Constant Reader February 2026 (Delayed Edition) Wilde Lake by Laura Lippman

 

 

Author's Note: I did mean to get this review up in time for February but as my readers know I've been dealing with a lot of other things and February is the shortest month. As apologies consider this a review for February 31^st and that there will be one for March down the road.

By the time I finished reading Wilde Lake another in the seemingly endless line of brilliant novels by Laura Lippman I found myself pondering two questions, one of which is purely my personal belief, the other that Lippman never states directly but one might get from reading it. Both might add a certain explanation to the behavior of Lu Brant, the protagonist of her novel, but Lippman is too good a writer to imply that even if my readings were correct it would excuse her actions at any point in the story.

The first comes from my personal perspective: is it possible Lu suffers from kind of spectrum disorder?  By the time the novel's over we know that there are disposition to mental instability in her family and Lu herself has several problems with learning both as a child and in her adult life.

Both as a child and to an extent as an adult Lu has a way of hearing what people say in a very literal fashion and being unable to make very clear personal observation. While part of this is due to her sheltered upbringing and her childhood (which takes place mostly in the 1970s) it is clear even as she gets older she can't make connections that to the reader are in front of her face, even with the course of time. She's unable to get through the idea of a double entendre, even at an age she should be able to, has no perception of the abusive terms that people say all around her and has a tendency to take everything a person says to her at face value without question. She has a great intellectual capacity at a ridiculously young age but she can't make personal connections and never seems able to comprehend at any age why being intellectually superior is something to be ashamed of.  The whole reason she tells the story of her much older brothers teenage circle is because she has no friends of her own.  The one that she makes of her own age she isolates almost immediately when she invites him into her world because she can't comprehend why it’s a bad thing to call him white trash in front of her father.

She says that she managed to crack the popularity circuit when she was in high school but we see no close friends in adulthood, even among the people with whom she works at the Howard County States Attorney's Office where at the start of the novel she has just been elected the first female one in the county's history. We see how ruthlessly she treats the people who have helped her, running against him which sets up the driving action of much of what follows. She claims to love her children but she's made it very clear her career comes first and we barely see any interactions with them. The only sexual relationship she has in her life is transactional because she doesn't want to have a romantic one and she finds this is a way to scratch an itch. Tellingly it's with one of the friends in her brother's former circle, whose also married. Lu is a widow but she makes it clear she was considering having an affair with him even while she was still married. The fact that this could very well have destroyed her political ambitions is something she considers but only so that she doesn't when she's running for office. She goes right back to it after she wins.

And she has a complete sense of tone-deafness. We see her attend a luncheon where she is the keynote speaker and she's annoyed that she's a fallback choice. The people wanted the state's attorney for Baltimore, who is younger and African-American whose win Lu thinks overshadowed her victory in Howard County. The fact that she is the first female state's attorney in Howard County history seems more significant in her mind then the fact than the fact that someone got further then her in what is Maryland's most populous city. And when she meets a woman who is younger and more threadbare and calls her out on being richer, she doesn't know how to answer when the woman makes it clear that she her earrings cost more than she makes in a week – something she knows is true but that's she unequipped to answer, instead giving her conventional one and then running away before the woman continues to challenge her on the fact that she thinks Lu Brant is a woman who is flaunting her privilege.

The thing is Lu Brant can't comprehend why being wealthy is a bad thing. Which brings me to the other implication: is Lu Brant in her heart a conservative who decides to run as a Democrat because that's what's necessary to advance politically in Howard County? I think I might get less pushback on that considering how Brant seems to openly present herself.

Throughout the novel she makes it clear that she is purely a political animal and when she runs against her former boss that meant as a Democrat. But she has views that throughout make one thing she is only liberal in the sense that helps her politically. It's not just her provincial views on where she came from which was from wealth and privilege where she has little interaction with African-Americans, clearly thinks herself superior to women – but has no problem going to an all-female school so that her intellect will put her above them later on – and throughout the entire book she takes a look at the past that has a clear nostalgia that we all know from conservatism. She keeps talking about how we should stop holding figures from the past for having views that were horrible today, which while I agree with it in principle, we eventually realize is a complete self-serving view.

This becomes the most clear when she's talking about her past:

In my lifetime -from 1970 to now – the accepted terms for black people keep evolving. Negro. Black. African-American and now politicians such as myself are trying to learn the minefields of gender-identity issues. Not that long ago, two prostitutes from Baltimore stole car, drove into the National Security Agency campus, got shot, one of them fatally….They were trans women. "Had they had the surgery?" my father asked and I tried to explain the question is no longer allowed. "Then they're transvestites. "No, dad, no." I tried to explain 'trans' and 'cis' which, it turns out, I didn't completely understand myself."

The events in Wilde Lake take place in April of 2015 as Brant points out not long after Freddie Gray's death would cause Baltimore to burn.

But Howard County is not Baltimore. Or Ferguson or North Carolina or Cleveland or – you get the point.

This is not the first time and far from the last where its clear that Brant is narrating the events of the 1970s and 1980s with something close to nostalgia. She keeps talking about a series of events which her family was involved it that would eventually lead to the death of a young man. And over and over she keeps coming back to the phrase: "They were men of their times. How can I fault them?"

Wilde Lake was published in 2016. I can't help but think Lu Brant is the kind of woman who would say in public she was in favor of Obama but in private vote for McCain and Romney. I suspect that for all her talk of Hilary breaking the glass ceiling she very well might have voted in the Republican primary. Not for Trump of course, but I can imagine Howard County is one of the few place in Maryland where he would have done well and you have to figure she might have voted for Cruz or Rubio in the primary.

While I think both of these are interesting possibilities and I wonder if Lippman considered them while writing Wilde Lake I found myself riveted because this is yet another in a long line of extraordinary novels by the author where the narration comes from a female protagonist who fits the mold of not only being unlikable and arrogant but proud of that arrogance. That arrogance comes from a sense of intelligence or class that has nothing to do with the real world. I've seen in many characters such as Cynthia Barnes in Every Secret Thing, Heloise Lewis in And When She Was Good and five years after this novel was published, Meredith Sampson in Prom Mom. Like Lu Brant, all of these women share intelligence, enormous wealth and have gotten to a position of great esteem in society. All of them are nearly completely isolated socially from the rest of the world and the people they interact the most with are their families, though they keep most of their secrets about them.

Lu Brant is cut from the exact same cloth as all of these women. Her father Andrew Jackson Brant is a legend in Howard County, the most famous states attorney. He has been known for his brilliant legal record, his figure in Maryland politics and one of the great forces in that state. The novel proceeds on two distinct narratives: a first person one in which Lu relates her family's history in the suburb of Columbia, her awareness around her family and her relations with her brother and his circle of friends. The other is related in third person but follows Lu not long after she has been elected the first female states Attorney in Howard County history and the first case she chooses to prosecute, the murder of a middle-aged woman by a homeless man who turns out to be Rudy Drysdale. The stories begin to intersect by the time we reach the final third of the novel but I will remain vague on the details as to how exactly.

Lu Brant seems to have it all. She was happily married to a man she considered the love of her life until he died of a heart attack ten years ago. She has been raising their twins, which were raised by surrogates, and has moved back into her father's home to take care of them while she continues to climb the career ladder.

