The Race by Richard North Patterson (MacMillan, £16.99)
Journals 1952-2000 by Arthur M Schlesinger (Penguin Putnam, £25)
Barack Obama’s victory in the US Democratic primary has been widely covered in the British press. But one of the puzzles of the coverage of the US presidential race in the age of the internet is why British journalists are given so much space in our newspapers. The race is gripping, but as our London-based commentariat pontificate, surely it makes more sense for interested readers to go straight to the source. nytimes.com, Newsweek, as well as Slate, Drudge, Huffington and the campaign sites themselves means we get US politics as they are cooking, not reheated by British correspondents.
Yet better still than US reporting, which can get repetitious, is the writing of American authors—both fiction and non-fiction—who often give much better accounts of what is going on. Nothing you will read about John McCain will be as good as Richard North Patterson’s The Race, simply the best novel about politics since Joe Klein’s Primary Colors. The Race’s hero is a senator who was captured and tortured by enemy forces when his plane was shot down. This is not McCain over Vietnam, but the handsome Corey Grace over Iraq in the first Gulf war. Patterson puts a decent distance between his hero and McCain, but although not quite a roman à cléf, The Race also features, in thin disguise, Rupert Murdoch, Colin Powell and various conservative political pastors like Jimmy Swaggart and Bob Jones.
Corey Grace, a Republican, has to decide how far he will go in bowing before religious and media interests in order to win the presidential nomination. His opponent is a Catholic senator who condemns homosexuality and promises the religious lobbies all they want to hear on abortion and stem cell research. The Race is located in the Republican camp, but takes the reader into the heart of political darkness that the ad hominem and misogynist ad feminam brutality of the Clinton-Obama fight has revealed.
For the Democrats, there is no better guide to the mood and passions of a presidential contest than Arthur Schlesinger’s marvellous journal of US politics, covering the years from Truman to Clinton. Schlesinger, a pure-blood public intellectual, was close to every important Democratic political figure of the second half of the 20th century (as well as many on the right, like Henry Kissinger, whose description of Donald Rumsfeld as “the rottenest person” he had ever encountered in government is worth the book’s price alone). Although linked with the Kennedy brothers, Schlesinger was his own man, and played up to his reputation as a star Harvard historian in his intellectual independence and judgement.
He obsesses, rightly, with the power of political words. Adlai Stevenson’s nomination speech in 1952 is described as “a brilliant literary document, complex and carefully wrought in its composition… it had wonderful passages of political polemic, and it was suffused throughout with a sense of the immensity and impenetrability of the crisis of our time.”
Great speeches inspire the liberal left. But pedestrian speechifiers like Nixon, Eisenhower and Bush, père et fils, often win power. Obama wows Americans with his verbal fireworks. But here is John F Kennedy in 1960 on a favourite tribune of the Democratic party, Hubert Humphrey, whose liberal podium performances also raised cheers. “Hubert is too hot for the present mood of the people. He gets people too excited, too worked up. What they want today is a more boring, monotonous personality like me.” John McCain might take comfort from that observation. So might Gordon Brown.
In 1972, Schlesinger noted: ” Incredible as it may seem, it really looks as if George [McGovern] will get the Democratic nomination… He was right to declare so early, and he has shown an accurate intuition on the issues.” Obama declared 16 months ago. Will his fate be that of George McGovern, who went on to lose so catastrophically to Nixon?
Being a great diarist does not equal perfect judgement. In January 1992, Schlesinger comes back from a trip to Europe and writes: “My return has witnessed the decline and, I fear, the fall of Bill Clinton.” But to read Schlesinger’s journal entries is to be taken into the US presidential electoral process in a way no British writer could manage. The highs and lows, the incessant compromises and the disappointment that emerge once power is won are all on display. But so is the idealism, the desire to use state power creatively and a republican, Whitmanesque belief that democracy and political engagement are great public goods.
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