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“AIN'T YOU GLAD YOU JOINED THE REPUBLICANS?”

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE GOP

Novelist Batchelor's (Father's Day, 1994, etc.) history of the Republican Party is as complete, informative, and stimulating as an eighth-grade civics text. Near the beginning of this strangely subdued paean to the GOP, Batchelor describes its 1854 birth as ``a revolutionary rising against the status quo of human bondage.'' The phrase promises grand vistas, not the flat landscape that follows, rendered in near-monochrome. Batchelor's meticulous history includes a chapter on each quadrennial election, complete with bios, snippets from speeches, platform reviews, and election results. Even Batchelor's partisanship is hampered by a style so flat, it's sometimes hard to distinguish praise from irony, as when he writes of the 1894 campaign, ``A vote for the Republicans was a vote for the American smokestack, for the American farm, for the America fireside, for all American profit''; or when he says that George Bush ``pushed Moscow and its puppet states . . . into the dustbin of history.'' The book begs for the why and how to go with its generous servings of who, what, and where. For example, why, after 100 years, did the GOP yield its role as champion of civil rights and women's rights to the Democrats? What is the link between Abraham Lincoln and Newt Gingrich? Batchelor quotes and then requotes Gingrich at the end of the book: ``The Republican party . . . has an obligation to be positive on behalf of the values of the American people,'' as if to say this is the ideal linking Lincoln to McKinley to Eisenhower to Reagan. But the phrase, even twice italicized, hangs unadorned and unexplained, like the rest of the book. An almanac filled with more than one cares to know about the Republican Party, and less than one wants to understand; an almanac written by a novelist, devoid of the novelist's God's-eye view. (b&w illustrations, not seen) (First printing of 50,000)

Pub Date: May 20, 1996

ISBN: 0-8050-3267-3

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1996

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ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN

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

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THE LAST OF THE PRESIDENT'S MEN

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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