We know that Lu has been trying to live up to the reputation of both her father and her brother both of whom have a legacy she's been unable shake, particularly when it comes to legacy and fame. Her father was (apparently) always outwardly social and her brother is openly gregarious. Lu has always struggled with social graces and you wonder why she chose a political position because for all her intelligence she can't master optics. Of course that's before you consider that this is clearly a decision of hers to prove she is smarter and better than her father and her brother which is why she chose to run for office in the first place, against the man who was her mentor.   She is a Democrat and her boss is a Republican and even with the name of her father, she still barely managed to win.

Brant has no issues choosing to run against her boss, even though he was a friend of hers. So she seeks her father's counsel. She doesn't know but will learn during the course of the novel that her father has a very long history of cutting off people who disagree with him even if they are his own family. He will claim that it is for the public good and the good of the state but considering just how horrible he treats everyone around him in private and insists on living on a code of manners that the rest of the world doesn't follow, it becomes increasingly clear that he's living by a code that is blanketed by his own prejudices. And as the book progresses we will see that Lu Brant has not only lived her entire life based on that code but that until she won the office it never even occurred to her to question that it was anything but stories.

Like so many of Lippman's female protagonists Lu Brant is remarkably incurious about her past other than her perception of it at the time.  This would seem to have a disconnect with her job as a prosecutor and her determination as the novel progresses to get direct answers. But I'm reminded of an old line that politicians are lawyers and attorneys never ask questions they don't already know the answers to. Lu seems more than willing to do this as part of her job but she's never considered to apply to her life and certainly not her past. (In this she is the opposite of Tess Monoghan, the private investigator and former journalist who is the center of Lippman's other novels, who is determined to find the truth at all cost.)

What's striking as we look as Lu's past as she tells is just how lonely she was. Her mother died giving birth to her (or so she spends her life believing.) Her father cut off his parents and has done the same to her mother's parents as well to the point that Lu doesn't know they are alive until they start calling the house regularly. In order to avoid talking to them her father changes the phone number of the house. Her father has devoted his life to his job and basically leaves her to her older brother and their housekeeper, who is anything but maternal and raises the Brants as essentially they were guests in their own home – and she treats actual guests better.

Lu is so unpopular as a child that she basically gloms on to her older brother's friends as her own, something that none of them really like or even tolerate.  She understands none of their adult conversations, doesn't understand double entendres or even seems to understand when she encounters two having sex. Lu has framed everything that happens with the aura of nostalgia when even the casual observer realizes she never comprehended the often horrific events going on around her and has never questioned them after more than thirty years.

It's this strange naivete that fills ever aspect of Lu's life both in the past and present, which keeps making me wonder about her possibly being on the spectrum. This is true even with her one personal attachment. For years she has been having a casual relationship with Bash, one of her brother's friends from childhood who is also married. We learn she was considering that affair the year before her husband died and saw no reason to think twice about it after he did. This is the kind of thing that, had it been uncovered during her campaign, could have torpedoed it and could just as easily be a problem once she becomes states attorney. Yet the moment she wins elected office she goes right back to seeing Bash for their perennial hookups. The fact that the sex is incredibly rough is also the kind of thing that could hurt her career but even though she has no desire to make it more serious, she does it because it fills a need in her life.

We see throughout the book, both in the past and present that Andrew Brant is not a great man, not even a very good one. The closer we get to the end of the novel we learn that her father has been basically lying to her about multiple secrets that could have led to her living a different life and he feels no remorse or regret about having hid them from her. By the end of the book we learn that the one case that built his entire career – the one that started his entire life – was also based on a fundamental falsehood that his own biases refused to allow him to follow correctly.

I realize that I've spent a lot of time talking about Lu Brant and her perception of events and really haven't talked much about the plot that's involved, especially the story that leads to connecting both the past and the present in a horrible way. I realize that I could do that but for once I'm going to leave that for the reader to discover on their own. What I will say is how the events of the past involve the rape and assault of a woman who is outside the circle of friends that Lu travels in and that Lu has never once questioned her brother or her father's version of events until the case of Rudy Drysdale makes it very clear she has too.

I will say that considering the decade that will follow in the aftermath of the events in this novel, I'm pretty sure Lu Brant isn't much of a feminist either or inclined to 'believe women'. When she finally confronts the victim for the first time in thirty years the woman tells the kind of story that is familiar of all those victims of rape who have somehow blamed for what happened to them. Lu is no different than those men both in the past and indeed when she learns the truth in the present. She's still trying to defend her family, still inclined to believe that the past is the truth even though by this point several people have died as a result of her childhood.

I should mention one last thing. Near the end of Wilde Lake Lu Brant reveals that she's writing this down and placing it in the Howard County Historical Society where it will not be revealed for another hundred years. She claims that she is doing this to protect the memories of her children and future generations of Brants. But by this point its clear she's very much her father's daughter and is determined to shape the narrative so that she never has telling her children anything that makes her uncomfortable and so she doesn't have to face the past either.

It's hard not to feel sympathy for Lu Brant by the end of the book: even she admits that her actions have cost her everything. Despite that, there's the very real fact that her decision not to question reality and only believe what she wanted to her entire life as well as her own ambition has done just as much damage as her family did in the past. You honestly wonder at the end of Wilde Lake if she's upset that so many people are dead because of her family or that they all died before she could finally learn the truth about her past and now she can never get answers.

One of the last paragraphs of the novel that doesn't quite spoil anything:

I tell the story here so that I may never tell it again. My childhood was made up of stories and so many of them were false. Is that because the true stories were unendurable?

By the end of Wilde Lake Lu Brant is convinced that she's telling this story because she doesn't want this to be her children's legacy. But Lu is burying it because she doesn't want to face her own role in it. When her children get old enough she can just blatantly lie to them about everything with the same disregard her father did for the truth, so she doesn't have to face her role in it. The greater tragedy of the novel is that this could have all been avoided if at some point Lu had just decided to ask her father or her brother or any of the people in her circle a question about what had happened. And I've no doubt she would have forgave them for it.

After all they were men of their times and she says she can't fault them. The reader can, of course, but she's made sure the rest of the world never will.

Ten Years Since Roger Ailes Resigned From Fox News, I Think It's Past Time We Discussed Certain Things

 

Note: I know that writing this article and some of the subjects I have to discuss will end up getting me excoriated by quite a number of commenters and writers on this site. There was a time when that would have bothered me immensely. I'm long past it now.

I'm fully aware that the unfortunate fact I'm a white, cis male can only bring out the worst parts by trying having this conversation. But  I've seen female writers, African-American and members of the LGBTQ+ community try to have ones on similar problematic subjects and they are almost met with the same kind of verbal castigation from the virtual mobs. Combined with my own experiences, particularly in recent months, I realize that there are always going to be people who care more about being, to use an appropriate phrase for this article, the loudest voice in the room. That this seems to be their only goal has to be considered part of the problem our society is facing today.

Yet these conversations must be had, nevertheless. So for those of you who don't want to have them, considering this a 'trigger warning'. Go and find people who will completely agree with you no matter what. I've never been that kind of writer before and I'm not going to start now.

Okay. Here goes nothing.

 

I remember in the late spring and summer of 2016 how overjoyed so many people among the liberal elite were when Roger Ailes was forced to resign from Fox News. The fact that the reason was because he was guilty of a pattern of sexual harassment over a period of decades almost seemed incidental to so many of these 'good liberal people'. To them Ailes was the monster who had spent the last twenty years building up a conversative news network that had solely been responsible for dividing the nation, destroying the liberal consensus and brainwashing millions of otherwise intelligent Americans to vote Republican. That was the crime that the Stephen Colbert's and Rachel Maddow's of the world wanted him charged with. That he had sexually  abused and harassed countless women, including commentators such as Gretchen Carlson and Megyn Kelly, didn't in my recollection really trouble them that much then – or as I'll write in a bit, perhaps even now.  Considering what has followed in the last decade I always got the feeling that all of the victims of Roger Ailes were never truly considered in the same strokes as so many of the women who have been victims before. I'm gotten the feeling both then and now that for all their so-called liberal principles, they truly believed that those women got what they deserved not only when they signed up for Fox News but when they became conservatives in the first place.

