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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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