Mostly mundane, but a decent companion and sometimes corrective to Robert Caro’s big-picture portraits of LBJ.
A sometimes defensive, sometimes hagiographic, but revealing account of LBJ’s confidant and sidekick.
Lyndon Johnson was, famously, a tall and imposing man who “would come close, invading your physical space, leaning over you, touching you, grabbing your elbow or arm,” all by way of steering a person into doing his will. And that was the good part: writes Watson, who served as Johnson’s chief of staff and, later and briefly, Postmaster General, LBJ could be quite the brute (though, in deference to Watson’s Christian sensibilities, didn’t curse around him). Little bits of dish pop up throughout this memoir, some illuminating (Eleanor Roosevelt didn’t like Jack Kennedy one damn bit, Jim Garrison was certifiably crazy), some not. More substantively, Watson tells the tale of an ever-so-carefully hatched plot on the part of Robert Kennedy to steal away the 1964 Democratic Convention, a maneuver that Watson quashed just in time. “The fact that I had uncovered and thwarted Robert Kennedy’s scheme to seek the presidency did not deter him from lobbying for an alternative plan to become Lyndon Johnson’s running mate for Vice President,” Watson offers by way of denouement, an alternative that Johnson, as sensitive as a Mafia don to loyalty and disloyalty, declined. (Another bit of dish: Interior Secretary Stewart Udall pulled a minor coup when, in the last few days of LBJ’s presidency, he authorized the naming of Washington’s municipal stadium after RFK.) Though indifferently written (with the help of fellow LBJ staffer Markman), Watson’s memoir shows just how tirelessly LBJ worked, putting in very long days, shunning vacations, keeping tabs on everyone and everything, mastering vast troves of information, and demanding that those around him work just as hard, all in contrast, say, with the reported habits of the current president, who might learn a thing or two from his über-Texan predecessor—especially on how badly planned wars can bring an administration down.
Mostly mundane, but a decent companion and sometimes corrective to Robert Caro’s big-picture portraits of LBJ.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-28504-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2004
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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