I remember there was this feeling of joy that was combined with the certainty of Donald Trump's electoral defeat in November, that the liberals were witnessing the death knell of all things conservative. Hilary Clinton would become President (though to be clear the left wasn't necessarily happy about that as much as Republicans losing) and then all that would remain would be to mop up the wreckage the right had done to the country.

Needless to say that didn't happen. Fox News still remains as prominent as it was, even if no longer controls the narrative of the right as it once did. Hilary's victory in 2016 did not come and Trump has never left the political scene since. In the aftermath of that upset there has been much action among the left for a 'reckoning' in many parts of our society, including sexual harassment – though to be clear they consider the #MeToo and Times Up movement completely separate from anything that happened involving Fox News.

But in the ten years since Ailes resigned – and not long after passed away –  from an objective level its very difficult for the impartial observer to see what has changed in our society in regard to this particular subject. Harvey Weinstein has gone to prison, as have a few prominent industry figures. Some executives have been forced to resign their position but they have not faced justice in the traditional sense. No real legislation has been passed at a national or a state level that has done anything to help the women who have been victims of sexual assault or abuse at any level. (Let's leave everything involving Epstein aside for the moment.)

What has seemed to happen forms a familiar pattern:

After a prominent individual dies, women who worked for him start coming forward with stories of years, if not decades, of abuse.

We learn how the power structure protected all of these powerful men from the criminal justice system. Many of these individuals who are still alive express remorse.

The event receives prominent media coverage for a while.

Nothing really changes for anybody.

I've seen this pattern play out countless times in the last few years. It's referred to usually as a 'reckoning' with the 'toxic culture of our society'.  

'Reckoning' is one of those words that the left has put into use more and more about every part of America and the rest of the world that doesn't fit today's norms of race, gender or sexual preference. Usually it's phrased as how "America has to come to terms with its complicated history." That's the polite version. Most of the time its used as a bludgeon to argue how horrible our society has been, how horrible its always been, and how it is incapable of changing.

This in itself is nothing new, even among scholars. As I keep writing it goes back practically to the days of the abolitionist movement.  It's not the same thing with so many of the powerful men who have gotten away with horrible crimes against the powerless for years.

Except it is.

Going back to the days of the Roman Empire and in every culture across the globe, the powerful and wealthy have always been able to get away with horrible and unthinkable crimes against the populace. For the record, this is not a sin that is regulate to America or the West; it can be found in the tribes of Meso-American society, most of the Asian cultures, societies in African and the Middle East. The powerful will always be surrounded by the rich and they will always allow them to get away with unthinkable crimes, many of them involving sexual deviancy at a horrific level. The fact that America is no different is upsetting but not surprising.

There are laws place, of course, but as I've written before the rich and powerful can find ways to overcome them and always have. That's one of the perks of being rich and powerful. The wealthy and powerful have always been able to have an easier time evading the criminal justice system. If you truly believe otherwise, you've been watching to many Law & Order reruns.

And the justice system has always been tilted in favor of the defendant. "Innocent until proven guilty' has been one of the hallmarks of the American justice system. I don't pretend it works perfectly by any means but it is far better than in say, Russia, China, the Middle East or any of the other dictatorships that populate the world.

Again yes the system is weighed against the poor and yes, that does include people of color. But let's not kid ourselves that it's always been about the poor. If you disagree with my statement, let me remind you of Bill Cosby. His wealth and position protected him, just like it did so many other wealthy and prominent white people.  That's not news either, it's one of the perks.

I don't pretend to understand anything that victims of sexual assault or abuse go through. I know that it must be dehumanizing and horrible. I truly emphasize with them and I grieve with them. But the statute of limitations is in place for a reason. The only crime that isn't subject to it is murder. So again the issue is with the laws.

Fine they were written by white men and yes they did much to protect themselves. Let's engage in some magical thinking. You really think if African-Americans or women or LGBTQ+ people had been present when it came to writing laws, they wouldn't have created loopholes to protect their genders or races from prosecution? They can do that if they want, if they ran for public office and became part of the process then makes laws better for people. But I don't expect this logic to apply to the activists who believe that it is more important to draw attention to an outrage then do the work makes sure they don't happen again.

And for the record I'm not convinced the current branch of leaders have realized that they aren't exactly helping. As I speak states like California are changing the name of the state holiday that honored Caesar Chavez based on the allegations that have been made against him. Setting aside everything else, how does that do anything to actually help the women who've spent years as victims? You've changed the name of a holiday that people like me had no idea existed. It's like thinking that making Juneteenth a federal holiday is going to make up for two hundreds years of slavery or renaming Columbus day Indigenous People's Day. Its cosmetic, its symbolic and in the case of the victims of Chavez, I think its insulting. Does Gavin Newsom truly believe by doing this it comes close to atoning for all the decades of trauma these victims say they've gone through?

And that actually brings me back to Gretchen Carlson and so many people at Fox News. After years of harassment they sued the network and Ailes and they received financial compensation and a public apology. They went through the law and they got the only recourse they could.

Yet ten years later none of the left-leaning websites or writers ever talk about Carlson or Kelly in the same breath that they do of Ashley Judd or Rose McGowan and all the victims of Harvey Weinstein. Nor do we hear them mentioned in all the names of all the victims of sexual harassment that have come out of the woodwork in the decade with admiration or even respect.

And we all know why. These women, then and now, are very much still conservative and Republicans. And I'm relatively certain all that 'blaming the victim' and 'believe women' that have been trundled about by all of those good liberal people for the last decade has never applied to any of the women who worked at Fox News during the 20 years Ailes was in charge. Like everything else, they are Republicans first and everything else second, even if one of those things is a victim of repeated sexual harassment.

To be clear I don't watch Fox News any more then I watch MSNBC or CNN or any of the many other news outlets these days. But I've read my share of articles abusing so many of these former journalists, particularly Kelly when she had her brief tenure at NBC a few years back. They were infuriated that NBC would dare let anyone who'd worked for Fox News be part of the mainstream media.

To be clear just a few years earlier film and TV had done there own retelling of the story with the limited series The Loudest Voice on Showtime and Bombshell in theaters. Both were critically acclaimed and the latter earned three Oscar nominations for Charlize Theron as Kelly. Yet even at the time I could really sense the left leaning Hollywood was reluctant to tell these stories, much less recognize them. Yes they fit the narrative Hollywood wanted to tell as part of speaking truth to power but it went against their sensibilities to see Kelly and Carlson as victims in the traditional sense.

More to the point all the defense that has been raised every time a woman who is the victim of a powerful man and why they might not come forward has never seemed to apply the same way to any of the countless victims of Ailes over his tenure as Fox News. I can just hear the conversations in Hollywood. "What did they expect when they chose to work for men like Murdoch and Ailes?" they no doubt said to themselves. "They had to know what they were signing up for when they became conservative."

And this certainly applied to Kelly when she ended up on at NBC. She was let go a few months after her tenure started. By this point I'm willing to bet none of the same people who talk about the outrages inflicted by so many powerful men over the decades are trying to find all of the women that Ailes supposedly harassed and assaulted over his tenure.

