The Only Reason Euphoria Exists Is Because Of Whom The Creator's Father Is. Because Sam Levinson's Track Record Before and After Shows He Has No Other Reason to Be Working in Hollywood

 

Ever since Euphoria against all odds and reason has become such a cultural phenomena and is so highly worshipped by a certain faction in America I've been asking myself a question: how did this show ever get greenlit, much less become a series? It wasn't until fairly recently I realized that the answer to the question had been staring me in the face all this time.

The creator of Euphoria as its fan are possibly aware is Sam Levinson. I've been asking myself who Sam Levinson was and why HBO was willing to greenlight a show by him based on his track record prior to it because I've seen some of the movies he's made in the four years since the second season of Euphoria ended – both prior to and after the series debuted in 2019  and they are no better then his flagship show and in many cases are far worse. It wasn't until I saw the credits of one of his films that I realized that Sam is a nepo baby pure and simple.

Sam is the son of Barry Levinson, one of the most incredible forces in Hollywood for more than half a century. 0bviously I'm a fan of his for his work in the creation of Homicide but he's been a force in film and TV for half a century.

He is the writer and director of some of the greatest films in history, from Diner, The Natural and Good Morning Vietnam to his Oscar winning Rain Man as well as Bugsy and the underrated masterpiece Wag The Dog. In the 21^st century he became one of the directors of many Emmy nominated and winning TV movies for HBO, mostly in collaboration with Al Pacino. These include You Don't Know Jack, Phil Spector and Paterno. He also directed two episodes of the Emmy winning miniseries Dopesick and an early Peacock limited series The Calling. He's also produced many other undervalued TV series in connection with Tom Fontana including Copper and most recently Monsieur Spade. Even as we speak he is currently working on three different TV series.

Barry Levinson's films, particularly the ones set in Baltimore, have always been known for their humanity and understatement, an absence of flashiness to them. I love his work for film and TV because he's interested in looking at humanity and the deeper stories.

This is not a trait that his son Sam shares. Indeed Sam Levinson managed to write two films and direct three others before he managed to get his job for Euphoria. Since Euphoria exploded he's written two other films and created another TV series. I've seen a bit of his work since then and its safe to say in none of them does he show the talent of either his father when it comes to storytelling or humanity, nor the subtlety and nuance that one associates with so many of the great writers in TV and film of this past century. Looking at Levinson's work, I keep thinking these are the products of a child who wants to be as good as his parents but basically doesn't have that talent. Yet he continues to get jobs because he's trading off the name of his more famous parent. This is almost certainly true for how his relationship with HBO began and it may well be the only reason Euphoria got greenlit. It has nothing to do with his actual talent.

This piece will by and large not relitigate my issues with Euphoria; my readers know what they are and I'm not going to beat that dead horse. What I will do is discuss some of the films and TV shows I've seen him do in the last few years which it make it crystal clear that Sam Levinson was first coasting on his father's reputation and then on Euphoria's success. Furthermore there's an argument even before Euphoria aired he was a one-trick pony and he didn't come up with anything original even then.

You can't exactly blame him for the flaws of Rogues Gallery his film debut as a screenwriter. A ridiculous action comedy featuring Zach Galifanakis, Adam Scott, Bob Odenkirk, Ving Rhames and Maggie Q all playing government spies with the code names of Tarot Cards (Chariot, Hermit, Magician, etc.) It's basically Hudson Hawk with less control but more imagination. It's completely insane but that's one of its charms.

That's not present at all in Another Happy Day Levenson's directorial debut and by far the closest thing he ever did to his father's work. Set in an estate in Annapolis (not far down the road from Baltimore) we follow Lynn (Ellen Barkin) at a wedding at her parents estate (Ellen Burstyn and George Kennedy) as she deals with a series of very touchy family dynamics. Lynn hopes to have a reunion with her family but her middle son (Ezra Miller in an early role) assaults everyone while her daughter Alice struggles with her demons. Like so many of his father's films the best laid plans of the protagonist quickly self-destruct under the complicated and increasingly angry family dynamics of her siblings.

The film was a box office disaster, making $8,464 its open weekend and as a result very few studios would touch anything Sam did again.  His father eventually came to the rescue letting him co-write the screenplay of one of his next TV movies for HBO The Wizard Of Lies, the story of the rise and fall of Bernie Madoff. The film received four Emmy nominations including Best Actor in a Limited Series or TV movie for Robert DeNiro as Bernie Madoff and Michelle Pfeiffer as his wife Ruth. Sam would receive a WGA nomination for Long form adaptation for TV for it and along with the acclaim he got for the film he was on HBO's radar.

