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Rodin's Debutante

3.12 of 5 stars 3.12 · rating details · 185 ratings · 53 reviews

Tommy Ogden, a Gatsbyesque character living in a mansion outside robber-baron-era Chicago, declines to give his wife the money to commission a bust of herself from the French master Rodin and announces instead his intention to endow a boys’ school. Ogden’s decision reverberates years later in the life of Lee Goodell, whose coming of age is at the heart of Ward Just’s emoti...more

Hardcover, 263 pages

Published March 1st 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (first published February 4th 2011)

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Apr 30, 2012 Timothy Bazzett rated it 5 of 5 stars

Ward Just's newest novel, RODIN'S DEBUTANTE, is a fascinating and absorbing read however you want to interpret it. It is, perhaps more than anything else, a coming-of-age story, but it is also very much about "the enigma of class in America."

The story of young Lee Goodell, only child of a judge in the small town of New Jesper, north of Chicago, is one of privilege, private schools and university with a generous "allowance." The town has it's own "Committee" of upper class citizens who make the...more Ward Just's newest novel, RODIN'S DEBUTANTE, is a fascinating and absorbing read however you want to interpret it. It is, perhaps more than anything else, a coming-of-age story, but it is also very much about "the enigma of class in America."

The story of young Lee Goodell, only child of a judge in the small town of New Jesper, north of Chicago, is one of privilege, private schools and university with a generous "allowance." The town has it's own "Committee" of upper class citizens who make the decisions about how the town will operate and exactly what the working class should know. Lee's father is the unofficial head of this group, which also includes the banker, the newspaper publisher-editor, the mayor, and a few other wealthy townsmen. The story pivots around two shocking unsolved crimes in the town, the details of which are squelched by the Committee 'for the good of the community." Nevertheless, these events mark the end of innocence for Lee and the end of the era of prosperity for the town. Soon after these events, Lee's family moves to the more prosperous and prestigious North Shore and Lee finishes his high school years in the private academy, Ogden Hall School for Boys, a struggling still-new institution already steeped in myths and lies which has its own dark secrets regarding its founder and its origins.

Lee, a serious student, makes the best of his years there, despite the school's doubtful pedigree and makeshift faculty. He finds an ally in the departing headmaster, August 'Gus' Allprice. (I couldn't help but wonder if 'Gus' was somehow meant to reflect some aspect of Auguste Rodin, whose rushed and imperfect sculpture of the nameless Chicago debutante graced the school's library.) With Allprice's aid (and funds from the founder), Lee helps to fashion a winning football team his senior year, one that would become legend as "the undefeated season." This accomplishment arose several times in the course of the narrative, prompting me to think often of Just's earlier novel, AN UNFINISHED SEASON, also a coming-of-age tale.

Lee Goodell goes on to the University of Chicago where he takes up sculpture, and, like Rodin, he works single-mindedly to his own vision, and also like Rodin, finds his work panned and written off by the Chicago critics. (But his first showing of his marbles are commercially successful.)

There are so many things to think about here it is hard to summarize them all. Allprice's seafaring background and his fascination with Melville's lesser-known South Seas novel, OMOO, and the headmaster's subsequent escape to Patagonia and the South Seas, along with his paramour, Anjelica. And then there is Lee's own discovery of Chicago's South Side with its own particular charms and dangers.

There is a Jamesian quality to the richly descriptive passages of the Chicago milieu of the early 1950s, and yet the dialogue between Lee and Laura is often clipped and Hemingwayesque. Just also indulges his obvious interest in music with his frequent allusions to the jazz and blues scenes of Chicago in the McCarthy era. These musical interludes made me remember another fine Chicago novel I read recently, Robert Hellenga's BLUES LESSONS.

One device which puzzled me here was the shift in point-of-view, from omniscient narrator to first-person, Lee's voice. The first time was when Lee described his childhood and early adolescence, up to the point of the shocking atrocities of rape and murder, the details of which the "Committee" suppressed, but which nevertheless changed the community forever. The second time Lee's voice surfaces is when he is older, married and has a meeting with the girl who had been raped. The change in POV is certainly effective, but I just couldn't figure out why it was implemented. Something to ponder for a while.

A rich and thought-provoking work, RODIN'S DEBUTANTE, no question. If there is a moral, it might be found in a sentiment from Victor Hugo mentioned toward the end - "a just government encouraged the rich and protected the poor." There's that matter of class in America again. I'm not entirely sure if I agree with Hugo, but it's something to think about. (less)

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Dec 02, 2011 Michele Weiner rated it 1 of 5 stars

Spoiler alert - I have written about the few events that actually occur in this book, and given away the ending, such as it is.

The opening sentence of Rodin's Debutante is, "This is a true story as far as it goes." Prophetic. The story doesn't actually go anywhere at all. I don't know if the main character was supposed to be the small town young sculptor Lee Goodell was raised in or the school the very wealthy Tommy Ogden founded. Ogden's wife Marie had returned from a trip to France where her t...more Spoiler alert - I have written about the few events that actually occur in this book, and given away the ending, such as it is.

The opening sentence of Rodin's Debutante is, "This is a true story as far as it goes." Prophetic. The story doesn't actually go anywhere at all. I don't know if the main character was supposed to be the small town young sculptor Lee Goodell was raised in or the school the very wealthy Tommy Ogden founded. Ogden's wife Marie had returned from a trip to France where her traveling companion had commissioned Rodin to make a bust of her daughter. Marie wanted to return to Paris to have her own bust made, but Tommy would not agree. Tommy was an unpleasant man who loved only for hunting and spent good deal of his free time at a Chicago whorehouse where he kept a luxurious room. To spite his wife and her demand for a Rodin, he suddenly announced in front of friends at dinner one night that he would endow a boys' school. He would call it Ogden Hall, and build it on ancestral land in the countryside north of Chicago. Marie never got her bust, but the Rodin that started all the trouble ended up at Ogden Hall, where the students believed it to be Marie.