And for the record there is evidence he may have lost his job at NBC in the early 1990s because he was guilty of the same practices there: The Loudest Voice essentially confirms it. But ten years after his death no effort has been made to find those victims either. You'd think given how much the left loves to dance on the graves of those they hate they'd be turning over every rock to do so, particularly considering everything involving the makeup of the current administration.

Instead the loudest voices go out of their way to talk about a 'reckoning' for our society. By which they mean to relitigate the bad behavior of historical men decades after it is too late to do anything about it except the endless deconstruction among our society that the left brings. And I've seen this pattern play out for thirty years as well because Roger Ailes helped perfect it on Fox News. His anchors use it as another cudgel to argue that the left, which he has made clear is the entire Democratic Party, hates America and wants to complete tear it down. They will then go out of their way to imply that the only way to save America is to vote Republican.

The liberal establishment, the Colbert's and Jon Stewart's and everyone else, would always mock Fox News as beneath the intelligence of their viewers, while ignoring the effectiveness of it as a political technique. They clearly didn't learn their lesson after Ailes's death, if anything they've doubled down on being everything he claimed they were. For all the left's talk of 'reckoning' in the decade since Ailes's passing, they still refuse to reckon with their own blind spot when it came to the machine he built. Instead they increasingly vilify all those who are part of that world – including the women that were the victims of the same horrific behavior during his life. Megyn Kelly and Gretchen Carlson are always going to be Republicans first and anything else second. That the left can't see this double standard, arguably the most horrific of any of the ones they've put up over their careers, is perhaps the biggest reason to reject their view of their world as much as the conservative one.

Lessons From Theodore White: How He Was One of the Few Writers, Then Or Now, Who Rejected Camelot

 

There's a belief that's a big part of  revisionist historians about Theodore White and JFK. The right wing as I said in the introduction argues that White was in the tank for Kennedy from the start to the point that they all but accuse him of getting him elected. That's laughable considering the book was published in March of 1961 and no one, least of all White, could have predicted just how successful it would become. It's like a conspiracy theorist suggested that the Islamic Revolution in Iran was staged not by the CIA or the neo-conservatives but ABC because Ted Koppel wanted the anchor's job on the nightly news and they decided to stage the hostage crisis to give him something to do at 11:30. (I really hope that I didn't start something on the Dark Web with this.)

Even if you wanted to believe White was in the tank for Kennedy from the start, it collapses if one actually reads the book. Yes White was with JFK and his camp on election night 1960. But he was one of two nominees for President. Somehow I doubt if he'd been with Richard Nixon the right would have argued his presence was responsible for Nixon losing. Because having read the book White spends as much time covering the Republicans as he does the Democrats, giving basically the same number of pages to Kennedy and Nixon in the fall campaign.

To a larger point, and I've written this multiple times, White may have been the own member of the 'Georgetown Elite' who went out of his way to give Nixon a fair shake. He would later acknowledge he had been taken in by him as President but in the 1960 edition (and indeed in the following two publications before Nixon was elected President) he went out of his way to treat him in a fair and balanced method. If he had any prejudice towards Nixon at the time I don't see it in his writing, if anything in the 1964 book he expresses sympathy and empathy for Nixon's political fortunes to that time.

Yes he did cover Kennedy extensively but that doesn't per se mean he was in awe of the man's charisma and aura. If there is a candidate he clearly admires in that book its Adlai Stevenson who gets by far the most sympathetic treatment in the boo. We see a similar approach to all four of the other candidates White follows for 1960: Rockefeller on the Republican side; Humphrey, Stuart Symington and LBJ on the Democratic side. He clearly has respect for those men and their accomplishments at the time (he would later write that he believed Stevenson, Humphrey and Rockefeller were more than qualified to be President) and I have little doubt had any of the also-rans been the nominees of their party who would have treated them with the same respect he did Kennedy.

The other argument from revisionists (I've made it myself at times) is that White was so taken in by the charisma and charm offensive of the Kennedy family that he overlooked so many of their sins that we now know about. The first is foolish, of course: White didn't have the benefit of more than sixty years of hindsight to do the research and judge them. There's also the fact that much of this is the issue of so many writers who wouldn't exist without White as their foundation judging their predecessors for not looking with today's glasses, which is a tail as old as time.

And most importantly there's the fact that it's not like this would have been a failure that existed solely to Theodore White. To this day, there are people of a certain age and even younger ones who will overlook, if not excuse, the truths we now know about JFK with that saying: "It was a different time." That was true, I should be clear, of the journalism of the era. Back then, the idea of looking into the bedrooms of political candidates was considered the stuff of tabloid journalism and exploitation. (And as we shall see White would indeed end up covering the first prominent effect of this on Presidential politics in his next book and do so relatively clear-eyed.)

Now its clear that White was granted an unparalleled amount of access to the Kennedy campaign – or to be more accurate the kind of controlled access that they allowed the media and the public to see for consumption. They were crafting an image that has held to this day in some circles and for a journalist writing his first major book (one whose success he couldn't possibly imagine) White would have been a fool to ignore. But that said having read his book multiple times its clear that while the Kennedys did much to curry favor with him he was pretty close to impartial when it came to reporting the bare facts of their campaign and it didn't stop him from talking with every candidate and having more empathy for some than others.

Having read the books its clear that while he may admire Kennedy and what he's doing he clearly has more sympathy for Humphrey during the primary fight. He admits that the Kennedy's wealth and stature appear as remarkable to the masses and actually argues that his ordinariness hurt him: "Humphrey was just like everyone else and a President, unfortunately for Humphrey, must be different from everyone else." Not for White is the belief in the likability of a candidate; he would mock the idea of the appeal of a President being based on whether you'd want to have a beer with him that has now become gospel.

Kennedy's ability did seem preposterous in Wisconsin in the winter of 1960. White relates how he went out of his way to shake the hands of so many people on the campaign trail and by and large they were aloof, even hostile, to him. The Kennedy charisma that won over the masses in the fall was not present to White in Wisconsin during that period. He acknowledges that the main reason Kennedy one was not so much a charm offensive but an organizational one, which money was the main driving factor. The Kennedy family did put a hue amount of resources into Wisconsin.

And as White reports the Kennedy family knew how badly they'd failed. They did win with 56 percent of the vote to Humphrey's 44 percent but it broke down on religious grounds. The four heavily Catholic districts all voted for him and he lost the four that were heavily Protestant. White makes it clear that Kennedy knows this at the time how badly he's failed.

What does that mean?" asked one of his sisters.

"It means," (Kennedy) said quietly yet bitterly, "that we have to do it all over again. We have to go through every one of them – West Virginia and Maryland and Indiana and Oregon, all the way to the convention.

Even at the time, it’s worth noting that even if Humphrey won in West Virginia, he had no chance of being nominated after he lost in Wisconsin: the fact he couldn’t win in a neighboring state crushed hopes of his electability. Indeed, if Humphrey had gotten out right then, there’s a real chance the Kennedy machine might have stalled right there: the primary path that they were travelling would have been meaningless if there were no viable contenders challenging them.

If realizing this, Humphrey had withdrawn at that moment, Kennedy would have faced zero opposition in West Virginia, thus any Kennedy victory there would have been worthless and been meaningless in terms of gaining power vis-à-vis the Eastern bosses.

