Though it lacks the stinging punch of Thompson, the book is a useful snapshot of a tumultuous presidential race.
The 2016 election finds the author on a search for the real America.
Sexton (Creative Writing/Georgia Southern Univ.; I Am the Oil of the Engine of the World, 2016, etc.) found himself in the political cross hairs when some of his reportage on the Trump campaign drew attention—and even death threats—from his supporters. “Trump wasn’t the cause, he was the disease personified,” writes the author, and then continues, “Trump’s true talent was finding the pulse of these ignorant, livid people and playing them like a virtuoso strumming an instrument.” Yet these people are as recognizable to Sexton as his own family and the blue-collar milieu in which he was raised, and he understands how and why Hillary Clinton couldn’t connect with them. He has more of an affinity for Bernie Sanders, who inflamed the passions of the left just as Trump had with the right and whose campaign went from making a statement to a surprisingly strong bid for victory. The author reserves his deepest exasperation for those purists of the far left who refused to see a significant difference between Trump and Clinton and who even turned on Sanders when he attempted to unify the party. “They were purists,” he writes. “To them, there was right and then there was wrong.” Sexton’s campaign coverage comes from a ground-floor, grass-roots perspective. The only convention that gave him press credentials was that of the Green Party, so he generally writes from the periphery, among the crowds who sometimes seem more like mobs at the rallies. Whatever he learned didn’t make him more prescient, since pretty much until election night, he strongly believed (as did millions of others) that “Donald Trump will not be president.” His book sometimes feels like a leftist counterweight to Hillbilly Elegy, laced with shots of Hunter S. Thompson, and it’s clear that Sexton couldn’t believe what he had seen until it was too late.
Though it lacks the stinging punch of Thompson, the book is a useful snapshot of a tumultuous presidential race.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61902-956-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
PROFILES
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
Less a sequel than an addendum, the book offers a close-up view of the Oval Office in its darkest hour.
Four decades after Watergate shook America, journalist Woodward (The Price of Politics, 2012, etc.) returns to the scandal to profile Alexander Butterfield, the Richard Nixon aide who revealed the existence of the Oval Office tapes and effectively toppled the presidency.
Of all the candidates to work in the White House, Butterfield was a bizarre choice. He was an Air Force colonel and wanted to serve in Vietnam. By happenstance, his colleague H.R. Haldeman helped Butterfield land a job in the Nixon administration. For three years, Butterfield worked closely with the president, taking on high-level tasks and even supervising the installation of Nixon’s infamous recording system. The writing here is pure Woodward: a visual, dialogue-heavy, blow-by-blow account of Butterfield’s tenure. The author uses his long interviews with Butterfield to re-create detailed scenes, which reveal the petty power plays of America’s most powerful men. Yet the book is a surprisingly funny read. Butterfield is passive, sensitive, and dutiful, the very opposite of Nixon, who lets loose a constant stream of curses, insults, and nonsensical bluster. Years later, Butterfield seems conflicted about his role in such an eccentric presidency. “I’m not trying to be a Boy Scout and tell you I did it because it was the right thing to do,” Butterfield concedes. It is curious to see Woodward revisit an affair that now feels distantly historical, but the author does his best to make the story feel urgent and suspenseful. When Butterfield admitted to the Senate Select Committee that he knew about the listening devices, he felt its significance. “It seemed to Butterfield there was absolute silence and no one moved,” writes Woodward. “They were still and quiet as if they were witnessing a hinge of history slowly swinging open….It was as if a bare 10,000 volt cable was running through the room, and suddenly everyone touched it at once.”
Less a sequel than an addendum, the book offers a close-up view of the Oval Office in its darkest hour.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1644-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2015
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