Around this time his second film was greenlit, Assassination Nation. I've seen this…film quite a few times and it's as if Harmony Korine and Lars Von Trier made a high school film only it was somehow more stylish. The film deals with four teenage girls in high school, played by Odessa Young, Abra, Em, Suki Waterhouse and Hari Nef. The movie opens with them in a motel room saying "We may not survive the night.

Here's just one line:

Like, what's the motive behind 300 plus mass shootings every year? There is none. People just burn out, wanna take down their own little universe.

There are so many rape jokes you wonder how many were cut out. There are gunfights, stand-offs, endless nude shots, lots of drugs being done and jokes about child molestation. It features Maude Apatow and Colman Domingo in critical roles. The movie ends with a marching band doing a number down a series of burnt own cars and houses. In other words, it would be a fairly dull episode of Euphoria.

It's too easy to say that the pilot for Euphoria is pretty much cut from the same cloth as Assassination Nation.  I have a feeling, based on seeing this film, that Levenson had an entire franchise planned and when this movie became such a critical and box office disaster he turned it into a TV series. Because the opening two minutes of this movie basically show with a subtitle every single thing that will happen in Euphoria during the first season with the sole exception of Rue's drug addiction and her relationship with her parents.

I have no idea how Sam Levenson pitched Euphoria to HBO and they were willing to buy it. Aside from both he and his factor's connection to the network there's nothing in the pilot much less the first season that meets the metric of what the network was putting out during the 2010s. It's a combination of how simultaneously open-minded and morally depressed Hollywood was in the aftermath of the 2016 election that this show got greenlit at all, much less so well received. I really believe nobody who's written a favorable review of it has seen Assassination Nation, otherwise they would realize that Levenson was essentially ripping off his own material and doing over and over for one season and then a second.

In hindsight the story involving Rue and Ali by far the strongest relationship in the entire series, honestly seems like it belongs in a different show entirely. Hell Colman Domingo's character really doesn't seem like he belongs in the same universe as everything else that's going on in Euphoria. Domingo's performance is far and away the best thing about Euphoria for that very reason; because he's basically untouched by everything that's involving all the other teenagers and their parents Domingo can manage to rise above the lunacy of five year olds with cigarettes, social media erotic posing and penises as far as the eye can see. Ali's conversations with Rue are among the few times you can see anything real among all the flash and illusion.

Many of the other actors and actress have been superb in other shows and films; there's a reason that Jacob Elordi and Sydney Sweeney have become stars and why Maude Apatow and Hunter Schafer are becoming presences in film and TV. But everything on Euphoria is very much in the style of Assassination Nation; there's a lot of style on the surface but there's nothing beneath it.  Of all the dramas that have come out of HBO in the past decade that have been nominated for or won Emmys for Best Drama Euphoria stands apart as the only one that seems to be pure style and image with nothing to say.  Whether that will change after the third – and what is likely to be the final season – remains to be seen but given what Levenson has written in the interim between Seasons 2 and 3, it's not clear if he had anything else to add to the discussion.

Malcolm & Marie a film which debuted in 2021 was essentially a black and white two person show between John David Washington and Zendaya in the title roles. Made for Netflix, it is the story of how a director and his girlfriend's relationship goes into overdrive during a single night. Mostly known for Zendaya's work (she was nominated for multiple awards for Best Actress) it's a more toned down film that one was used to from Levenson at that point.

While the second season of Euphoria was airing Levinson then adapted a Patricia Highsmith novel for Adrian Lyne called Deep Water. Ben Affleck played a  husband who allowed his wife to have affairs in order to avoid divorcing here and then became a prime suspect in the disappearance of her lovers.

This was the first project that Levenson had written as an independent screenplay since The Wizard of Lies and its difficult to blame the flaws of the film as much on him as the director. Lyne was best known in the 1980s and 1990s for a series of erotic thrillers. His best were the Oscar nominated Fatal Attraction and Unfaithful; his most pornographic was 9 1/2 Weeks and somewhere in the middle was Indecent Proposal. This was his first film of any kind in twenty years and by this point he could only get it released in Hulu. Lyne had been a voice of the Zeitgeist in the 1980s; by 2022 he had run out of things to say and its difficult to blame the real difficulties of the film, most notably the age difference between the two leads, on Levinson.

