself asking for the same story over and over, trying to break down the heroic version she initially heard. She needed to get through that stiffness of the rehearsed narrative to something rougher and more authentic. She was not after the same kind of authenticity as Markham; where Markham wanted to convey in precise detail the nature of her subjects’ journey northward, Percy wanted to illustrate the emotional and psychological power of war stories, the way they are constructed, the way they can be unreliable, the complex questions that unreliability poses.

Percy was heavily influenced by James Agee’s Let Us All Praise Famous Men and by the notion that nonfiction will always operate with limitations and will never be able to represent the world as it is. These limitations are some of the central tensions of her book; she portrays herself as the writer, the interviewer, struggling to understand across a gulf that is also the gulf between the average American and the soldier returning from war with PTSD. In the parts of the book in which she herself is present as a character, actually depicted interviewing on the page, the reader interviews through her in a way, struggling to make sense of experiences that in the end are impossible to untangle by everyday reasoning. “I asked him all those questions you’re not supposed to ask, about how many you killed, and death and destruction, and I asked him about morals,” she writes. The sense of the terrifying foreignness of both the questions and the answers is palpable. Percy is not acting here as the hidden expert deciphering this world for us, but instead as a novice we can identify with and relate to the characters through. “It didn’t really feel like I was trying to be an expert on the subject,” she told me, “but rather going into it as a question, with questions. That was what was driving the book.” Here the awkwardness of the interview is the story itself: How does someone who has never been to war understand war, and how does someone who has been to war make it comprehensible?

Percy is not acting here as the hidden expert deciphering this world for us, but instead as a novice we can identify with and relate to the characters through.

Percy obtained many concrete details — the height the aircraft at the heart of the narrative was flying when it crashed, its position, its specs — from sources other than her main subject, Caleb. With him, she focused predominantly on how he was struggling to make sense of an extremely traumatic experience.

This meant learning when to stay silent and when to push back. At first, she told me, her tendency was to react to these stories of trauma in the way she would react to a friend who was grieving: to respond empathetically, to ask sensitive questions, to tread very carefully, until she realized that this wasn’t actually what her subjects needed. They wanted her to listen, so she grew quiet and listened.

She eventually became less nervous about asking difficult questions, and as her relationship with Caleb evolved over years and he increasingly insisted on bringing her in line with his vision of the world, she pushed back a little harder against it. This delicate line in interviewing between privileging a subject’s view of the world, trying to comprehend it with as much nuance as possible, and challenging some of the improbable or biased or ethically dubious aspects of that view is one that Percy navigates masterfully. The narrative is tense with interactions like the following, in which Percy gestures to the gulf between her experience and her narrator’s, and to her own doubt, and at the same time gives credence to the necessity and fullness of his convictions. In this scene, she challenges Caleb and he challenges her back, and in the interplay between them lies the trauma.

“I tell him gently how sometimes when people convert to new religions they project their faith backward, using religion to explain difficult situations.”

“That’s all very interesting,” Caleb says,” but I have no doubt that this thing has been after me my whole life. I know you think this all sounds crazy, and don’t get me wrong, so do I.”

He crosses his arms and presses his lips together like a beak.

“What exactly would be the point of me going through deliverance?” I ask. He keeps telling me to consider it.

“Let’s say you did. What do you think it might have?”

I don’t say anything.

Then a few breaths later in that same scene, Percy asks:

“Did you feel anything after deliverance?”

“White noise,” he says. “All this white noise. I didn’t even know it was there and suddenly it was gone.”

In the first third of Demon Camp, which is written like fiction — a lyrical, haunting story of a vet growing up, going to war, and experiencing its horrors — Percy wanted to convey Caleb’s point of view. She taped many conversations and appropriated his language and rhythms directly from those transcripts. She also prepared him for interviews by saying, “I’m going to ask a lot of questions that seem really irrelevant. Can you spend a lot more time talking about this random object in the corner of the room?” She would tell him, “Slow time down to where you’re going to take me an hour to describe ten minutes.” What emerges from this is an almost embodied nonfiction, where Percy is in a way channeling her character. Of the night Caleb lost his virginity, Percy writes, “She showed him what to do in the way a mother might show her child how to fold a napkin.” Of his eagerness to believe in deliverance at a conference in Rhode Island where people came to be rid of PTSD, she writes, “He was born into a family who spoke of God at warm meals.” Percy gives me faith that, with enough time and observation, it is possible to use powerful, lyric prose to convey the experience of another person. She does, however, attribute the particularly lyric style of Demon Camp to the fact that it was her first experience of reporting, and she came into it “without any baggage in that realm.” I, too, feel that I now have too much baggage as a reporter to write as freely as I want, and I find Demon Camp exciting in how it breaks convention with much of standard literary journalism. It illustrates the possibility of being rigorous with interviewing and reporting while still writing a haunting, transporting work, harking back to the writing of earlier literary journalists like Didion and Wolfe.

