Lessons From Theodore White:Part 1: How The Left's First Attempt To Take Over The Democratic Party Ultimately Led to Failure

 

Theodore White was a brilliant writer because despite being an old school liberal he remained objective. As I've written indirectly in previous articles White believed that what he referred to as 'The Liberal Theology' – the philosophy involving governing during the Great Society combined with the antiwar movement led to a formation of the left which he referred to as The Movement. He summed up their philosophy simply in his 1972 volume of Making of the President:

"a: War is bad -and the American military was almost, if not quite a criminal institution, wasteful and profligate of life and treasure, patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, and the adventure in Vietnam immoral.

b) Black is good – and the demands of blacks on the general society must become, in the revision of priorities that would follow after the war, priority number one

c) since money comes easily under the modern managed economy, the believe that Money Solves All Problems is the rhetoric of hope…

Thus, out of such thinking, there developed in the years between 1968 and 1972 a formless but very powerful action group within the Democratic Party that can only be called The Movement…

Like so much regarding Theodore White its striking how much of the basic tenets of nearly half a century ago are still relevant today. Everything that White wrote about in 1972, with certain details changed for time, be considered doctrine of the left wing thinking of the Democrats today.

White was more than willing to admire their strengths particularly in regards to African-Americans as well as the cause of what women in politics. But he was also very clear of their weakness and one of their biggest true today as it was fifty years ago was about 'big city life':

The old Liberal Idea of the sixties had provoked many experimental approaches to city problems, most had been passed into legislation – and most had failed…By the early 1970s it was clear that the Liberal-inspired ideas of the Great Society had failed the cities; they had been based on a political misreading of how those cities functioned, and what communities in those cities needed for community survival. What had actually happened in the great cities of America in the 1960s, and was continuing to happen as America entered the seventies, mocked all the billions of dollars spent on programs to 'save' them,

All the programs had been advanced by Democratic thinkers practicing the best doctrine of the day but theologians put doctrine above experience. The Movement insisted on more of the same for the seventies – and in the big cities, where the Democrats get their core votes, more of the same frightened too many of the communities who were being driven from their home.

In the revisionism thinking of the left today this has been phrased as 'white flight' and dismissed under the label of racism, just as White said was gospel among the left as early as the 1960s. To this day the overwhelming majority of progressive thinkers still embrace the Liberal Doctrine and choose to argue whites fleeing the city and voting Republican as 'proof' of that fact and therefore absolves them of looking closer at their flaws. What was clear as the seventies began was that the Movement was hoping to use this as a force for political power.

White wrote that it was difficult in 1970, particularly for the Democrats, to see how the country was changing. He correctly points out the rise of the New South during that period and how moderates were winning the fight there. He also points out several major spokesmen for the peace movement were winning critical governors Democratic primaries. Jessie Unruh in California, Sander Levin in Michigan, John Gilligan in Ohio, Patrick Lucey is Wisconsin and Milton Shapp in Pennsylvania.  Unruh would be trounced by the incumbent Governor Ronald Reagan  and Levin would lose to William Milliken but the other three candidates did win election. There were also peace candidates winning in notable Congressional primaries – in Manhattan, Berkley, Denver and Newton-Cambridge.

He also points out how the forces of this movement could do in states whose conventions and politics rested on the caucus system. Critical was one in Oklahoma in which an anti-war county chairman packed his convention with anti-war activists:

His convention wrote a party platform calling for legalized abortion, a timetable for withdrawal from Vietnam and reduced penalties for possession of marijuana. One candidate warned that they were murdering candidates for the Senate and the House in the hawk and bible state. Replied a liberal candidate "Any candidate we murder, let him be murdered."

More than any other statement in White's book this makes it clear how little the Movement cared about winning elected office rather than making a point.

It was clear the Movement held tremendous weight within the party itself but as White points out the average voter was not swept away. In 1970 the Movement would sweep over the Washington state convention and endorse a primary challenger to Henry Jackson, one of the most conservative Democrats in the Senate. Jackson would win his primary with 84 percent of the vote and then crush his Republican opponent by nearly five to one in the general election. And as for the most colorful members of the new theology won primaries but their votes totals in the general fell off. Bella Abzug and Ronald Dellums would win election to the House and be faces among the far left of the party for the decade to come. But Robert Drinian in the Massachusetts fifth would only win by two points in tight three way race. Craig Barnes the Democratic nominee in the first would lose in the general to Mike McKevitt the first time, flipping the district to the Republicans. And in Connecticut Reverend Joseph Duffey had led an insurgent campaign to primary the Democrat Thomas Dodd. Dodd would run as an independent as a result Lowell Weicker would be elected to the Senate – a position he'd hold for the next eighteen years.

"The new politics," White wrote, "could mobilize for caucuses and win primaries within the party – but it lost force in the strangest of ways, whenever it penetrated the hearts of the cities. He adds:

The Liberal Theology drew new lines – men of morality must take over the party, politics was too important to be left to the craftsmen of accommodation. The theologians saw no riddle in the contrary dictates of morality and reality. Life must conform to the highest principles – what was morally right, they felt,  must be politically sound."

I underlined those last two words because it is incredibly clear to outside observers that today the  Bernie Sanders-AOC wing of the Democratic party agrees with that theology one hundred percent. They believe that this is absolutely true and underperformance, if not outright rejection, from the voters has done nothing to diminish their certainty.

And  its worth a reminder of  what happened when George McGovern tried to harness The Movement to become President of the United States.

 

Both the implosion of the Nixon Presidency and multiple academics (many of whom are left-wing) have done much to rehabilitate McGovern's failed candidacy that it is worth remembering many of the failures at the time which White himself recorded. They reveal many ironies that those who choose to see McGovern as a martyr or prophet overlook.

The first is the most surprising. It is well known that after the 1968 convention McGovern himself sponsored a commission that would draft new reforms for the Democratic nominating process four years later and that have been part of any nominating process going forward. Many have suggested McGovern rigged the game so that he could get the nomination four years later and that is utter nonsense.

What is ironic is that these reforms were meant to allow the voters more of a choice when it came to nominating their candidate for President then they'd had before. And as the primary votes demonstrated very clearly they did not want George McGovern.

Much of this was due to McGovern's strategy which meant only competing in a certain number of primaries and leaving many of the others to other candidates. But it doesn't change the fact that as late as May 15^th McGovern was running a distant third in the overall count of primary voters, more than 1.1 million votes behind George Wallace and nearly half a million votes behind Hubert Humphrey. (Wallace would withdraw after the attempt on his life on May 15^th.) And by the time the primary process was over McGovern still had earned exactly 25 percent of all primary voters which was still behind Humphrey. 

And when it came to competing in the states that would be electoral prizes McGovern's track record was worse. He basically left Illinois to Edmund Muskie, finished third in Pennsylvania behind Humphrey and Wallace, lost Ohio in a close vote to Humphrey, finished a distant third to Wallace in Michigan (it was a crossover state and Wallace received nearly 800,000 votes) and barely contested Texas which Wallace won easily. By New York the race was over and his victory counted for little. Only in California did he win a competitive primary and he did in the aftermath of a series of debates in which Humphrey skewered him so badly that his once insurmountable polling lead turned out to be less than five points – and did enough damage to him nationally that his campaign never recovered.

McGovern's campaign was successful for much the same reason Goldwater's was eight years earlier: his organizers has spent the last year and a half doing great work at a caucus and state level getting all delegates to committed to him so that none of the other candidates knew what was happening until it was too late. Wallace admitted it was impressive that he'd managed to get the most votes but only had 324 delegates pledged to him by May 15 while McGovern, who had far fewer votes, had 560. In other words the game was just as rigged as four years ago: the only difference was it was the Left doing it rather than the establishment.