White knew of what he spoke. In the 1952 Democratic primaries Estes Kefauver had won the lion's share of the Democratic primaries against limited competition. And because of that fact the party bosses had been sure he couldn't win and withheld their support at the convention, thus setting up the circumstances for Adlai Stevenson's eventual nomination on the third ballot.

Symington and LBJ had decided not to compete in the primaries, holding out for a convention deadlock. Aside from Humphrey there were no real candidates in any of the other states Kennedy was competing against. In a footnote White points out that Kennedy's only competition in the New Hampshire primary – the first primary in the nation – had been basically uncontested with Kennedy's only opposition coming from a ball-point manufacturer he doesn't even bother to name. Wayne Morse and Mike DiSalle might have had some more political weight behind them but no one considered them serious contenders for anything in Oregon or Ohio, respectively.

And it is worth noting that  White is ambiguous at best at how much the wins in the primaries in the states Kennedy campaigned in were to the long term strategy. As he points out in a footnote of the seven states that Kennedy chose to openly contest, five of them ended up going to Nixon in the general election. (For the record, those five states were  New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Indiana, Oregon and Nebraska. Only Maryland and West Virginia went for Kennedy in 1960 – and one wonders how much of that vote was driven by the presence of Lyndon Johnson as Vice President.)

During the lead-up to the Democratic convention and the convention itself White spends much of his time with the Adlai Stevenson campaign – one which, I should add, is basically going on without Stevenson agreeing to lead it – then he does with the Kennedy campaign itself. He clearly admires their efforts; however futile they end up being and there's an argument his heart truly is with Stevenson. And while he follows the Kennedy campaign from behind the scenes he makes it very clear that not even they were certain of a first ballot victory: it took until Wyoming, the last state in the role call for them to get the 763 votes they needed to clinch the nomination. White makes it very clear that for all the brave front they put forward no one was sure until the end of the role call that they got the nomination.

And it's worth noting that for all his clear admiration for Kennedy, White makes it clear it was Nixon who started the fall campaign like gangbusters and that Kennedy's faltered in the early weeks. He makes it clear that Nixon's vow to campaign in all 50 states clearly impressed the voters in a way that Kennedy's campaign struggled to in what he calls 'Round One. At the end of the Republican convention Nixon was ahead 53 percent to 47 percent in the Gallup polls and it took until September for them to build momentum. And its clear he has more sympathy for Nixon then Kennedy because of 'a series of episodes that wrung sympathy for him even from his most embittered opponents." He focuses on how Nixon struck his kneecap on a car door in North Carolina that became infected and eventually forced him to spend nearly two weeks in Walter Reed. He makes it clear how badly it hurt his health. And White makes it clear from the vantage of the press corps just how much contempt the press held for Nixon – making it pretty clear that Nixon's contempt for them may well have been justified.

Its worth noting while the verdict on the Kennedy-Nixon debates as to how important they were, White himself thinks that they little to actually educate the audience. And he makes it clear that throughout the campaign neither campaign did much to contrast the difference between their views on the issues he considers important to the voters. In a sense he agrees that perception of Kennedy to Nixon was importance but never once does he think Kennedy ever did anything to clarify how he was different than Nixon on the issues.  In his book on the 1972 campaign White gives a list of the four Presidential elections that he believed offered the greatest contrast between the two candidates – and 1960 is not one of them. (I will mention which four later on.) At the end of the day he thinks Kennedy won the election because he seemed to win a popularity contest, not because he was necessarily more qualified to be President.

He comes to the conclusion at the end of the book that he doesn't know whether Kennedy's election is a consequential one in American history and he has no illusion about the fact that Kennedy didn't get a mandate as the Republicans gained two seats in the Senate and 25 in the House of Representatives. The Democrats controlled both Houses of Congress by a considerable margin but Kennedy had not provided his party with that most glorious things: coattails.

If the Democratic Party at best, in 1960, held even with the Republicans and at worst suffered a defeat, then only one lesson can be drawn therefrom: that this was a personal victory for John F. Kennedy and not his Party.

And White is unclear at the end of his book if that is a good thing for the country or a poor one.

Ted White acknowledges Nixon’s campaign was more successful as part of a general map: he divided the country into eight regions, and said Nixon carried five. The three Kennedy carried were New England, the Northeast, and the South. Indeed when it comes to the total number of states carried Nixon carried 26 to Kennedy's 22. And he makes it clear the real accomplishment Kennedy managed was convincing the overwhelming majority of Protestant voters – who had famously rejected Al Smith, the previous Catholic candidate for President in an electoral landslide – to end up choosing to vote for him to provide his narrow margin of victory. And he makes it clear how it  

Like everything else related to the Kennedys I think Making of A President came to be viewed as a favorable portrait looking back through history and after the assassination.  To be sure White reports all of the well known anecdotes, puts up a favorable look at both the candidate and his family on the campaign trail and off and makes him sound knowledgeable on subjects. But that's no different then the other candidates he talks to during the book or indeed many of the ones that will come in the future. He's clearly impressed by Kennedy's accomplishment and winning both the Democratic nomination and the Presidency against seemingly impossible odds but that means little once when has power.  He ends the book the way he will all that follow: looking at the obstacles the President will have to face and whether he is up to it. And after giving a picture of the country and the world this what he says about the man's ability to do so:

It can be certain only, at the incumbency of the now 35^th President of the United States, that he would certainly try.

That's essentially a variation of what George W. Bush would say about Obama when he took the Presidency in 2008: "I want him to succeed." That's all White is prepared to say even after spending a year in his company. He has no idea of the future any more than the rest of us would and no certainty that he will.

In the next part of the series I will look at how White viewed both Robert and Ted Kennedy in his books in a way that makes it very clear that they he never looked at either man as part of 'the Restoration of Camelot' future generations would.

Reflections on this Year's Oscars, Part 2: Someone Reviewed The Oscars And You Know I Have Something to Say About THAT

 

 

I knew that no matter how quick or entertaining the Oscars were this year, it was inevitably  going to be attacked as being too long, self-important and unentertaining. And sure enough the Washington Post ran a column that had nothing to do with the winners or what the author thought of them but could have just as easily been a column written by any one who criticizes any awards show.

I'm now beginning to think Hollywood's biggest mistake is televising its awards shows. I understand why they did it, it was an attempt to bring in millions of viewers on live TV. But even before streaming and cable started cutting into the ratings this was always going to be a battle it could never win with the critics because at a basic level they always have this wall that goes up every time they see anything that is on TV involving Hollywood. In their minds if something appears on a screen, it is subject to criticism and must be graded as a work of entertainment.

An awards show is a live event which means it can't run on schedule. It's about the people the nominees and winners and about recognizing them and the industry first and foremost. That means it has to be self-congratulatory.  And this is where the real elitism of critics come in: they don't real care enough about who edits or shoots or costumes a film, not really. They might individual appreciate details in a film or TV show or a play but they don't want to hear them speak and they don't care about recognizing them.  To be sure they are vital to contributing to a work of art but they're not special, not like writers, actors or directors. (They don't really care much about them either but one thing at a time.) And they certainly don't give a damn about them realizing their lives dream or what it might mean to be on the same stage as all these people.

No all they care about is that they are distractions from what these critics seemingly care about: the writers, directors and actors. Except they don't really care about them either except as abstractions. Sure they love their work (some of it) and they like their performances and some of them might even agree with their politics. But the critics don't really care how much this might mean to them to be recognized by their peers, how this realization of their dreams is a big deal. No, what they care about is that they can't deliver a short, rehearsed, charming and warm speech when they don't have a script in front of them. Yes this is a glorious moment for you and we understand how much it means but do we have to listen to you drone on and one about how important the craft and your work means to you?  Our opinion of your work is all that matters; we don't care what you think of it.