All the blame, however, must go to Levinson on what was his follow-up project to Euphoria, The Idol. Initially one of the most heralded projects of HBO during the spring of 2023 it very quickly became arguably the biggest disaster HBO has had during the 21^st century.  A collaboration between Levinson and the artist The Weekend, it very quickly became clear that it was HBO's Showgirls, without even so much as the camp value.

The reviews were the worst any HBO project had ever received and the network received such horrible press that they actually cancelled the show while it still had an episode left to air. They did so, I should add, during June of 2023 when the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strike were devastating the airwaves and viewers were crying out for original programming. No one seemed to mind that they never saw how the series ended.

Levinson turned 41 this January. He has spent much of the last two years writing and then filming the final season of Euphoria which is scheduled to debut in less than a month. So I think before it airs the time has come to ask certain questions about Levinson's abilities as a writer and director.

At this point Levinson has been nominated for two Emmys, both for the second season of Euphoria. The first was producing, the second for co-writing music and lyrics for one of the songs with Zendaya and Labrinth. (Labrinth, it should be noted, has announced his retirement in a very public tweet where among other things he said: "F---- Euphoria). He has never been nominated for writing or directing an episode of the show, though he did win the DGA award for TV for the 'Stand Still Like a Hummingbird' episode of the show and was nominated for other awards for it. To date Euphoria has won 9 Emmys, two for Zendaya and one for Colman Domingo. The overwhelming number of the nominations and wins have been for technical elements, makeup, music, cinematography and costumes. Multiple actors have been nominated for awards in the cast but Levinson has basically been ignored save for the ones I tell you about.

What this tells me as Euphoria is far more respected for its technical aspects and some of the performances than anything Levinson has contributed to it. This is an outlier for great dramas not just for HBO but almost any peak TV drama in the 21^st century. Even the most visual stunning series on HBO, whether they are Game of Thrones, The Last of Us or The White Lotus, tend to get multiple nominations for writing and directing when they are on the air. I will grant you that Euphoria has had to compete against Succession both years it has been eligible but consider what it was up against in the most recent year 2022: Better Call Saul, Ozark, Squid Game, Yellowjackets, Severance & Stranger Things. Those shows were able to get writing and directing nominations (save Yellowjackets to this point) every year they were on the air.  Levenson, who has written and directed every episode, stands alone from all his fellow showrunners in that regard. That's strange for a series that in a short time has become such a part of the cultural conversation'

I take away that while there are fans of the technical aspects and the actors there's not as much respect in the industry for Levenson's part in creating Euphoria. And this show as well as Wizard of Lies are the only works of film and TV that have received a positive critical reception from the industry at all.  And considering the body of his work, there's something very troubling about it.

Assassination Nation and Euphoria have a very exploitative vibe with the latter honestly seemingly more like highly stylized pornography then an actual TV show. Deep Water was a film where the Alliance of Women Journalists nominated it for the award for 'Most Egregious Age Difference between The Leading Man and the Love Interest' which is a different kind of exploitation. The Idol was notorious for just how exploitive the relationship between the characters played by Lily-Rose Deep and The Weeknd was.

It's very difficult for me not to look at Levinson's overall work and see a cross between the films of Larry Clark and Gaspar Noe, two filmmaker who were controversial for graphic nudity and unsimulated sex scenes usually with actors playing characters below the age of consent. While I'm not entirely onboard with so many of the new standards of morality that have emerged in Hollywood in the past decade in the case of both of these filmmakers and quite a few others, I'm more than onboard with the idea of intimacy coordinators and so forth.  One of the reasons I've had so much difficulty watching Euphoria for even a few minutes is that it does seem very much like child pornography and exploitive. There has been a fair amount of discussion about this in Levinson's work, particularly after The Idol, but it doesn't make me any more comfortable with those critics and audiences who still eagerly anticipate the new season of the show.

And unlike filmmakers and TV writers who tend to show growth as they mature almost all of Levenson's work ever since Assassination Nation retains this kind of exploitive feel to it. With the critical exception of the writers behind Game of Thrones, almost every major TV writer associated with HBO during this century has tried to move on to a different subject when they had a successful series, whether it was David Simon or Alan Ball, all the way down to Craig Mazin. For all the bright colors in Levenson's pallet in his film or TV, they all basically are painting the same picture and its far more stylistic than substance.