Percy gives me faith that, with enough time and observation, it is possible to use powerful, lyric prose to convey the experience of another person.

In her highly anticipated debut, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, Sarah Smarsh also wanted to illustrate the imperfections and limitations of nonfiction, and the fact that the stories she is telling are not the ultimate, absolute truth but rather the subjective recollections of individual human beings. She wanted to emphasize the wit, insight, and personality of her characters — her family, blue collar workers who have so often been depicted mainly in demeaning stereotypes, or denied a voice at all in American culture. At first, Smarsh intended to immerse the reader in a narrative that read like fiction, a seamless recounting that made her interviewing invisible. But then, she told me, she realized that “for me, the family members who I was interviewing, who are dynamic characters in the book, are so original and funny and vibrant in their own words that I found however much I honed a narrative based on the things they told me, it was leaving one of the greatest strengths of the story on the table if I didn’t let them do some speaking for themselves.” This was also, she explained, “a subtle way of reminding the reader … (a) I’m not making this shit up, and (b) it’s not all about me. I’m building this from hopefully empathic conversations with people whose stories go back further from my own.” This tactic of forgoing the unbroken enchantment of a narrative that reads like fiction for a sense of real people telling stories allows Smarsh to pull off a remarkable feat: Although her book is a memoir, her voice and presence feel secondary to that of her family, and her consciousness, though it is actually writing and constructing the story, does not feel as though it is what drives the book.

Take, for example, Smarsh’s description of her grandmother Betty’s move from Wichita to Smarsh’s grandfather Arnie’s wheat farm:

Betty peeled untold pounds of potatoes, baked pies, fried meat, and stewed vegetables that grew outside the front door. She learned the isolation of rural life through a batch of cookies — she had everything she needed but the brown sugar. What was she supposed to do, drive ten miles west to Kingman just to get one damn ingredient?

“It wasn’t like when you lived in town, you’d bebop down to the QuikTrip,” she told me years later.

She learned to keep the basement overstocked with discount canned food, the deep-freeze packed with every cut of meat, the cupboards filled with double-coupon deals.

Heartland is driven by Smarsh’s memories and framed by her childhood, but in the end the book is not really so much about her — that is, her interior self and struggle — nor is it propelled by her voice in the MFA-ish sense of “voice.” I was amazed by this when I read the book, and it speaks in large part to the power of her interviewing. In an author’s note that prefaces the book, Smarsh notes that she researched and wrote the book over the course of 15 years, conducting “uncounted hours of interviews.” The resulting narrative demonstrates not only the extent of these interviews, but also Smarsh’s particular understanding of this world and these people and the empathy she has for them. While much of the uniqueness and insight of Percy’s book came from positioning herself as an outsider, trying to figure this world out — she told me that she doesn’t think the book would have had the same resonance had she come into it as a seasoned war reporter — Smarsh’s book derives its empathetic power from her belonging, her intuitive sense of this place. Much of the narrative, and of the conversations in the book, revolve around the tangibles of places, houses, jobs: the emotion is implied and pulses subtly and largely unstated beneath these facts. She was not asking her grandmother, “What did you feel? What did you think?”

Smarsh’s book derives its empathetic power from her belonging, her intuitive sense of this place.

When your own society hasn’t cared about you for decades, she told me, “those truths are experienced at some strata that is below words and articulation.” The lack of articulation of these truths in fact drove her to become a journalist in an attempt to articulate them. What makes her book so singular is the fact that she is able to convey this repressed or buried emotion in the language and the worldview of her characters. She doesn’t try to speak for them in what she calls “fancy English.” (She told me she speaks two forms of English: country and fancy.) She uses her understanding of this place and this worldview not to translate it but to convey it, with the skills and ethics of what she describes as “an old-fashioned hard-ass twentieth-century newspaper training.” We chatted briefly about Katherine Boo, whose work shares much in common with hers, and she remarked that Boo’s writing is exceptional because Boo doesn’t impose “her own inevitably socialized way of seeing reality” onto the people she’s writing about. The same could be said of Smarsh.

Like Percy, Smarsh emphasized the importance of being comfortable with silence. She described the interview as a forced, staged, artificial reproduction of what we do every day: talk to people and elicit interesting stories and information. “It’s sort of like if someone is just naturally hilarious and whenever you sit around and drink beers they crack everybody up, but if you put a microphone in front of that person and you’re like, ‘Be funny!’ they kind of shut down,” she said. This is the awkwardness the interview can generate for writers.

Smarsh told me she hates awkwardness and she has a “crushingly high empathy default setting,” but she’s learned to pause, to leave space for her subject to fill in. The most powerful and true answer might need that space, even if it makes the interviewer squirm.