And who cares what people in the film industry think about movies or what people in TV think about film or people in theatre think about plays? Sure your industries might be struggling for recognition right now and this is a night that theoretically is supposed to celebrate it. But why should that be our problem. Can't you celebrate yourself as quickly and efficiently as possible? As well as being completely spontaneous and entertaining as every other play and live event we watch, of course?

And sure the host may have a tough job entertaining both the audience watching at home and keeping the mood light in the theater. But is that any real excuse for not having every single joke be a genuine laugher every time? Sure that's not a standard we apply for any comedy movie or TV show or for that matter if they host a late night show but that's not the point. You're not doing this for the audience in the theater or at home, you're doing for us, the critics, the ones who can only pass judgment on anything.

If by this point you've realized that I'm genuinely exasperated by the continued and ludicrous process that so many seemingly intelligent people seem to throw away when it comes to reviewing an awards show as if it were say, Sinners and One Battle After Another, gold star. I honestly think at some point some genius is going to say: "You what would make these Oscars better? No awards!" And that person will be taken seriously because that's the world we live in today.

 The columnist in the Post who wrote the most recent column who  is a Gen-X who has written non-fiction bestsellers and has done a tour in Hollywood in the early stages of her career. Yet she maintains the brain rot that I expect more from millennials and Gen Z when it comes to most subjects they don't understand yet for some reason is ever present when it comes to treating an awards show.  I'm not even going to dignify this person by giving their name; for all intents and purposes it might as well be any of the dozens of critics who keep making it harder for individuals to take my profession seriously. (She's not actually a critic by the way. Doesn't help.)

At this juncture in my career I'm beginning to think the people who review the Oscars for any publication are only hate-watching it. Not in the way those people who claim that they only are doing so for Emily in Paris or …And Just Like That, the ones I think secretly love these shows but are ashamed to say so. And not like the far right political people who will argue that the Oscars are just another night of left-wing politics gone mad. No I think these people watch every Oscars with a stopwatch in their hands, are yelling at every awards recipient "shut up already!" long before they start getting played off, have a detailed list of every joke that makes them cringe and hate the In Memoriam segments not because of the music involved but because they can't understand why Hollywood is paying tribute to people who were important to the industry. "All they did was die," I imagine they say out loud at home.

I don't think my judgment of these  individuals – I won't dignify them with the term 'critics' – is too harsh. Its one thing to take the awards themselves too seriously; I passed that point in my life by the time I got into college. But in the case of the author of this column not only am I not convinced she cared who won, I'm not sold she even saw any of the films. Which brings me back to the question I ask every time: if you don't have a vested interest in the nominees or winners, why in God's name would you choose to spend three hours of your life watching an awards show honoring them?

My long-time readers know this isn't a rhetorical question. Whenever I cover any major awards show, Emmys, Golden Globes, any number of the Critics Awards, what I spent the majority of my time talking about are the winners of the awards and their acceptance speeches. This is what I think my job is about and because I actually have an emotional investment in the nominees and some of the winners that's why I watch these awards shows. And for the record, I do care about the technical winners such as editors, cinematographers and makeup artists. I've been watching and covering the technical Emmy as long as the actual Emmys. I think they play an unsung role in creating so much of my favorite TV so at the very least they deserve to be paid attention to.

I've never felt the same connection to the Oscars but I have always watched it, perhaps more out of muscle memory then anything else. But every time I watch it, I know going in what I'm going to get. It's going to be three and a half hours long on a good night. If we're lucky half the jokes any of the host tells will land and the rest will be awkward. Some of the banter between presenters will work; some won't. The acceptance speeches will be heartfelt and going on extensively and I probably won't recognize most of the technical winners by obligation. There will be more than a few political comments done solely to enrage the other side with no other purpose.  That's where the bar has been set for me since 2000. Some times it gets a little over that, sometimes it really sucks, but most of the time that's what its like.  I've come to accept that. It astonishes me that there are still people out there who seem to be expecting more.

No one is even pretending Hollywood has anything but an uncertain future these days; certainly not the columnist for the Post. And I'm not going to pretend that they haven't done much to bring it on their heads and that they don't deserve criticism where its due. But listening to this columnist you almost seem to think they're looking forward to it with in the same 'we're doomed to oblivion' approach that makes up so many of these columns about anything these days.  That's the definition of kicking someone when they're down.  And to do so on a night that is about celebrating their industry strikes me as the equivalent of not only writing a eulogy before the body is dead, but saying in it that the deceased was boring, self-indulgent and long-winded when they were alive. This would be in bad taste no matter who did it, but for one who does so under the guise of criticism, it's the kind of thing that makes all of us look bad.

So on the oft-chance that the writer of the Washington Post reads this column, I will channel Pauline Kael and Rex Reed at their meanest in response to them:

"I really hope your piece was generated by AI because if you are a human being, you only did a slightly better job then a third grader suffering from dyslexia and did so disgracing all actual third graders and those who struggle with dyslexia. You demonstrate the kind of elite snobbery in your writing that I've come to expect from those who think opera and ballet are thriving industries and that movies will go extinct first.

The Academy Awards is an awards show in Hollywood. It is not a production of the Royal Shakespeare company, the Bolshoi Ballet, a Taylor Swift concert or The Brutalist. To review it my that metric demonstrates that not only could you not appreciate any production of them if you were to attend them but that you probably would leave before the first intermission of any because they didn't speak to you. And by that I mean none of the performers mentioned your name personally while they were performing and therefore they were of no meaning to you.

It is not enough to say that people like you make critics look bad. You make journalists look bad, writers look bad, TV viewers look bad and anyone whose completed the process of evolution look bad. If I were you, I would go back to writing your books and making a living that way. I will not be purchasing any of them and indeed if I see any at my local bookstore I'm going to place them with the pages facing forward in the shelfs so that customers overlook them. You might consider that petty and vindictive, but that perfectly matches the context of your review.

No one ever puts a gun to anyone's head and forces them to watch an awards show. And no one ever asked for anyone to review an awards show based purely on artistic merits. Everyone in Hollywood knows what the Oscars is and how tough it is to put together. They have to deal with critics every day of their lives. They really don't need it on one of the days that is solely and totally about them and no one else.

And as to the fact that any other profession is like this – I see that one of your pieces was short-listed for a Pulitzer. How would you feel if that awards show was televised to the whole world and someone criticized you on your acceptance speech? If you were too long and self-indulgent? If everyone said the ceremony was bunch of elitists congratulated themselves and said: "Does anyone honor fry cooks?"

We all want some kind of recognition for what we do. Hollywood just does it publicly and in the most extravagant fashion. They at least try to make it fun. They don't need pedants like you shaming them for not being entertaining in their tension and agony.

So do us all a favor. Next Oscar night or any awards show, don't watch it. Read a book. Binge-watch your favorite series. Hell, watch one of the movies that was nominated that night. You'll have a better time and so will the rest of the world because we won't have to read another one of your self-indulgent pieces of detritus the following day."

I won't lie. That was kind of fun. I won't make it a habit.

Reflections on This Year's Oscars From A TV Critic Part 1: Why Wasn't The Race for Best Actor Over In April?

 

 

This article requires a bit of introduction for those of you who might not know how voters pick winners in the Emmys.