McGovern's beliefs were very much the theology of the left. He had in a sense always been a Progressive: he'd worked for Henry Wallace as a young man and had been a delegate to his Progressive Party Convention in 1948, a convention that in hindsight might well have been a model for what McGovern's own convention turned out to be nearly a quarter of a century later in terms of diversity, left wing viewpoints – and complete chaos in the eyes of a viewing audience. As White put it in an interview: "In George McGovern's mind the polarity was that of Good and Evil. He was a virtuous man, he knew what was right and wrong."

This no doubt made him appealing to The Movement who thought along those exact lines. But as White pointed out after multiple interviews you came away with conversations with McGovern with no idea what the man was thinking.

After a while, those who saw him frequently came away wondering what George McGovern thought himself. Eugene McCarthy made the cruelest comment. "Talking with George McGovern is like eating a Chinese meal. An hour after its over, you wonder if you really ate anything."

Because McGovern was the peace candidate that was more then enough for those who organized for him, those who followed him and those who listened to him on college campuses. McGovern said he was in favor of all the issues that were prominent to the left at the time: abortion, amnesty, busing of African-Americans, legalization of marijuana. McGovern did this because he needed to mobilize these forces to win the nomination and control of the party. But as White pointed out:

Yet what he said and spoke in the spring months could not be limited to audiences of his choosing. On the college campuses, within the circle of his faithful, he might be cheered as the voice of the future ; in the tormented cities of America, however, after a decade of similar, high-minded proposals, he sounded like the voice of the past – more of the same, and frightening.

As White reports McGovern's candidacy was not taken seriously until after the Massachusetts primary when he was officially the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination. Now that he was the candidate, the voters needed to know what McGovern stood for.

Ending the Vietnam War was by far his strongest issue but White pointed out that McGovern's view of it frequently made him sound like a demagogue, as bad as Nixon or Wallace at times. White quotes him:

Our government would rather burn down schoolhouses and schoolchildren in Asia than build schools for Americans at home…The Nixon bombing policy on Indochina is the most barbaric action that any country has committed since Hitler's effort to exterminate Jews in Germany…He's playing politics with the lives of American soldiers and with American prisoners rotting in their cells in Hanoi."

These were exactly the kind of statements that appeal to the Left then and now, which is no doubt why that get a pass from academics in a way that the more conservative demagogues do not.  These statements would no doubt work on a college campus; to more conservative voters it was always going to be a challenge. And that argument was McGovern's greatest strength as a candidate.

One of the biggest flaws in a campaign that had too many to count was his economics program. Designed in August of 1971, it was so broadly socialist that an eyewitness was outraged that McGovern went along with it without even once challenging them on their findings. It was released in a speech during the leadup to the Iowa caucuses which White describes as 'a long loose ramble which McGovern presented not as a blueprint but rather as suggestions or options… It proposed sweeping tax reforms that would close all loopholes gut the rich, comfort the middle class and sustain the poor." Two took on a life of their own: a new taxation of inheritance which no individua would be able to receive half a million dollars in gifts from their families during their lifetimes or after their deaths and a program that would give a way $1000 a year to every man, woman and child. This was not entirely unheard of but McGovern gave no idea of how he would pay for it.

Those who might be inclined could say that ideas such as this would evolve into many aspects of the beliefs of left-wing candidates like Bernie Sanders or Andrew Yang. But in an era far less polarized it was universally greeted by Democrats, Republicans and all forms of media as completely ridiculous and was an absolute gift to Republicans for rich donors.

It was statements like this that made the Democratic establishment certain that if McGovern was the Democratic nominee they would be headed for electoral disaster in the fall – a prophecy that turned out to be accurate, of course. Which meant they were determined to do anything in their power at the Democratic Convention in Miami to stop McGovern from getting the nomination.

George McGovern, for all his morality, was not naïve when it came to politics. Having attended the 1968 convention as a last-minute nominee for President, he knew the only way for him to win was to have the party unite behind him at the convention. But that was always going to be impossible. For even if the old guard had been willing to get behind him as White makes very clear, McGovern's own people had no interest in it.

Their thinking on politics was not unlike the slogans of the activists: they were here and the rest of America would have to get used to it. This convention was about them first and everyone else would have to bow to them. They didn't listen to the old guard, they didn't care what the electorate watching on TV thought, they barely gave lip service to what the candidate himself wanted. The 1972 Democratic Convention is the clearest example of what happened when the left took over a major party – and White makes it very clear what a shitshow it was.

He shows how the delegations had almost none of the Democratic elected officials on the convention floor that Democratic voters in those states had seen in previous conventions are on TV. He shows how the delegates engaged in seating delegations that would hurt any chance they had of winning states like Illinois a few months down the road. He shows how the delegates pushed their choices for chairman and vice-chairman of the McGovern campaign over the head of McGovern and the people who'd helped get him the nomination. He shows that they voted on a platform so radical that McGovern himself didn't agree with it – and then spent so much time and energy clowning around by nominating Archie Bunker and Mao for Vice President that he couldn't give his acceptance speech clarifying his views until 3 AM when the entire country was asleep. And he illustrates that by taking out any professionals who could successfully vet a Vice Presidential candidate it laid the groundwork for Thomas Eagleton's candidacy which sunk any remote chance McGovern had of winning in November.

And as White illustrates in the final chapters the people running McGovern's campaign were completely clueless on how to run a national campaign. I will deal with this in a later article but White points out by September it was clear the campaign McGovern was planning had nothing to do with his campaign planners. There was no head of the campaign per se to take orders from, McGovern had no idea how to delegate a campaign. No one was coordinating the themes of the campaign, its ideas, its television, its travel plans. The headquarters itself as White illustrates became filthier, with mail not being delivered, the Xerox machines being clogged, and obscenities being regular shouted. No one wanted to talk to anyone who had anything to do with politics, dismissing anyone who had a history of even being part of the JFK campaign as being a freak.

They regularly turned down anyone who might be able to help them in the general election. As one state Democratic Chairman said: "They felt they owned George McGovern, they had him long before anyone else and by God, they weren't going to share him." And that wasn't just politicians: the headquarters was mostly white with very few black faces and almost no women. They truly believed that McGovern winning primaries was the same as the general. "They were angry when we pointed out what the working man was resented was us."  They couldn't come up with a theme for their campaign until the final months, finally focusing on the corruption and Watergate. And this just made him look increasingly inept. By October White quotes one Democratic leader as saying: "The only way to save the party is to lose big."

Watergate and Nixon's presidency imploding less then two years after the election would do much to make many members of the candidate claim that Nixon had only won because of corruption and cheating. But as White points out as early as mid-May the Nixon campaign was sure of victory and all they cared about was building a landslide.  As White points out after the Democratic convention Nixon had 57 percent of the vote to McGovern's 34 percent – and that was before the Republican convention.

The McGovern campaign would later say that a list of 600,000 donors to their campaign – considered the most 'significant legacy of it' – was lost after the campaign, with some McGovernites arguing that new chairman Richard Strauss destroyed it in an act of vengeance. Given the incompetence of the McGovern campaign that White lays forth in great detail, I'm more inclined to side with Strauss when he says he never received it. If they couldn't deliver mail within the campaign, I find it more than believable that someone could have accidentally thrown it out after election day, saying they wouldn't need this anymore. And more to the point, it ignores a very real question. Having given their money to a campaign in which Richard Nixon had won with an unprecedented 60.7 percent of the popular votes and 49 out of fifty states why would anybody who gave money to McGovern want to make any political donations ever again?  And considering that the campaign was radically underfunded from day one, any Democrat worth their salt wouldn't trust them for helping fund a local party campaign, much less a Presidential one. They got what they paid for.