I asked Smarsh about how interviewing family differed for her from interviewing strangers and if she employed any unique techniques. Her response was that actually approaching family interviews as a journalist — a professional working in a field with specific demands and protocols — made it easier for them to tell her their stories. This approach, she told me, “allowed my family to say, This is just work. I’m a journalist, I’m just doing my job, and if there’s anything my family respects, it’s someone just doing their damn work.” The interviews were not a touchy-feely let’s-all-understand-one-another session or, as Smarsh put it, her family saying in gushing tones, “Let’s support darling Sarah’s work!” Rather, she said, they were “basically the writing version of sharpening some tools in the shed.”

Smarsh told me she hates awkwardness and she has a “crushingly high empathy default setting,” but she’s learned to pause, to leave space for her subject to fill in. The most powerful and true answer might need that space, even if it makes the interviewer squirm.

I, too, have played this I’m-the-journalist role with my family: in particular, with my younger brother, when he went on a soul-searching road trip one summer and I begged to accompany him, as if he were the budding musician and I the rookie reporter for Rolling Stone. I have found it fascinating how much I could not know — and could come to understand — about someone I’ve known my whole life. The space that opens up between family members with that journalistic distance, with the curiosity and novelty of that role, can reveal objects hidden in plain sight. Smarsh describes writing about her family in this way, as a journalist, as “the most transformative process I’ve had as a human being”; in understanding the social, cultural, ground-level factors that made her mother in particular who she was, Smarsh was able to forgive her.

Smarsh described herself at one point as a “journalist of everyday life,” a phrase that seems at once intuitive and uncanny. I’ve come to latch onto it as a guiding principle; I love both its sweep and its specificity. In many ways, the art of interviewing, and of reconstructing the narratives of “regular” people — that is, not celebrities or public figures — is the art of making everyday life exceptional and fascinating, of seeing what we either take for granted, miss, or cast only a passing glance at in our narrow worlds. In the case of all three of these writers, everyday life contained significant traumas that would be foreign to many readers, but it also contained infinite small moments of tenderness, heartbreak, and connection, and the brilliance of their work is the ability to convey both: to map out the forces that shape a life and also all the quirks of individual strength and personality that define it.

The interview can feel like an act of transgression or, at worst, of violation, and at the same time like the ultimate veneration, a low bow before the infinitely layered experience of another human being. It is a unique intimacy, uncomfortable and pleasurable, awkward and at times transcendent, a spark of meaning that flashes between two often very different people. As Smarsh put it, “You are being given a gift.” And as with any gift, the giving and the receiving are complicated: How to reciprocate? How to honor? How to achieve balance? And is that even possible, or the point?

To look at the interview is to understand writing not as the solitary endeavor of the genius performing her sorcery but as relationship, as negotiation, in which a writer is trying to simultaneously remove herself entirely from a story — to in fact scribble out her assumptions and readings — and to purposefully tell that story with all her skill, will, and vision. The interview acts as a prism illuming the ultimate goal of any writing: to use one’s language and self and brain as a way of getting beyond self and language and brain into a larger realm, a shared one, a more universal one built of the most microscopic blocks: And what did the river feel like? Tell me about the wallpaper.

* * *

Sarah Menkedick is the author of Homing Instincts: Early Motherhood on a Midwestern Farm (Pantheon, 2017), which was longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Her second book, about an epidemic of anxiety in American motherhood, is forthcoming from Pantheon. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in Harper’s, Pacific Standard, Oxford American, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Jacob Gross
Fact checker: Matt Giles

The Cold War and its Fallout

Photo courtesy the author / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Vincent Czyz | Longreads | June 2018 | 21 minutes (5,418 words)

 

I was born into Cold War America, 1963: Brezhnev, the Kremlin, the KGB, ICBMs, the Warsaw Pact. My father was a hard-line Republican, a Rough Rider looking for his Roosevelt. Reentry vehicles, NATO, first-strike capability, limited strike, and hardened silos were all part of my vocabulary by the time I was 12. He dismissed with contempt liberals who wanted to cut the defense budget and showed me bar graphs comparing U.S. and Soviet military hardware. The red bars representing Soviet numbers always towered alarmingly over the blue ones, except when it came to helicopters; the United States had a lot of those.

The stalemate between the superpowers has been over for a long time, but every now and then I still catch some of the fallout. While making a furniture run, for example, with a friend — Danny had mothballed a bedroom set at his mother’s house and needed a hand getting it into his truck. We went to the front porch in jeans, construction boots, jackets. It was a chilly March afternoon. He rang the bell.

Danny’s mother, a small Korean woman, opened the door. She gasped when she saw me, then covered her mouth. I almost stepped back, wondering what I’d done wrong.

Mrs. Lo Cascio lowered her hands. “You look just like your father!”

From his early 20s on, my father had had a mustache, and this was the first time Mrs. Lo Cascio had seen me with a beard. Her reaction was a rerun of an incident at my father’s wake in June 1983, a couple of weeks before I turned 20. Uncle Eddy, an adopted member of the family, put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “You’re the ghost of your father when he was 17.” As often happens at funerals, his face performed a high-wire act between smiling and crying.

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