I'm not sure if at this juncture I'm prepared to write Sam Levinson off as a creative force: he is relatively young and he might very well be able to regain the humanity that was occasionally present in some of his first films. What I do know is that his work for HBO lacks the depth in terms of writing and directing that I've come to see from a network that still remains the gold standard for TV in my eyes. Barry Levinson and his production company did much to help lead that revolution and the father has done much to add to the luster of it in so much of his work for the network. Sam, with his work seems determined to spray graffiti using a substance that is decidedly not aerosol in the 2020s. This is one case where I think the child needs to be more like the father than anything else.

Homicide Rewatch: The Documentary

 

Written by Eric Overmeyer ; story by Tom Fontana, James Yoshimura and Eric Overmeyer

Directed by Barbara Kopple

 

In 1997 when this episode first aired the idea of 'meta' in television was all but non-existent. To be sure Darin Morgan on The X-Files had realized it on an epic scale in his writing, most magnificently with Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space' which had aired just a few months earlier. But by and large, television took itself seriously and that was particularly true of drama.

Considering that in the 2000s so much of comedy, first on network TV, then cable and then all through streaming, was about to create the format of the mockumentary and turn it into an art form I find it fascinating that one of the earlies recorded examples of it on TV in any form was 'The Documentary' episode of Homicide. To be sure, it doesn't play by the rules that The Office and Parks & Rec will do later on as the camera is always there and the cast is always referring to it, all in the name of a documentary we may never eventually see.  By contrast Brodie makes it very clear that he's been making a documentary almost entirely without the permission of the members of the unit and it's only on the unusually slow night that is New Year's Eve that he decides to show the detectives what he's been working on.

Brodie has never really gelled as a character in the nearly two seasons he's been on the show but it is possible that for Fontana this was intentional. In this episode Brodie is clearly a stand-in for David Simon who originally wrote the book that inspired the series which everything is based on. Like Simon when he chose to write his book the detectives have treated Brodie as if he were a nuisance and never a member of the squad. Even when he's doing his job he is barely tolerated and all the detectives consider him basically a gadfly. They don't think of him as an obstacle the way they do the bosses but they don't consider him an asset either.

This was true, I should add, of the detectives when Homicide became a series. While some were generous to its accomplishment many of them openly degraded it in terms of quality or how they were played onscreen. Many of them, I should add, would end up being transferred out of the unit in the years that would followed and by the time of the airing of this episode, only one of the detectives Simon had originally written about was still working in Homicide. (There were other factors and the show itself will make it part of the story by the time we get to Season Six.) So watching both Brodie's documentary and the detectives criticizing it, both humorously and with increasing anger as they see themselves portrayed, works very much as a metaphor for the detectives themselves.

But its also a metaphor for how many viewers and NBC itself often looked at the show. The opening credits play over the theme music for the series, they criticize the editing techniques as well as his camerawork and complain the show doesn't have enough action, all criticisms that the network constantly made of the show throughout its original run. Throw in the fact that in the middle of this Bayliss goes on a bathroom break, not long before the show itself cuts to commercial, and its clear just how much fun the writers are having. Which is good, considering just how bleak the season has been so far and how much darker its going to get once the phones start ringing again.

There's also an added layer to this episode which the overwhelming majority of mockumentaries ignore (save The Office): is the workplace documentary any good?  Aside from an in-joke that I won't yet spoil, having seen Brodie's documentary the answer I have is if this has been sold to TV and I knew nothing about going it, I would applaud it solely on its own merits. This opinion, I should add, is held by the fans itself as you'll see below in 'Notes From the Board'.

Part of the reason it stands out comes from the sequence called 'Random Thoughts'. In it all six detectives recite, pretty much verbatim, a memorable five page sequence from Simon's book in which he tells us the exact process that a suspect does every time he has committed a murders. It’s a description pretty much of the process we saw Frank go through in the pilot and that we've seen so many times before. But this time it has an added power as the detectives relate the Miranda warning and in exact detail why the first three points are so pertinent. They make it clear from the start that the detective  is 'a man who is not your friend' and that every suspect who they bring in knows this in their soul at every level going in.  They make it clear they are telling you about your 'sacred Fifth Amendment freedom',  that anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law and that this detective is offering you an attorney, someone that anyone brought to a police station guilty or innocent has to know its in their best interest to have.