 

 

The Movement, in the form it represented, would break down in the aftermath of McGovern's defeat combined with the end of the Vietnam War in January of 1973.  Many of those who as part of it, such as Abzug and Dellums would remain in Congress and major liberal causes for the rest of their careers but they would be outliers as those who had been part of it chose to return to the activism that they had been loyal to during the previous decade.

Others from the McGovern campaign were prominent figures in Democratic politics in the decades to come. Gary Hart, McGovern's major campaign strategist, would win election to the Senate in Colorado two years later. Two members of the Arkansas delegation, a young couple named Bill and Hilary Clinton, would become active in Arkansas state politics with Bill first winning the office of  attorney general in that state in 1976. And at that convention the current governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter had attended and had made a play to be McGovern's running mate.

All of them would be derided by former McGovernites as neoliberals who sadly seem to have taken the exact message that White would consider the greatest possible mistake: "Had they known the truth (about Richard Nixon after Watergate, they would have turned (him) out. In fact McGovern's own campaign workers took a very different perspective – arguably the correct one.

Ted Van Dyk, McGovern chief speechwriter, would actually say before election day, "The Republican Party is the place where people go when they want to go slow, and I think they want to go slow now." After that 49 state landslide, there's an argument that all those Democrats who enjoyed success in the aftermath had learned that lesson. Indeed for the rest of the 20^th century and well into the first decade of the 21^st  both political parties would sharply go to the right because of the 1972 election – the Republican Party was already heading there and the Democratic Party knew the only way to be competitive was to whittle away from the territory the GOP was co-opting. 

Patrick Caddel, McGovern's pollster would have a similar reaction after the election: "American is not geography, it's an idea. Watergate fouled up that idea."

In the final chapter White sums up what the 1972 election taught him:

The idea that prevailed was that America should go slow. Go slow abroad, go slow in the cities, go slow with power wherever it interfered where a child grew up, where she went to school, or where he was sent to die…The Americans were for slowing the pace of power and they chose Richard Nixon.

In the years that have followed many academics from that error have made the argument that the liberal theology was successful until the conservative revolution killed it. White – writing nearly a decade before Reagan's election – would argue the opposite: the conservative revolution happened because the liberal theology had failed. The struggles that take place today may very well be happening because the Movement, either then or now, has never accepted that message. But that is to be expected because as we shall see in later articles, those among the Movement had language for those who chose to give any alternate views to theirs – and McGovern's defeat had been failed spectacularly because their candidate had failed to understand it.

Homicide Rewatch: Baby It's You (Law And Order Crossover)

 

 Written by Jorge Zamacona (both shows)

Directed by Ed Sherin (both shows)

 

Given the immense ratings for 1996's crossover with Law & Order, it made sense that NBC had demanded a sequel as possible. However Dick Wolf and Tom Fontana waited two years in order to avoid the logistical challenges that had burdened them the first time.

Last time Universal had insisted that the Law & Order episode be self-contained for the purposes of syndication. This time, however, Wolf made it very clear that this had to be a two-part story told across two shows. (Wolf would continue this pattern as the Law & Order spin-offs became more prominent and would do the same with his Chicago series at a more intense level, eventually having them take place on a single night.

Once again Zamacona and Sherin reprised their duties from the previous crossover and this time they chose to do several things differently. The first, and most obvious, was to keep things within Law & Order's format of ripping stories from the headlines. In this case the murder of teenage model Brittany Janaway is very much modeled on the Jon Benet Ramsey killings that had happened just a few months earlier in 1997.

While this would seem to be out of kilter with Homicide's formula the very nature of the way Janaway was killed – toxic shock from the result of being sexually assaulted days earlier – is one of the darkest stories that Law & Order did in its original run. (It would be much more fitting with the Special Victims Unit spinoff that came within two years – more on the direct link later.) This is a theme that was very keeping with the kind of stories Homicide viewers had become used to: death of a child was very much in the milieu. And considering that the crossover is doing much about the sexualization of teenage girls in the media the episode has, if anything, improved with age with the themes involved.

Unlike the first crossover the Law & Order episode takes its time bringing Baltimore in the picture. The episode shows Brittany dying and being worked on by her father Steven. Instantly the detectives are suspicious: why did her father take to her to his office rather then the ER?  And they're shocked to learn that while the pictures make her look like she's in her twenties, she's only fourteen. (She's been doing this since she was seven years old; this was clearly as direct a reference to the real life JonBenet as the writers wanted to get it.) Van Buren and the detectives never thought this was possible when they saw her pictures on billboards and its clear there's some kind of cutting.  The detectives are unsettled from the start how sexualized these girls are: when they interview one of the models they are stunned to learn she's in eighth grade and not in college.

It's not until the first act is over when they learn just how horrible her death was. She had been undergone a horrible rape and it took two weeks for the toxic shock to kill her. Immediately afterwards they go outside to eat and the media has gathered who knows details of the death that the M.E. just told the detectives about.  Here the show makes its first major shift from the last crossover: Jack McCoy shows way ahead of schedule and is angry about the leaks. When Van Buren makes it clear the leaks might very well have come from the Janaways who might know the investigation is coming around to them, the episode starts taking the turn not unlike the one we saw in the Blood Ties trilogy. The media has swarmed the penthouse that Janaways live in and they are far more hostile then they were in Baltimore. Briscoe and Curtis demonstrate that they are New York cops shouting and maligning the media circus in a way you think that Pembleton himself might tip his hat too. And by the time they get inside the Janaways have lawyered up with the wonderfully sleazy Leslie Drake.  He makes it clear that they are not allowed to talk to the parents unless they are given 24 hours' notice and without him present. He oozes with hypocrisy, saying that the Janaways lost their daughter and that should take precedent over finding out who might have killed her.

Its not until the first interview with the Janaways that Baltimore even gets brought up: the Janaways lived there until two years ago and they still have a residence there. Critically they were last there two weeks ago when the assault took place. Only then does the idea of calling Baltimore come up – and that when things get entertaining.

The second brilliant idea is to change which detectives are front and center. One of the best parts of the crossover was the banter between Munch and Briscoe so the detectives decide to call Munch. It made sense to put Bayliss and Pembleton front and center in the first crossover: they're essentially the stars of the show. But because there was so much combativeness with Frank essentially acting like a prick the whole way through it made the first part difficult to enjoy and overshadowed Law & Order's involvement in the second part.

This is good because it gives a chance to put the underutilized Richard Belzer at the front of a story and his discomfort is about the fact that Lennie slept with his first ex-wife. Al's reaction is to get over it and adds: "How do you know I didn't sleep with her?"  So Munch then makes the decision to call in Falsone, another brilliant move as Jon Seda gets a chance to be at the front of a story for the first time since the series premiere.

By this point the detectives at the precinct are essentially being bullied by the Janaways at  every level: Drake shows up with a profiler and a letter from the mayor demanded they listen and when they don't Drake goes on the news deriding them and posting a $250,000 reward to deluge the department with cranks. When McCoy confronts him with what he's doing Drake makes it clear he doesn't care about how much work the police have to do and he follows that up with a TV report deriding McCoy with the Janaways playing the heartbroken parents about the suspect involved. McCoy then subpoenas the Janaways essentially putting up a gag order. We have no idea if they'd have followed it because by that point we've actually got a suspect.