At the end of each season everyone in the cast of a show, whether it is a drama, comedy or limited series, picks a single episode that they believe represents their best work and submit it to every single awards show from the Golden Globes to the Emmys. I don't know how that would work if multiple nominees from the same show are competing against each other. For example when someone was looking at the episode Kieran Culkin submitted for Best Actor for Succession in 2023 did they solely focus on Culkin or did they also focus on Jeremy Strong's presence in that episode when it came to making their decision? Some day I may write on that ambiguity but this isn't the time because I want to focus on how I judge a performance for the Emmys.

My approach, which I imagine is similar to the majority of viewers even if they aren't critics, is to look at a performers entire body of work during a season even episodes they have a smaller role in. When I was watching Better Call Saul I wasn't going to judge Jonathan Banks work in every episode, Rhea Seehorn's, Bob Odenkirk's and so on. I made similar judgments when I was looking at that for every nominee in every category I've seen.

For that reason I've always given what you might call a 'degree of difficulty bonus' if during the course of a season we learn something about a character which adds a completely new layer to their performance that makes us call into question everything we previously believed about them. The obvious example would be Lost and such brilliant performances by Terry O'Quinn and Michael Emerson. The entire cast was extraordinary, of course, but the two of them were playing variations on who they really were to the rest of the characters but at such a level that we believed it was genuine.  This was true for Emerson from the moment we met him as Henry Gale and if you watched the fifth season of Lost you know that by the end of the season we learn the man we have thought was John Locke for the second half of the year is not who he said he was.

These kinds of performances within performances are rare even in the era of Peak TV but I've seen the majority of them. There was Gregory Itzin's work as President Charles Logan on Day Five of 24, Damien Lewis's work as Nick Brody in the first season of Homeland, Giancarlo Esposito's work as Gustavo Fring on Breaking Bad (that layer is largely absent in Better Call Saul but it shows up quite a few times) Martin Short's performance as Leonard Winstone in Season 3 of Damages, Christian Slater in Mr. Robot (especially in the first season) and Yahya Abdul-Mahteen's work in Watchmen. I realized I've left women out in this recounting so here are some clear ones: Evan Rachel Wood and Thandiwe Newton in Westworld, everyone in the cast of Severance (obviously), Kathy Bates's work in Matlock and Julia Roberts work in Season One of Homecoming. And that's without counting the entire run of Dexter, both Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell's work in The Americans and Jon Hamm's work in Mad Men. I'm sure there are countless others I've forgotten but let's not let the list get endless.

The overwhelming majority of these performances were either nominated for Emmys or won them. In my opinion many of them are among the all-time great character works in 21^st century TV and I don't think I'd get that much pushback for saying so.  That brings me to last night's Oscars.

Now I'm not going to engage in the debate over whether Sinners deserved to be Best Picture more than One Battle After Another because I don't care enough about the Oscars. What I do want to make an argument for is something that became clear to me the first time I saw Sinners on cable in August.  After I saw the film the first time and have watched it multiple times well before even the nominations came out, there was only one question in my mind: which of the four other nominees will end up getting trounced by Michael B. Jordan at the Oscars?

I have to say I was genuinely pissed as the awards seasons went on and every major award group right up until the Actors on March 1^st seemed determined to crown Timothee Chalamet or Wagner Moura the next winner. I had much admiration for the work Leonardo DiCaprio did in One battle After Another but the longer the awards seasons went I was beginning to wonder what the hell was going on.

Now I realize most of you don't pay attention to all of the Film Critics Groups that meet in December and January: by this point I'm beginning to think that they're beginning to breed like rabbits even as films themselves begin to struggle. I'll save you the trouble. Jordan managed to win the Best Actor prize from twelve of those groups; Chalamet won 17 for Marty Supreme, Leonardo DiCaprio won 6, and Ethan Hawke won seven for Blue Moon. That part didn't bother me; I know that unless a performance is absolutely extraordinary there will never be universal agreement from the critics on who will win any major acting award and some critics groups will give awards to actors who I know won't get there or if they do for a different film. Case in point Sebastian Stan won multiple awards last year for A Different Man but got nominated for The Apprentice. (No comment.)

So when the Golden Globes and the Critics Choice gave their Best Actor prizes to Timothee Chalamet and were shutting Jordan out, I began to wonder what was going on. Now I need to be clear, race did not enter my discussion at any point as to why. What I was wondering was why that degree of difficulty bonus – which critics and especially Academy voters really tend to lock on to – didn't seem to be working for Jordan when by their own rules, it applied.

Now as everyone who has seen the film and even those of who haven't know Jordan played twin brothers nicknamed Smoke and Stack. So he was giving two performances in Sinners.  No, I take that back. He was actually giving three.

What cemented for me the certainty Jordan should have won was when Stack became a vampire. (I really don't think I'm spoiling anything at this point.) As anyone who knows the first thing about this and as the film's own dialogue explain, a vampire is completely different version of the human it once was. So Jordan had to play:

Stack pretending he was still Stack

Stack as an undead monster

And he had to make that change believable in less than a minute of screen time.

I don't care how method Chalamet went to play Marty, either onscreen or when he was campaigning to get the movie seen.  Jordan had to play two versions of one character and then play his brother reacting to learning the truth that his brother is dead and gone forever.  That scene alone should have ended the discussion of who Best Actor was right then. The fact that it didn't – and more importantly that so many people seemed determined to give the award to either Chalamet or Wagner Moura during January was insulting.

To be clear its not like the Oscars weren't unwilling to give nominations to performers whose roles themselves were performances. We saw Emma Stone get multiple nominations for her work in Bugonia which not until the final minutes do we realize that this is an entirely different kind of performance. And the Oscars were more than willing to honor Amy Madigan for her work in the horror masterpiece Weapons for her work as Aunt Gladys, a performance that became iconic even quicker than Jordan's in Sinners. (On a welcome note the 2026 Oscars were among their many other accomplishments the best year that horror as had collectively in its history.) So the question is why did it take until the Actor Awards two weeks ago for the rest of Hollywood to realize, yes, Michael B. Jordan was the Best Actor in a Leading Role?

The go-to answer is race but it was harder to make that obvious call as the awards season went on. Teanna Taylor won Best Supporting Actress at the Golden Globes a week after Madigan had won the Critics Choice Awards in that category and Wagner Moura did prevail for Best Actor in a Drama for The Secret Agent. (Let's just work around the fact Sinners and One Battle After Another were in the Comedy/Musical category.) And its not like the vibes weren't shifting. The BAFTAs did give Best Supporting Actress to Wunmi Mosaku who was basically empty handed to that both in the red carpet season.

The other explanation is the Oscars has never truly been able to deal with performances that involve these kinds of lifting unless it comes in the form of Peter Sellers. They were unwilling to nominate Armie Hammer for his work as The Winklevoss Twins in The Social Network any more then they would Eddie Murphy for The Nutty Professor and they couldn't bring themselves to nominate Alec Guinness for his work in Kind Hearts & Coronets. They will make these accommodations in the works of Charlie Kaufmann – they've nominated Nicholas Cage and Kate Winslet for playing these kinds of roles in Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine – but it doesn't fit the 'mold' that the Oscars tend to give for performances. Their degree of difficulty, sadly, has far too often been seen in how they give awards for actors who play autistic characters or with some form of physical disability (satirized so well in Tropic Thunder) wear extensive levels of padding and makeup (Brendan Frasier in The Whale is the most recent example of that) and of course versions of historical characters. (Unless you count Jesse Buckley's work in Hamnet we actually didn't have that many of them among this year's nominees.)