It's this monologue, more than anything else, that makes it clear that me that Homicide is not and never will be 'copaganda'. These detectives – particularly Braugher who has rarely sounded more God-like – are essentially telling anyone watching exactly what they should do when they end up taken to the Homicide unit, having committed a crime of violence. They make it clear that they know the rules of engagement, that they are adversaries and that it is their job to convince the suspect that it is in their best interest to waive their rights and incriminate themselves. These scenes in 'The Documentary' might as well be a step-by-step instructional video telling you what is going to happen to anyone brought down to a police station in the dead of night and how the process will play out. And there's no doubt in the final minutes that Pembleton is making it very clear that he thinks the guilty people who confess to him "are ignorance personified." If anyone watched this episode in 1997 than  in the next thirty years committed a murder (in Baltimore or anywhere else) and still decided to waive their rights, I would have a difficult time if later on they argued 'the cops tricked them."

As the sequence plays out all six detectives are superb with their individual lines. Belzer delivers his trademark snark in regard to needed someone 'who is familiar with the Baltimore code of law or at least read the cliff notes."  Diamond contrasts by telling you your best bet is to shut up and then in the next sequence speak up. Melissa Leo is brilliant in the charming beguiling ways that we've seen far too little of in recent years, particularly when she says, "with eyes full of innocence." And the sequence where Meldrick takes the role of interrogator and Pembleton the dumb-eyed suspect is extraordinary because the viewer is so used to Frank being the one who reels the fish in rather than falling for bait.

Its striking to see so many of the detectives unnerved by having their inner secrets aired. Its hysterical in particular seeing Frank unnerved by having his dirty laundry aired, whether it involved joking about overtime being televised or lying about how they reveal how the damaging of a department vehicle was covered up by Frank to avoid paying for fender-bender which he caused and Brodie recording.

Of course the most fun takes meta to a whole new level. Lewis and Kellerman are going to arrest a suspect, who ducks out the back and runs behind the alley where he runs into a crew that is filming a TV show…by Fatima Productions…called Homicide…and Barry Levinson is shooting. Which means Homicide is a fictional show being made in Baltimore but the detectives we know are part of the show Homicide…and everyone's brain explodes after they stop laughing. (This in itself is the ultimate in-joke and I'll get to that below.)

The question that the detectives ask over and over is why Brodie chooses to focus on the murder of Llewlyn Kilduff. (This murder, based on where it is on the board, took place between the end of the Sniper two-parter and The Hat, in terms of the calendar. This is a murder committed by Bennett Jackson who kills his neighbors, sits on his porch swing and confesses without a thought. Pembleton, who is the primary is fine taking the confession but Bayliss wants to know why. We learn that Jackson was a funeral director and that his wife has Alzheimer's. He's had parties with people coming in and out of his home.

The truth is revealed at the end and its grim even by the standards of the show. Jackson has been taking bodies from his funeral home to his house, dressing them up in poses and pretending to have parties. (The writers stop just short of arguing that necrophilia was involved.) His only explanation is: "I was lonely. The Kilduff's didn't understand."

I think there's a meta level to this as well, considering that one of the reasons Homicide struggled for renewal was because the executives wanted more 'life-affirming stories' which went against the nature of what Fontana did. By having this be the public face of the unit – and part of the documentary – Fontana is putting forth that the show is always going to be about the darkest and most ugly parts of human life and those who can't deal with it have to turn away. The fact that Bayliss is painted as the hero – Secor's character was seen as our way into the unit – is also meta as is the fact of the greater lesson we've always known. "You're better off not knowing the why." In this case I'm not sure Bayliss – or the viewer is.

We also get insights into the personal lives of the detectives: we see Howard's secret beau (who Kellerman recognizes but tells only Howard) Giardello having a night on the town (with two women!) and Lewis hanging out with Stivers. This is nicely intercut with Cox showing up in the middle of the documentary saying she was bored when its clear she wanted to see Mike. The scene where we see the two making out is sweet, especially as the two try to decide to start actually dating.  The viewer wants to root for both of them, we do, but we've seen relationships between detectives and ME's. They never end well.

And as an added bonus we finally find out who the Lunch Bandit, who we met last season, is. Brodie figured it out, and while the unit is surprised we really shouldn't be. Of course it's Gaffney has been stealing everybody's food and of course he's been doing it even after becoming a boss. And of course, this is never mentioned again.