Munch and Falsone are making progress; they find a cranky neighbor who tells them of a report of a suspicious character around the time the Janaways were last here. They manage to track down the cab that picked him up, learn that he came from Penn Station (Baltimore's, not New York's) was wearing a Mets cap and not long after he dropped him off he saw the young man running away. By the time Briscoe hears of this one of the Janway's staff has come in, says she thinks she knows who did it and doesn't want the reward. She thinks its Johnny Ramirez, the son of an old babysitter who quit because Johnny was spending too much time looking at Brittany in a creepy way. The mother doesn't believe he did this – a look inside the young man's apartment makes us think otherwise – but he said:  "they were using her to make money."

By that time Danvers brings Munch and Falsone in. In a few short sentences he makes clear what we already know but because the crime might well have taken place in Baltimore he wants them to go to New York and extradite Ramirez. This is the third brilliant part of the crossover: it puts Zeljko Ivanek in a far more prominent role then he usually gets and we get to see him a courtroom, a place he rarely shows up. Much of his scenes in the second part are with McCoy and the fact that Ivanek can hold his own with a man who was already one of the greatest actors of all time makes you wish he'd had more to do during the series.

It's a sign of how much easier Munch and Falsone are to get along with that where Frank was aggressive about his present Munch just jokes about it: "I'm looking for a good piece of brisket. Can't find any in Baltimore." Munch is far less strident about it and he's willing to just sit at the desk and eat takeout. They joke about the suspect, Falsone asks Curtis about his kids and his ethnic makeup and he talks about his own.  And the camaraderie works: he and Briscoe figure out that Johnny might end up where they buried Brittany and while it takes a while, he does show up.

The interrogation sequence near the end is superb. Falsone takes the bad cop approach, Curtis divine, Munch and Briscoe almost fatherly. And eventually they get the truth: Johnny was there but as a witness. He saw somebody going at her – her dad's car was there. The final scene of the crossover suggests the idea that its clear Jack never wanted to think: Steven Janaway raped his daughter to death. The last lines of the first part are delivered by Emil Skoda: "You're about to look into a very dark corner of the human heart. Bring a shovel." He's not wrong – but he's not right either.

The episode begins with Ross and McCoy interviewing Johnny whose testimony is still too vague to be a good case against Steven Janaway. Ross suggests punting into Baltimore but McCoy says possession is nine-tenths of the law. And when the detectives go to pick him up the Janaways are gone and Drake is being his usually cheerful self. Munch actually gets him to admit they went back to Baltimore.

Back in Baltimore the first thing Frank says when he recognizes Curtis and Briscoe is to say: "Has Charon set his minions from beyond the river Styx?" He then shares with Falsone every detail of what happened last year, making clear that he still holds the two of them responsible for Rausch dropping dead just as he went back into their custody.  Giardello is annoyed that two of his detectives have been in New York for so long and he seems less happy to see Briscoe and Curtis then before. Updated Falsone and Curtis get a search warrant for the house while Giardello tells Munch "as unseemly as it may be, go with Briscoe" to the hospital where Janaway has privileges.  The difference is made clear from last time immediately: Falsone makes it very clear that he doesn't care where Janaway fries.

Munch and Briscoe hear from one of the doctors that Steven Janaway quit and moved two years earlier when Brittany came in bleeding badly. The father refused to give an explanation. When they talk to the treating nurse she remembers the case: Brittany was brought in with vaginal bleeding and that her father had treated her. Janaway had been adamant that no one breathe a word of it, saying he didn't want his wife to know.

 Falsone and Curtis talk amicably about how much they make: Curtis tells him his wife is the breadwinner in the family while Falsone's clearly blue collar, talking about moonlighting and even putting together  a calendar about the detective of Baltimore. Curtis asks what happened and Falsone jokes: "You've seen the cops in Baltimore?" (This is another subtle joke about how Homicide even in Season Six still wasn't hiring matinee idols for its cast.) When they get to the house they find Maureen Janaway frantically vacuuming her daughter's room. "There goes the crime scene," Falsone said resignedly.

Back at the squad as they bring Maureen Janaway in Falsone now finds another problem. His ex-wife Janine just called and something happened to his three-year old son that she seems inclined to tell him only after the fact. Curtis offers to hold off but Paul is resigned: this has clearly happened before and its too remind him his wife has sole custody. That may be part of the reason then when Falsone and Curtis talk to Janaway he starts getting particularly aggressive when it comes to her denials about her husband in regard to her daughter. And when he's told his son was in the hospital (after taking over  a day to call back) he's furious.

Then again considering where the investigation is, this is understandable. Homicide has frequently probed the depths of pedophilia almost from the beginning of the series but this is the first time it's dealing with the most horrific of subjects: incest.  No wonder Munch is pissed that after his daughter died, Steven felt fine leaving town to play 18 holes.

Briscoe tells Munch during that period: "You wear a badge and you speak for the dead. I think I know you." Perhaps its fitting that the two of them lead the first formal interrogation of Steven Janaway in the box. We haven't seen Munch in the box for a long time and it’s a rare treat to see just how good Richard Belzer is in an interrogation. The two of them start talking about the Janaway marriage and then John asks: "You ever get bored." Munch starts talking about just how much of a sucker's game marriage is (and even though its an act Briscoe mutters 'Now I know I know you.") Briscoe brings up the incident in the ER three years ago and Janaway says: "Why am I here?" The way Munch leads into the Miranda warning is searing while Briscoe slowly presents the facts: the nature of the crime, that the attack took place in Baltimore, Janaways previous actions regarding her condition. "Your daughter was fourteen, but when she dressed up for work, she looked anything like a pubescent teenager," Munch points out. Briscoe finally asks the question: "Did you sexually assault your daughter?" This finally provokes a emotional reaction from Janaway. When he denies it Munch whispers: "We think you did." Despite everything Munch and Briscoe say he says with the first sign of emotion: "Then prove it."

In New York McCoy intends to go to Baltimore to claim jurisdiction. Ross points out Danvers will argue felony murder – which is a solid argument. Jack says he's going to redefine the crime: arguing its depraved indifference, that Janaway knew his daughter was bleeding from the assault and did nothing to stop it. Ross mocks the idea but Jack says he's going down, in large part because of everything Drake put him through – and after the last two episodes, its hard to argue it.

When McCoy gets to the courtroom Danvers is deferential but he's actually worried. It doesn't help the judge is Aandahl. The show has a long memory and so does Danvers: two years ago she was the judge who released Rausch into the custody of the New York DA, finding a precedent that led to Rausch's memorable demise.  This time Aandahl tells us she worked for Adam Schiff and is almost girlish, saying that she's a Mets fan. "Adam's a Red Sox fan. After Buckner booted that grounder Adam wouldn't give me the time of day," she giggles.

Then we're back to the kind of argument we often get on Law & Order in pre-trial motions. On that show we're inclined to root for Sam Waterston, this time its harder to tell which side we want to win. Both Danvers and Jack make competent legal arguments.  Danvers, however, manages to negate the argument of depraved indifference by pointing out what we saw in the teaser of the Law and Order episode: he was on his knees performing CPR. Aandahl agrees with that part of it and grants jurisdiction. However she gives Jack a bone and allows him to serve as co-council.  Danvers doesn't have a problem with that and for once, neither does Jack.

