James Thurber once remarked that "we live in a time when in the moth-proof closet dwells the moth." It is a good lesson and could easily be the text for Halberstam's dazzling account of how some of the best and brightest men of our time—John F. Kennedy, Walt Whitman Rostow, the Bundy brothers, Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, numerous other political illuminati of the '60's—were chewed up, some beyond mending, by a little moth named Vietnam.
It's a moth who ate so much so voraciously and so sneakily that he grew to be an unmanageable creature of monstrous proportions, capable of toppling presidents, visiting holocaust on an entire area of the world, and sucking dry the moral viscera of the great nation Amurrica. How did the moth do it? How was he able to chomp up and ingest everything in the Washington closet right under the collective perspicacity of the brainiest individuals to serve in government since the New Deal? Weren't these men educated at the swellest schools? Wasn't Rusk a Rhodes Scholar? Didn't Rostow write books which set even the Cambridge elite on its fabulous behind? Didn't such an oracle as Walter Lippmann him-self recommend McGeorge Bundy as Secretary of State? Hadn't they all learned at Groton and other Ivy way stations "what washes and what does not wash"? And, yes, wasn't it also true that even Lyndon B. Johnson, who became the hungry moth's favorite dish, was one of the nouveau best and brightest, notwithstanding Pedernales origins and San Marcos State Teachers College vita? All true, but the bug continued to gnaw the fabric—relentlessly. "Lyndon Johnson had lost it all, and so had the rest of them; they had, for all their brilliance and hubris and sense of themselves, been unwilling to look to and learn from the past...swept forward by their belief in the importance of anti-Communism (and the dangers of not paying sufficient homage to it)."
Halberstam's conclusions are not original—see Daniel Ellsberg's "Stalemate Machine" fueled by the "lesson of China" in Papers on the War—but his ability to interrelate the decisions and the policy-making processes with the makers' personalities and intellectual biases results in a tour de force of contemporary political journalism.
Pub Date: Nov. 16, 1972
ISBN: 0449908704
Page Count: 724
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1972
As one of the few women to hold a leadership position in the civil rights movement, Powers has a compelling story, but it is far overshadowed by her kiss-and-tell tales about her affair with Martin Luther King Jr. Powers makes a real effort here to narrate her evolution from small-town girl to the first black—and first woman—to be elected to the Kentucky state senate (in 1967). After two unfulfilling marriages and some equally unfulfilling jobs, she volunteered for a local campaign. She then advanced to become a member of the Executive Committee of the Jefferson County Democratic Party before running for office. Having only completed community college, Powers had to learn on the fly, and it's inspiring to read how she schooled herself in the arts of politics and government and sponsored several influential bills. As a political pioneer who served 21 years in the Kentucky Senate, Powers is a ripe prospect for a straight political memoir. But what she's really selling here is details of her affair with King. It's no secret that King had extramarital affairs, which were documented by the FBI. But never before has one of his lovers stepped forward to share the pillow talk. Powers tells how she was first approached by King, and she goes into specifics about how rendezvous were arranged. She writes that she saw him as a man, not a god, and how their friendship blossomed into romance. She doesn't mention King's wife or family until after she tells of the assassination, when she goes to the house to offer her condolences. The scene is straight soap opera- -the innocent wife and the repentant mistress meet at last. One can't help but wish that Powers had decided what book she really wanted to write—her political autobiography or her schoolgirlish romantic diary. (photos, not seen) (First printing of 30,000; author tour)
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-88282-127-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: New Horizon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
Lightweight though often entertaining reflections on an obsession with beauty. Once a homely teenager, Siman (Pizza Face, 1991) is now a gay man obsessed with physical beauty. With his long-nosed friend, Dorothy, a lesbian Playboy editor, he embarks on a ``trip'' into the world of beauty as a way of resolving old feelings of exclusion. Along the way, Siman encounters the beautiful (female bodybuilder Lenda Murray; Playboy ``student bodies'' Amanda and Kelly; supermodels such as Naomi Campbell and Cindy Crawford) and their creators (plastic surgeons, photographers, and model-agency doyenne Eileen Ford—who notes forthrightly that modeling is about money, as well as about dreams). Many of the interviews are funny, especially one with Sy Sperling, president of the Hair Club for Men, which sells hair replacement systems; Sperling says he didn't give money to New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani's last campaign because ``I don't want to promote a guy who is promoting the bald or covered look...I don't want people thinking this guy is a client.'' Siman also brings us through some of his own (not wholly successful) attempts to rid his face of acne scarring: silicone injections, dermabrasions, and a chemical peel (one doctor considers wrinkles a deformity). He has a lively style and is at his best when flippant, pointing out, for example, that straight, white-collar men didn't go to the gym until recently because they were afraid that muscles would make them look either working-class or gay. However, Siman's journey doesn't appear to have yielded any important ideas or provocative conclusions; indeed, wherever he attempts profundity, his prose gets murky, and some of his assumptions—that there is an objective standard of beauty, that the young are almost always more attractive than the old—are both conventional and downright silly. Underlying the tongue-in-cheek tone is the sense that Siman takes beauty all too seriously.
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-671-89080-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
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