THE COMPANY

by John Ehrlichman ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 28, 1976

Ehrlichman's recourse to an epigraph from Wallace Stevens--""So, say that final belief/ Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose""--invites Henry James' rejoinder about ""convertible literary stuff."" But then all experience is convertible, and Ehrlichman is a respectable wordsmith with an adroit sense of pace; you can't not read or misread this variant version. It's told by William Martin, head of the CIA, and deals with the pre-Final Days from Monckton/Nixon's election to the bugging of Democratic headquarters. The roman à clef has a key big enough to fit a pair of roller skates: Flaherty/Ehrlichman's a ""shiny, clean young man""; Esker Anderson/LBJ sounds just like him; Ears Haglund/E. Howard Hunt's a hair-oil slick and skillful mercenary; while the Rio de Muerte/Bay of Pigs file is the one that Monckton wants to get his nervous hands on to get back at airplane crash victim, president Curry/Kennedy. Martin thwarts him by using the appropriate leverage, blackmail, and so gains safety with the woman he loves on a halcyon island post. That's the story. Its most interesting parts concentrate on Tessler/Kissinger--seen frenetically pursuing his own course of foreign policy while raging ""Gott in Himmel""--and of course on Monckton. He takes pills to sleep at night and liquor to wake up in the morning, meanwhile indicting all those ""little shits"" and ""faggots"" and ""pissants"" who feed his paranoia. . . . Once upon a point in time, April 30, 1973, Nixon called Ehrlichman ""one of the freest public servants it has been my privilege to know."" Ehrlichman, who will be seen as well as read all over, now gives you another ""time to choose."" But this is what a good card player calls a ""restricted choice.

Pub Date: June 28, 1976

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1976

Categories: FICTION