The episode then does a time jump that is more common to Law & Order then Homicide; it's about a month later and Jack is at a bar where Falsone is drinking and he buys Jack a drink. This leads to the kind of conversation that, to this point on Law & Order, we rarely got: one of the attorneys getting to share his feelings about a case. Falsone is in a brown study, wondering what kind of person Brittany might have been had she lived.  Jack assures him Janaway will suffer.  Falsone tells the story of a kid he knew growing up who was beaten up regularly by his alcoholic parents who Paul wanted to take care of – and one day he just didn't come to school.  Then he gets to the core of it: how could any man sexually abuse his own child? And then Sam Waterston says something that in his previous four seasons he almost never got a chance to say on Law & Order. He tells how one day he was on vacation, on a beach, and he sees this beautiful looking girl with her back to him. "I started to think, you know what you think when you see a girl that pretty." And then she turned around and it was his daughter. (This is the first time we know Jack even had a child.) "I felt a little sick to my stomach," he tells Paul. "Some people don't have any conscience."

The trial scene is one we rarely get on Homicide. And it's not quite what we're used to in Law & Order. The courtroom is smaller and the crowd noises more clear. It makes clear that Drake is very much the kind of attorney in the courtroom: he's provocative, a gut puncher, ignoring the objections until the judge says otherwise. The trial cuts between the witness McCoy and Danvers put up, regarding the sexual assault in a very Homicide type way.

Drake decides to do something you never thought he'd do. After a very animated conversation he calls Steven Janaway to the stand. He barely gives much of a questioning and then after asking him if he raped and murdered his daughter and Steven says no we're surprised. Jack is baffled by this thinking that they're being set up but Danvers refuses to listen and starts questioning him. Janaway says he was in Baltimore the night of the attack but he wasn't at home – he was in a motel with another woman.  Danvers and Jack are furious – you're required to send alibi notification before a trial and Drake never did. Drake tried to assure them he didn't know a month ago. We have no idea if this was a trick by Drake – it really does seem like the kind of thing he'd pull – but Danvers and McCoy demand a continuance. They get 48 hours.

And the detectives to get to the truth: Janaway was at the hotel where he said he was, even ordered room service. Janaway has been an affair with Dr. Plotkin, a med school colleague for nearly ten years.  So they decide to bring in both Stephen and Maureen in separate cars and separate rooms. "This should not be pleasant or comfortable for either of them," Jack says. And it truly isn't.

For the first time we see the media vultures descend on the Janaways, first the husband, then the wife. Jack is part of the interrogation in one room with Falsone with Steven, Munch and Danvers go in with Maureen.  They are asked if they were good parents. Falsone is particularly cold with Steven "You were out with another broad when she needed you the most." He lays pictures of Brittany on the interrogation room table, demanding to know if he knew what happened to his daughter. Munch shows the same picture to Maureen questioning if she knew about her husband straying.

It is Drake, who seems to have committed to being Steven's lawyer, finally convinces him to answer the question. Jack asks why he risked a trial and possible death sentence. Finally Stephen answers and its almost heartbreaking: "Because I'm guilty." At some level he knew what was happening to his daughter – and that his wife was the one responsible for all of the horrific abuse.

Munch gets to a different point as to motive: Maureen seems to have acted out of jealousy of how her daughter was the attractive one and she never was. That her daughter got all the attention, was so successful and her father paid more attention to her then his wife.  And when the mother admits Munch is furious: "What the hell's the matter with you? You were jealous of your own daughter!"

It's a solution far neater then the one that came in real life (the case remains unsolved even now) but one can't exactly say Homicide took the easy way out. The idea of a father sexually assaulting his own daughter is almost easier to believe and comprehend then a mother doing the exact same thing to her child. It's a horrific crime and Homicide should be applauded for dealing with it, even in this fashion. And full credit throughout must go to Tom Tammi and Maureen Anderman as the Janaways for their work. Both spend the first episode looking frozen and as if their performing and the humanity and pain starts to come out by degrees in the conclusion, particularly in the final interrogation.

The episode only stutters a bit at the end: Falsone coming to Jack McCoy asking if he can pursue shared custody seems a bit off, and the scene where he comes to the Janaway home to give his daughter's things to the grieving father smacks of awkwardness: it really doesn't seem like the kind of thing either show would do, particularly the way the father lets him off the hook. But it's a small problem to go with what is overall a superb two-parter, dealing with a grim subject and not blinking once.

 

 

 

NOTES FROM THE BOARD

 

'Detective Munch': Munch gets to give as much as he ridden on. When Briscoe says we know him he says: "The one whose ex-wife I slept with?" Told he has to be more specific, he says: "The mediocre pool player." At the cemetery Briscoe mentions Gwen's flower preferences and John says: "I have no interest in anything about that little tart. (Ah but later this season.) He actually seems interested if Mark Twain and Walt Whitman are buried at that cemetery. "Better them then me," Briscoe says. As the Homicide parts begins Falsone says: "I can't prove it but I'm pretty sure that in a previous life Briscoe and Munch were married."

Perhaps the best line from Munch comes when they're at the club Steven Janaway's at. "We're a couple of Jewish cops; you think we have a chance of joining this country club?" It's rare for John to use his religion to make a sarcastic comment and you can tell how nervous it makes the club pro. Good for John. Briscoe seems to like the idea. When they say they want to wait he assures him: "Oh, he won't try to convert anybody. Trust me."

On The Soundtrack: On the streaming you will hear Meredith Brooks: "What Would Happen" as the detectives interview the hotel staff trying to prove Steven Janaway's alibi. On the DVD you will hear Blind Faith's classic: "Can't Find My Way Home" but honestly that song really doesn't seem to go with the final minutes when its used and the replacement that they get is much more fitting.

Oops! Sam Waterston's name is spelled 'Sam Waterson' on the credits sequence on Homicide.

There's also an interesting contradiction in Law & Order. In Baby It's You, J.K. Simmons appears as Emil Skoda, who by Season Eight had become the psychiatric consultant. But as everyone who watched the last crossover remembers in 'For God & Country" Skoda played Emil Rausch. Couldn't be helped.

This crossover was originally planned to be even more ambitious. At one point Wolf and Fontana considered bringing ER by that point NBC's biggest hit into the crossover. Fortunately John Wells and the producers turned them down. God knows how it would have worked. (Though it would have been fun to see George Clooney talking with Briscoe and Munch.)

Hey, Isn't That…Dan Hedaya is one of the most accomplished character actors in history. He began his career playing Herbie on the TV soap Ryan's Hope in 1975. He appeared in many films and TV shows during the 1970s and 1980s and ending up playing Joseph Keuhnelian on St. Elsewhere during Season 2. He also played Ralph in the first Season of Hill Street Blues. He was cast as Nick Tortelli in the failed Cheers spin-off The Tortellis. He'd actually appeared in Law and Order in Season three as a Lieutenant who framed a suspect for murder. (Somehow Lennie Briscoe didn't see the similarity five years later.)  His most critically acclaimed films were Blood Simple, The Addams Family, Searching For Bobby Fischer, Cher's Father in Clueless and Jeff Rabin, who has a famously messy office in The Usual Suspects. Known for his resemblance to Richard Nixon, he appeared in two films about the 37^th President Oliver Stone's Nixon in which he played Trini Cardoza and the sly parody Dick in which he played the President.

After this episode he went on to play Herb Spivak on ER, another attorney who is a wealthy corporate attorney in Season 4 and by Season 11 is operating out of a van. Other TV appearances of not include Joey Legs on FX's Lucky, the recurring role of Don on Yes, Dear, Father Frank on the sadly too short lived The Book of Daniel and Barney Frank on the TV Film Too Big to Fail. He has made appearances on Blue Bloods and Gotham. His last major film to date was on the Amazon film Influenced

 

 

 

 

How Volunteering For Mary Peltola Made Clear The Difference Between Activism And Politicking

 

 

Those of you who are regular readers of my columns know that when it comes to bringing about change know that there is the divide between the activist and the politician and that I've always believed that the latter will be more effective. You might also know from previous columns that in the past few months I've begun doing volunteer work for Mary Peltola's campaign in Alaska because I wanted to do more in that field.