But the high point comes at the end with Pembleton giving another monologue that is pure Simon:

You're history. And if I wasn't so busy locking you up, I'd tell you…I'd tell you that after all my years I'm still a little amazed that anyone utters a word in this room. Think about it son. When you came in this room, what did the sign say? Homicide unit, that's right. Who lives in a homicide unit….And what do Homicide detectives do for a living?  You got it bunk. And tonight, you took somebody's life. So when you opened your mouth, what in God's name were you thinking?

But the detectives are not happy when they learn that Brodie has sold this documentary to PBS without their knowledge, much like Simon. Perlich almost manages to justify his stint on Homicide with his monologue in which he makes it very clear that the difference between investigating a murder and making a documentary are essentially the same thing. Both are working towards a greater good.

The episode ends, like so many others, with no resolution. They watch the ball drop and the moment it does the phone starts ringing. Everyone has to go back to work. The detectives go back to investigating murders. Giardello goes back to his office with a troubled look on his face. And Brodie takes the videotape out of the TV and goes to the board, erasing 1996 and writing in 1997. It's a new year but the bodies will keep dropping. Death took a holiday but its back at work.

 

 

 

NOTES FROM THE BOARD: In a poll on Court TV of the 15 greatest episodes of Homicide this episode is ranked 5^th all-time.

 

Inconsistencies: Brodie must be one hell of a documentarian. In the montage sequence where we see so many of the murders that have been committed during Season 4 and Season 5, Brodie seems to have been present not only in episodes where he wasn't called to the crime scene but even before he officially joined the unit. There are scenes from Fire, A Doll's Eyes and Scene of the Crime, all of which took place before Brodie was officially recruited in Hate Crimes. And if you're really paying attention, the majority of the most traumatic murders for the squad –  the ones in The Hat for Lewis and Kellerman, Requiem for Adena for Bayliss and the murders of Kevin Lugo and Raymond Dessassy for Howard and Giardello, Brodie was in the squad room at the time covering different events. (Brodie would refer to this as artistic license.)

As for the shots of the various detectives he did room with Munch, Kellerman and Bayliss. And who knows? Maybe Mary invited Brodie over for dinner.

Foreshadowing: When Munch sees Lewis and Stivers together he tells him: "A word to the wise. Nix the horizontal rumba with a fellow detective." He's wrong about Lewis and Stivers but in the final season…

Brodie said that he sold his documentary to PBS and that Bill Moyers will probably narrate it. In 1998 PBS aired a special in collaboration with Homicide called 'Anatomy of A Homicide'. (For the record, we'll be dealing with that in a while too.)

There's footage of Isabella Hoffman as Megan Russert in this episode but she's never seen in anything we haven't seen before.

"Detective Munch" I think his best line comes after Brodie says he admires Ken Burns. "Ken Burns, the only man to make something more boring than a baseball game. A documentary on baseball." This is Munch being facetious, we've already seen many references that he's an Orioles fan and we'll actually see that play out in a storyline in Season 6.

The event where Kellerman and Lewis chase a suspect onto Homicide and he surrenders is actually based on a real-life event. It’s a fictional adaptation of an event that Richard Belzer would make part of his routine. Security guards would chase a shoplifter where Homicide's cast and crew were filming. The thief mistakenly assumed that the cast were really cops and surrendered himself to the security guard! Clark Johnson was on set when it happened and eventually got tired of recounting the story. (But it's such a good one!)

Hey, Isn't That…Barbara Kopple, the director of this episode, is a famous documentarian best known for Harlan County USA for which she won an Oscar. She also won for American Dream in 1990. Those are just her most famous documentaries. She also directed Wild Man Blues, Woodstock '94, My Generation and Shut Up and Sing (the documentary on the Dixie Chicks) and Miss Sharon Jones! She would also direct episodes of OZ and attempted a foray into fiction film with the 2005 feature Havoc, starring Anne Hathaway. She is still working at age 80.

Melvin Van Peebles, who plays Bennett Jackson,  is most famously known for writing, directing and starring in the Blaxploitation film Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, one of the most iconic films ever made. He had worked in short films prior to that and would work in that genre for years for such films as Don't Play us Cheap and the TV miniseries The Sophisticated Gents. He would have small roles as an actor over his career, most famously in the series Sonny Spoon in 1988. Most of his work, I should add, came at the behest of his son Mario who has been a bigger force in TV and films that his father. Van Peebles died in September of 2021 at age 89.

On the Soundtrack: In what is one of the best merges of music and film the Iguanas Boom Boom Boom is used throughout the episode. It is from that we get the line 'Back Page News' that Brodie uses in the title of his documentary.

 

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.