TV has had very few of those from category one in the last quarter of a century (and when they do appear their increasingly played by actors who actually have them), has more than a few characters with makeup and CGI but rarely gives them the awards, and while we'll always have period pieces and historical series (The Crown is the most awarded of the group) they've always been far less omnipresent then they are at the Oscars every year. I don't pretend the Emmys are based more on merit then the Oscars are (though I'll gladly put their track record in this century against the Oscars any day of the week and expect to come out ahead) but they certainly recognize that degree of nuance more. And it isn't lost on me that Jordan, long before he became one of the biggest box office stars in this century, cut his teeth working in some of the greatest TV shows of all time. (That's actually going to be the subject of a future article.) When you cut your teeth working for David Simon and then become a featured player in the work of Jason Katims you learn subtlety and nuance in a way that film has increasingly become far less capable of delivering.

All of which is to say that the Oscars did the right thing and gave Best Actor to the best performance by anyone in that category this year. I'm happy for Jordan and I'm delighted he won. As a critic an observer I'm  slightly irritated that it took so long for everyone in my circle to realize what for me was obvious six months ago. Do better, guys. Do better.

 

Lessons From Theodore White: A New Series Showing How The Making Of The President Tells Us Stories From The Past That May Show Us Where We Ended Up – And How to Get Out, Introduction

 

I make no secret on how much regard I hold for Theodore White, the journalist and author of the groundbreaking Making of the President series of books that covered political campaigns during four of the most consequential elections in American history while giving a snapshot of America during an era where the reverberations are still being felt to this day.

I have regularly used White's writing as a primary source for so many of the articles I've been writing about American history and politics, whether in regard to the Kennedys, Hubert Humphrey, George Wallace and the antiwar campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern. His clarity on political issues at the time, whether the U-2 flights, the Civil Rights movement, the growing antiwar movement and the conservative movement that came out of the Goldwater campaign have given insight into this critical period in American history. And the views he has on both political parties, even more than sixty years after he published his first book, incredibly still have tremendous insight into so much of partisan and internecine fighting in both parties to this very day.

White is still held in enormous regard by historians and other journalists that followed, all of whom have tried with varying degrees of success to capture what he did so well in his first four books. Yet in recent years revisionist historians on either side of the political aisle have done much to reject him, whether by vilification on the right or omission by the left.

The far right's behavior, as one might expect, follows the same pattern they've basically held long before White came on the scene. They believed White was an agent of the so-called 'liberal media' and was therefore suspect. That said, the main reason he is dismissed by conservatives is because of the false flag that somehow White was able to throw the 1960 election to JFK and creating a false narrative about both Nixon and Republicans.

That part doesn't stand up to scrutiny if one actually reads White's books, not just in regard to 1960 but every subsequent book he did right up to America In Search of Itself. The idea that he was in the tank for the Kennedys pretty much goes out the window when one reads 1960 and by the time he gets to the follow up books, its clear the bloom is off the rose. As we shall see in the articles I've written White may have been the only journalist who never bought into the Myth of Camelot and while he might have been fooled initially by John, that blindness was not granted to his younger brothers when they made their runs for office.

The left's decision in the course of time to increasingly ignore White's writings is more understandable when you consider the time. White's look at the decade, particularly when it comes to the Civil Rights movement and the antiwar movement looks at it objectively and with a candor that belies the one both movements did in the immediate aftermath of the rise of the conservative movement.  The left has always tended to argue that they were this close to a revolution and America let them down and the further one gets away from that era, the more rose-colored their glasses become. White, who was actually there and was writing how it unfolded in real time, shows all of the flaws of the movement under a microscope and it is not flattering to any part of it. He understands the issues and what is being discussed as well, if not better, then many of the protestors and demonstrators did and he asks questions that very well may never have occurred to them at the time – and more importantly that they still haven't been willing to answer.

Most controversial to the left may be how he chooses to sit in judgment of their approach to politics as the 1960s progressed and moved into the 1970s. White clearly had liberal principles – that much is hard to ignore – but it was liberalism as it had been defined classically for nearly two centuries. He saw both how the liberal policies were starting to stagnate even before Nixon took office and just as importantly how what was becoming the liberal approach was increasingly leading the Democratic Party to disaster.  Considering that the Republican revolution basically was taking its roots as the Democrats were increasingly making this part of their platform gospel is a standard that in the 21^st century the left has done everything in its power to argue was a moral failing of both Republicans and the nation.  That they have no reached the point that the word 'liberal' itself became so toxic that it has currently been replaced by the left with 'progressive' shows another example of how this branch of America will deal with language more than policy.

And it's worth noting that at the end of every book White would take a look at the results of the election and try to predict where the country was going to end up going under the next administration. He would look at the patterns of the vote but not in the breakdown of identity politics that has become gospel among pollsters. Rather instead he looked at America through its various regional sections and tried to see why the winner had appealed to one candidate and why the loser had failed. He also picked up on trends in both the political and general sphere of the nation that gave insight into the problems America might have as well as trying to see the future. In many ways he was more correct then he knew about where America was going and its hard to argue that we as a country might be better off had more people in power at the time taken the lessons White was telling the country into consideration.

White was very much a colleague of the old school of politics and he was increasingly becoming uncomfortable with the growth of the presidential primary and how he thought it was ruining the electoral process. This is a view, I should add, that is increasingly becoming common among scholars and other elitists who worry about the health of democracy. With that said, White gives a very clear view of what conventions were like before primaries eliminated all the drama and they became made for television events.  You couldn't get a clearer snapshot of what political conventions and the nominating process was like then from reading White's books.

And because he's clearly an objective reporter he makes it very clear that those processes might not have been as great at nominating candidates as so many reporters and other scholars think when they think about using them today. This is true not merely when he covers the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago which was just the climax of a year of chaotic politics in the party but when he covers the leadup to both the 1964 Republican Convention that nominated Goldwater and the leadup to the 1972 Democratic Convention that nominated McGovern. He makes it clear that the disasters that led to two of the biggest electoral landslides in history climaxed in genuine onscreen drama for both parties – and it makes it clear that in all politics, there is such a thing as bad publicity.

As an amateur historian I find White's books increasingly comforting in a turbulent time because they tell me something that in today's endless news cycle, and where everything that happens is picked apart by everybody on social media, the average person would do well to remember: all of this has happened before and the past can give us lessons if we are willing to learn them. And since increasingly the media that followed after White has failed spectacularly in learning these lessons and far too many politicians show a similar lack of cognition, I believe we as a society have a moral obligation to try and learn from them ourselves if we are too move forward.

What will follow will be stories from all five of White's major books, both popping the bubble of myths that so many generations that have followed have taken as gospel and relating narratives that have either been forgotten or telling familiar stories with the perspective of a first-hand observer. Many will involve politicians who are still familiar names from that era as well as other major figures from that perspectives. Others will involve incidents and individuals that may very well have been forgotten completely by history but whose actions foreshadowed many of the struggles that we see to this day.

I believe that true objectivity from any historian may be impossible but I also think White tried, with all his power, not to let his internal bias show in his writing. That cannot be said of those who came after him and it is something I respect him for and judge his successors. I strongly urge the reader of these columns to seek out the first four books: they were issued in a reprinting in the 2010s and no doubt can be found on eBooks or Kindles if one tries.  Are they the best record of what happened during this period? I can't say with certainty.  But if you want to see a perspective of what America was like when it was in search of itself as White put it, this is a great place to start for anyone.