What I've been doing has been as difficult as I expected. But it's also given me firsthand experience of what the difference between the two really is and why I can understand at a certain level why so many people would prefer activism.

I've more than aware how frustrated and upset people are that America of today and how so many people could feel helpless and what to do something, anything, to bring about change. So taking what I believe is the one thing that will get be the least pushback from my position as a white cis male, let's say you decided to attend a No Kings Rally.

I've done much to deride them over the past couple of years but in a way I do understand the appeal. You go on a website where one in your region is being held, you design some signs or T-shirts and then you go. You spend the better part of a Saturday there, you spend time with people who complete agree with you, you get to express your contempt for the President in a loud and unfiltered way. You're covered by certain TV stations who share you point of view, you get a lot of coverage on social media and then you go home, thinking that you've struck a blow being part of 'the resistance'.

My personal feelings aside I can get at an objective level why people would want to do this. It's an outlet for your genuine feelings of frustration; the amount of effort you have to put in is relatively little (I'll get to that) and you immediately get the dopamine hit of feeling like you've achieved something because you see it on TV or the internet. You haven't actually accomplished anything – Trump is still President – but it feels like you've done something important and for all my criticisms of that approach I understand why that would matter to a lot of people. It does satisfy the immediate idea that you've accomplished something and the fact that you've spent the day surrounded by people who agree with everything you say makes you feel that you are part of something.

And that's the difference between activism and politicking. In activism, you are always surrounded by people who are in lockstep with your point of view and there are clear differences between who's on your side and who you're against.  The activist has a very binary view of the world and there is a comfort in that.  But that is the very thing that almost always limits any good the activist can do. As long as there is your side and their side and you're the one who can permanently define the other side as the enemy you can spend your life in activism and never have to leave your bubble. I don't deny there's an appeal to that; in my own life its always been very hard for me to leave the safety of my comfort zone in almost everything. But as a way of making the world a better place, it's only going to feel like you're changing things. You're never going to actually change them.

Now the last month or so I've been working the phone banks for the Peltola campaign. At this stage of things we're mostly trying to call former Democratic voters in Alaska who may not have voted in an election or two and get them to come out in the fall. This is harder then it sounds and in the few times I've done it I can assure you it's not that easy.

I've joked to my friends and family that this experience has given me a respect for telemarketers that I never had. And that's what working the phones for a campaign is like. You're cold  calling from a list (or the campaign is doing it for you in a sense) you wait and see if someone will pick up (a lot of the time it goes straight to voicemail) and if they do you have to read from a script to see if they'll talk. In most cases they will hang up on you very quickly. And while I've had several people say they will be voting for Peltola for all I know its just something they're saying to get me to leave them alone. Some have actually said they want me to take them off their list and I've talked to more than a few people who've moved to other countries. This last week I talked to someone who'd moved to Costa Rica a while ago.

By contrast to being an activist where you immediately get the feeling you've accomplished something if you're working for a campaign you have to deal with rejection far more often. And I'm doing this from the comfort of my own home on the other side of the world. I have immense respect for those people who are leading the campaign in Alaska and have uprooted their lives to work for this candidate. (I've met a few and in a different article I'll probably discuss them.) These are people who will have to spend a lot of time organizing campaign events and voter outreach events in the biggest and densest state in the Union, never mind just how horrible the weather is on most days. It's difficult enough for me to make these phone calls; I can't imagine what it will be like to travel to Nome or Anchorage in September or October.

And even the successes you achieve as a campaign worker are in a sense more ephemeral than the activist. In all the sessions I've done so far I think at best I've convinced maybe ten people to vote for Peltola in November. I'm not denying every vote counts in an election, especially one that by this point every political website is ranking as a toss-up. But even in the best case scenario I'm not going to know if I made a difference to the campaign unless we end up winning in November – and the thing about politics is that nothing is carved in stone.

This is something I'm aware of. Alaska may be more of a purple state then we try to say it is but it's still going to be an uphill fight to get Peltola elected. A lot of it will depend on the grass roots efforts on the ground but I'm fully aware that Dan Sullivan has the advantage of incumbency in a state where Democrats have a difficult time winning elections. Mary Peltola has proven that it is possible for that happen – she has won elections twice in a district Trump carried – but there's a difference between 'possible' and 'certain'.

Even from the relative comfort of my home in New York I have no illusions how difficult the work I'm going to be doing is. And this is just trying to win over former Democrats. In the weeks and months to come I'm going to have to try to win over Independents and Republicans and try to convince them to vote for a Democrat. That's not going to be fun and it will have less rewards.

But that is the very reason why the political approach is the one that is necessary to building real change. As an activist you can easily torch anyone who might even have questions about your approach and being undecided makes you as bad as the opposition. The politician doesn't have that luxury. Their job is to build coalitions, not just when it comes to getting voters to elect you in a ground game but if you actually want to bring about the lasting change that so many activists demand but almost never get for their efforts.

As we've all become more painfully aware in the last decade in particular bringing about lasting reform is a never-ending marathon, a race you can never stop running because the opposition is just as determined to keep tearing down all the victories you thought you've achieved forever. It is understandable that many people would feel overwhelmed and lost – indeed I've talked to quite a few Alaskans who said they would vote for Peltola because they genuinely do feel that they're drowning in bad news. And I get the impulse that so many people, particularly the young have, that they need to do something, anything. But there's a difference between doing something immediately and doing something that's actually constructive. The former makes you feel good in the moment but nothing has actually changed in society afterward. The latter takes far more time and effort, almost always has more negative experiences on a daily basis that positive ones and at the end of the day, there's no guarantee of success.

It's for that reason I have immense respect for the people in the Peltola campaign – and not just them. The ones working for Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Josh Turek in Iowa and James Talarico in Texas. All of them are going to be fighting uphill battles in climates that have a long history of being unfavorable to the kind of reform America needs. If you've read my articles about them over the last several months or know anything about politics in general, you know exactly why this is the case. There are rarely moments of glory in the work they'll be doing in the last few months and very little of the media attention that the anti-Trump rallies have gotten and will continue to get. But if they succeed, they will have played a part far more important in bringing about the kind of long-term change activists desire but never do with their marches and rallies.

As for me, I will keep doing the work. To paraphrase a former President I choose to work for Mary Peltola and do the other things not because it is easy but because it is hard. That's the real difference between activism and grass roots politics. It's a lot of work but if you do it right the rewards are significant and glorious even if you never know for sure the role you played.

 

 

Could Caleb Groen Become the Fifth Superchampion of Season 42? The Answer Is...

 

On July 3^rd 2024 Isaac Hirsch defeated Kelly Proulx to win his first Jeopardy game in a narrow runaway. He would go on to win eight more before being unseated by Jay Fisher on a Final Jeopardy no one could get correct, finishing with 9 wins and $215,390.

This total would earn him a bye into the semifinals of the 2025 Tournament of Champions where he would ultimately fall short of defeating Nilesh Vinjamuri and eventually an invitation to that year's Jeopardy Masters where he surprised even himself by finishing fourth.

Exactly one year to the day Scott Riccardi would manage to defeat Jason Singer. Jason had the previous day become the first player in an unprecedented fifteen consecutive games to win two games. Scott would win quite a bit more eventually reaching super-champion status with 16 victories and $455,000 before being shockingly defeated by Jonathan Hugendubler in a come from behind victory.

Scott's total of wins and money won was by far the most of any participant in this past year's Tournament of Champions but he would be thrashed, along with TJ Fisher in three consecutive runaways by Paolo Pasco this past February.

And on July 2^nd 2026 Caleb Gruen won his first game on Jeopardy and went on to win the next eight.  He was attempting to win his tenth game almost two years to the day Isaac  had failed to win his and the same day one year later Scott  would win his tenth.

Such synchronicity is nearly unheard of it forty two seasons of Jeopardy; it's the kind of story you couldn't believe if it were fiction.  But there were differences. After Isaac's streak had ended, no one would come close to winning as many games until Scott came along. By contrast since Scott's departure it has seemed like a super-champions has emerged every month. Indeed Caleb's streak began when he defeated Richard Nguyen who just two days earlier had beaten Adam Remsen after 12 consecutive victories which had given him a bye into the semi-finals of the 2027 Tournament of Champions – something that he had earned by winning two more games then Tristan Williams who had become the first to win exactly ten one month earlier.  Now Caleb was treading on Adam's tail and would have to win at least another four games to guarantee himself the bye Adam thought he'd earned.

Of course Caleb was not thinking that today. He had to concentrate on whether he could manage to win his tenth game. No small issue. To be sure Caleb had managed six runaway victories in his nine appearances but Monday's and yesterday's matches had left him with very little margin for error. On Monday's game he'd only found one of the Daily Doubles in Double Jeopardy and he had to come on strong in that round to narrowly put the game out of reach by the end of the round. On Tuesday he got off to a big lead early in the Jeopardy round, then lost it all on the Daily Double. In Double Jeopardy he was actually in third for a while but then managed to get going and thanks to finding the last Daily Double late in the round he managed a narrow runaway again – and this time he needed to because his nearest opponent Patience Bruce got Final Jeopardy right and he didn't. (Expect to see Patience as a likely Second Chance Tournament player this year.) In both games he was getting more and more incorrect answers – six incorrect on Monday's, five on Tuesday's.

There was no question when Caleb was good, he was very, very good. On Thursday he managed to win $60,000, the highest amount won by any player this season, a mark not even Jamie Ding had reached during his incredible 31 game run. But aside from that win he had a weakness: Final Jeopardy. He had won his first three games despite never responding correctly on Final Jeopardy in what had been three consecutive triple stumpers. He'd gotten in right on what was his fourth win when he absolutely needed to and four straight runaways.

That was the question going into today's match as he faced off against Marisa Rizzuli and Amando Marin. Did Caleb have what it took to succeed where Isaac failed or would his streak end? The answer was… he absolutely could.

It took a bit for Caleb to get to that p0int. While he had $8600 at the end of the Jeopardy round Armando was putting up a challenge. But three clues into Double Jeopardy it was clear is was going to be Caleb's day.

After responding correctly on the first clue he found the Daily Double on the next one in NOTORIOUS. He chose to wager $4000:

Robert Stroud, who became a self-taught ornithologist during his years in solitary, is best known by this nickname. He just needed a moment: "What is Birdman of Alcatraz?

Then he found the Daily Double on his next pick in POEMS. This time he bet $5000:

Milton's poem this man 'Agonistes', meaning enduring a struggle, describes him as 'eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves'.

He knew it was Samson. Just like that he had $19,800. It was all over but the shouting after that. He had another dominant performance: 31 correct clues and only 2 mistake and finished with another impressive total at the end of Double Jeopardy. $38,000.

The only suspense left was how big was his payday going to be as he officially became a super-champion.

The category was 20^th CENTURY HISTORY. "The U.N. Conference of April 25, 1945 opened with a speech that said this man 'gave his life while trying to perpetuate these high ideals." Caleb knew the correct answer: "Who is FDR? (He'd died just two weeks earlier. The wager was $22,067. Caleb had surpassed his own single day record with $60,067 and achieved super-champion status with a very impressive 10 day total of $300,567.

As Ken remarked Season 42 was already a season of super-champions. And Caleb was already impressive in his own way. In just ten games he'd won nearly as much as Adam Remsen had in twelve and it took Scott Riccardi, his super-champion twin twelve games to get where Caleb was in ten.  And while even if his streak continues to the end of the season he won't be anywhere close to Jamie Ding in total wins, in one way he's better than Jamie. By winning $60,000 or more in two games he's accomplished something that only a handful of super-champions did: Jennings himself, James Holzahauer, Matt Amodio, Amy Schneider, Austin Rogers and Jason Zuffranieri are the only super champions who've managed that feat.

With Caleb's victory Season 42 of Jeopardy has officially equaled Season 38 for the number of super-champions who played during the length of the season. And with seven players already who've won six games or more it has also tied it with producing the most players who won that many in a season. (I'll publish the official list in my summation of Season 42 at the end of next week.) The 2027 Tournament of Champions is going to be a doozy and we're still three months away from the end of the eligibility period.

At this point the only real problem Season 42 is facing is that with so little time elapsing between Jeopardy champions there may not be enough players to fill out the Jeopardy Wild Card Tournament this year. But honestly that's a problem few Jeopardy fans would consider a real complaint.

I'll be back at the end of the season to summarize what has been an incredible year of Peak Jeopardy.

 

 

Stephen King Writing As Richard Bachman: Rage (1977)

 

We may never know one way or the other but there's an argument that Rage, the first novel King published under his pseudonym may have sold the poorest of any book King ever wrote.

It's not merely because almost no one bought any of 'Bachman's' novels when they were under his name. It's that when the truth came out about Bachman, all of King's books under that label were published first in an omnibus volume and then only in the mid-1990s did they begin to get released individually. And then outside events intervened that lead to the author essentially pulling the book from the shelves voluntarily.

You see Rage is about a high school named Charlie Decker who on a bright May morning has a mental breakdown. It's been a long time coming as he admits. He's called to the office by the principal Mr. Decker, who talks to him about his most recent psychiatric evaluation. Decker tries to be polite about but then Charlie starts to 'get it on' which as we will learn is to mentally dress down an authority figure in the meanest possible terms and with vulgar language. Decker reacts like any principal should and expels him. This is Charlie's reaction:

I went down the staircase whistling. I felt wonderful. Things happen that way sometimes. When everything is as its worst, your mind just throws it all into the wastebasket and goes to Florida for a while. There is a sudden electric what-the-hell glow as you stand there looking back over your shoulder at the bridge you just burned down.

He then goes to his locker, takes out his father's pistol and his bullets. Then he goes back to his classroom and shoots his algebra teacher.

After the shootings at Columbine King voluntarily had Rage pulled from all bookstores which as we all know ended school shootings forever.  The truth is King no doubt this as a preemptive strike. For his entire career even then his novels always were being put on 'banned books' lists because of their violence and language (as they still are basically to this day.) Rage was no more responsible for all of the shootings that had happened before that horrible event then those who would eventually try to blame films such as The Basketball Diaries immediately afterward. But King had to know that this would be something that those on the right (who had less influence over censorship back then but it was still significant) would use as a cudgel to get all of his books off the shelfs and do everything to destroy his career in the future. Besides this was an easy sacrificial lamb compared to others that were far more worthy of it.

So the only way you can get Rage in the 21^st century is either if you find a copy of the book at a used book stores or more likely if you can find the omnibus collection on eBay or other places. Now I've had the latter for decades obviously, so let me tell you some more details.

First Rage is almost certainly the first book King ever wrote. He started  it while still a teenager, either 18 or 19 depending on his telling of the story. "At one point I found it moldering away in the cellar of the house I grew up in – this rediscovery was in 1970 and I finished it in 1971." This book, like The Long Walk, was one of two very early novels he wrote before Carrie ended up being published that he thought was 'pretty good'. In fact under the title Getting It On Doubleday had almost bought it and published it two years before Carrie was sold. So it became the first book he submitted as Bachman in 1977. It was released, like all of the first four Bachman books, without fanfare and sold just as badly.

Now I've read it multiple times over the years. It does not, as King himself referred to it in 'Why I Was Bachman' "suck like an Electrolux" but honestly its not very good King or even very good Bachman. The Long Walk reads far better, is more tightly written and does a better job getting into the head of Ray Garraty, who's the same age as Charlie Decker. Rage, by contrast, is uneven and rambles too much.

Part of the problem is Charlie just isn't that interesting a character. He ends up telling his story to his classmates as part of his 'defense' for what he does but there are times even he acknowledge its not that interesting a story.  The reason he claims to have done everything he did is because of how bad his father was. "My dad has hated me for as long as I can remember'. The thing is we never get a clear reason why because the novel's entirely from Charlie's perspective. He served in World War II and he was clearly proud of doing so and he doesn't seem happy to be a recruiting chief for the Vietnam War. And he is abusive to his son at times but not in a particularly original way.

Honestly Charlie's grievances are so small: his father yells at him and hits him after he breaks the windows of the car, he hates wearing a corduroy suit his mother gives him at 12 and has to wear it to a birthday party (by that point his father doesn't even talk to him, he has a terrible sexual experience at sixteen, finally he takes a pipe wrench to school and finally nearly kills one of his teachers.  'Bachman' really only seems interested in what's happening in the present and not what made Charlie who he was.

When King first wrote the novel he was a teenager in the 1960s when the Vietnam War was going horribly and the generational clash that to this day shapes every aspect of our American experience was going on. Its praiseworthy that he tries to put us in the heads of his fellow teenagers and to do so in an act of violence might be a good way to do it. But Charlie doesn't come across as that interesting a protagonist or an antihero. There's no good reason for Charlie being who he is – he's basically a stick figure.

If Rage had ever been done in any other medium (which it almost certainly never will be) it probably would have worked better as a play.  In the hardcover its barely 125 pages long and it basically unfolds over an hour and a half from the moment Charlie is excused from class to the end of the hostage situation. And since it's also basically set in a high school and the majority of it a classroom, it would almost certainly work dramatically better.  

The main reason that I actually think King was premature in removing Rage from the shelves is that its actually improved with age in many ways. I'm not talking about the shooting in the school, I'm talking about how it gets the core of so many of the problems driving teenagers that are nevertheless true; the loneliness, the desire to conform, the way they all seem frustrated. And that's what actually makes Rage work.

After Charlie shoots his homeroom teenager none of his fellow students react:

Nobody said a word. They sat in utter stunned silence, looking at me attentively, as if I had just announced I was going to tell them how they could all get passes to the Placerville Drive-in this Friday night.

They barely manage dull surprise when Charlie says: "This is known as getting it on.

Nobody said anything for five minutes…They looked at me, and I looked at them. Maybe they still could have bolted and they're still asking me why they didn't. Why didn't they cut and run, Charlie? What did you do to them…I don't answer any questions about what happened in Room 16. But if I told them anything, it would be that they've forgotten what it's like to be a kid, to live cheek-in-jowl with violence…

I'm just telling you that American kinds labor under a huge life of violence, both real and make-believe…I knew they thought they'd be all right. That's part of it. What I wonder about it is this: Were they hoping I'd get somebody else?"

No one can look at so much of what teenagers, both in this country and around the world, are living through and not realize how dead on that statement still is in 2026. That King wrote this thirty years before social media and active shooter drills were become the norm for the average teenager is yet another example where King/Bachman saw the future without meaning to.

The only person who honestly seems to think that something horrible is going on is Ted Jones, the most popular kid in high school. Everyone else seems to almost be having a good time from the start, they're fine if he's smoking, one actually asked if he can do homework.

Charlie acknowledges to one of the students that he's nuts but he can't explain why. "If I knew what was making me do it, I problem wouldn't have to." What Charlie can't explain is why everyone in the room is almost immediately on his side. He's actually shocked when they start to turn on Ted, who's the only one who wants to end the violence.

One of the sequences that is the most powerful in the book comes when Don Grace, the school shrink tries to talk Charlie down. He tells Grace that the next time he asks a question he will shoot someone. This leads to a four page tour de force. Done entirely in short sentence in which Charlie engages in a back and forth that eventually tricks Grace into asking a question by quoting the bible and finally causes him to walk away utterly broken.

What's more frightening is after this the classroom erupts in joy, which he describes as on the outside as something unsettling.

Very early in the novel Charle basically states his thesis about the universe and that he thinks for most part it is sane orderly and logical. But:

The other side says that the universe has all the logic of a little kid in a Halloween cowboy suit with his guts and his trick or treat candy spread all over a mile of Interstate 95. This is the logic of napalm, paranoia, suitcase bombs carried by happy Arabs, random carcinoma. This logic eats itself. It says life is a monkey on  a stick, it says life spins as hysterically and erratically as the penny you flick to see who buys lunch.

No one looks at that side unless they have to, and I can understand that. You look at it if you hitch a ride with a drunk in a GTO who puts up to 110 and starts blubbering about how his wife turned him out ; you look at it if some guy decides to drive across Indiana shooting kids on bicycles; you look at it if your sister says, "I'm going down to the store for a minute, big guy" and then gets killed in a stickup.

It's a roulette wheel, but anyone who says the game is rigged is whining. No matter how many numbers there are, the principal of that little white jittering ball never changes. Don't say its crazy, it's all so cool and sane.

And all that weirdness isn't just going on outside. Its in you too, right now, growing in the dark like magic mushrooms.

I find it impossible to argue with that logic and anyone who thinks otherwise is as crazy as Charlie knows he is.

Charlie uses this statement right after shoots his algebra teacher to make it very clear he knows that he's insane and that by contrast proves his sanity. He can't explain what happens next, how the teenagers with a feud turn on each other and then decide to become friends, how everybody begins to share secrets that even horrify Charlie. Finally he realizes something horrible:

At times I was almost tempted to feel (foolish conceit) that I was holding them by myself by sheer willpower. Now I know, of course, that nothing could have been farther from the truth. I had one real hostage that day and his name was Ted Jones.

The real horror in Rage is not the violence that Charlie invokes upon the faculty but that comes in the real climax of the novel. It is something that is genuinely horrific and can't be explained by such things as Stockholm Syndrome. It's so unsettling that Charlie doesn't describe it himself in the book and almost feels compelled to comfort Ted after its happened. We know in the aftermath of the horrors of that day that Charlie has been institutionalized and all of the teenagers seem to have gotten through their experience completely fine with no signs of trauma. And why should they? Charlie was never the real cause of it.

I'm relatively certain in my lifetime, certainly not King's that Rage will ever be on library shelves or available in a new edition. The thing is, if you realty want to understand just how crazy the world is today, reading 'Bachman's' first novel might give you some insight. It won't explain the nightmare that unfolds with Charlie and his classmates but if we realize that at some basic level those problems with teenagers have always been there, that the craziness of life is just below the surface and that all of us are just one little thing away from exploding then there's an argument we need to read it.

And as we all know there are still Charlie Deckers in our world and our society is no more prepared to understand them now then they were in 1999 or in 1977. The only real difference is that there's a place in the world where they're accepted for who they are. That being said Charlie Decker would have no use for Andrew Tate or those in the manosphere. They'd be too close to Ted Jones for his liking.