Meanwhile, in nearby New Jesper, Lee Goodell was growing up. His father was a judge, one of the informal group of men who gathered to run New Jesper from behind the scenes. Lee had a perfect childhood. The only sour note were the tramps who sometimes camped out by the railroad tracks. Lee and his friends would explore the area and often met the men who rode the rails---until there was a murder, and all contact was forbidden. Several years later, another crime was committed in New Jesper, one so heinous that the city fathers decided to keep it quiet. There were no witnesses save the victim, who had amnesia for the crime, and no one was ever even suspected, let alone convicted.

One follows Lee as his parents move from New Jesper, that suddenly dangerous town, to the North Shore, and on to Ogden Hall, the University of Chicago, and beyond. He takes a job, he marries, he works on his sculptures, he is mugged, but still nothing doing in the plot department. One waits and waits for somebody to find the perpetrator of the stunning crime, one even imagines that Lee is involved (if one has a good imagination), but one waits in vain. The perpetrator is not revealed. The victim returns, but does not regain her memory. The story ends. Thank God my Kindle actually displayed a page that said I had finished the book or I would still be looking for the rest of it.

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Aug 26, 2011 Kat rated it 3 of 5 stars

Lovely language, thoughtful descriptions, some puzzling sentences (thank you book club members for helping unravel one part of speech mystery). This book is very much of the momement or lived in, I am stumbling for words here, but you get a sense that the places and people are very authentic, very right for their time. The problems I have with this book and with some other books by Mr. Just are 1) that the protagonist is removed a bit from the drama, not a first-hand participant, but an observer...more

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Mar 12, 2011 switterbug (Betsey) rated it 4 of 5 stars

Chicago and its outlying areas exert a crisp emotional current and brooding tension in this assured and shimmering coming-of-age story of bygone days. Rodin and his (fictional) Debutante sculpture provide both a specific and totemic significance as well as a mythical fever to the book and its themes, its force being largely symbolic. In the years before WW1, Tommy Ogden, a wealthy industrialist with a passion for hunting and a penchant for a brothel, spitefully denies his wife the money to commi...more Chicago and its outlying areas exert a crisp emotional current and brooding tension in this assured and shimmering coming-of-age story of bygone days. Rodin and his (fictional) Debutante sculpture provide both a specific and totemic significance as well as a mythical fever to the book and its themes, its force being largely symbolic. In the years before WW1, Tommy Ogden, a wealthy industrialist with a passion for hunting and a penchant for a brothel, spitefully denies his wife the money to commission a Rodin bust of herself. Instead, he turns his lavish mansion and estate, just outside of the city, into the Ogden School for Boys.

Years later, during the Cold War era, Lee Goodell is a student at Ogden and later the University of Chicago. Lee aspires to be a sculptor and a world traveler, eschewing his ancestral heritage of practicing law. The ambitious desire was ignited partly by the Debutante sculpture that stood in the school's library, and fueled further by some truly cutting incidents in his life. If you think about sculpture as something that forms out of removal, a shape and dimension that emerges from a formless origin, and a meaning that comes out of chiseling and whittling, then you will arrive at a parallel for much of the book's thesis.

Lee is that formless youth who lived in the provincial, sheltered town of New Jesper on the shores of Lake Michigan. His father, a judge, was a titan in the community and a governor of suppression. He was instrumental, along with his secret committee, of stifling the full story of a vicious sex crime and quelling the murder of a hobo from the wrong side of the tracks. Judge Goodell had honorable but misguided intentions, and Lee overheard these secret meetings, which became a defining moment in his life. Soon after, he moved with his parents to the tony and suburban North Shore.

Once Lee goes off to college, he meets a worldly, sophisticated group of students that open his eyes to life's more expansive possibilities. Another defining moment occurs when he becomes the victim of a crime on the gritty South Side. Rather than turning him away, he became more enriched and dedicated to establishing himself in this rich city of turbulence, truculence, and diversity.

This is my first Ward Just book, and yet over the years I have collected several of his novels, now beckoning me from my bookcase. I look forward to more of his silky, supple, chiseled writing. His depiction of Chicago is superb, rousing me with its teeming, provocative nature. Just's ability to portray the city occasionally eclipsed his less rounded characters. You read him for the stately prose, and for the themes that come alive through the heartbeat of Chicago. Allusions to Melville's Omoo and Balzac's Old Goriot are prevalent in the book, and parallel this novel by shoring up a lot about class distinction and locale.

The characters and plot are efficiently portrayed, and at times they are subverted by the themes. Just was occasionally expeditious in turning points that I would have wanted to see more fleshed out, some landmark moments in Lee's life. However, I think Just intended for the characters to be less individual than a product of a political landscape, a locale and a time--an homage to Chicago's twentieth century, and to those tumultuous memories. In Just's story, the city inhabited the people as much as the people inhabited the city. (less)

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Mar 16, 2012 Don rated it 3 of 5 stars

Very well-written, butI didn't feel that the book fulfilled its promise. The descriptions of Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood--home of the University of Chicago--at mid-century seemed to be true, but most of the rest of the novel is vague and ill-formed. A good deal of the book is about Ogden Hall, the slightly disreputable private boy's school that the protagonist, Lee Goodell, attended, but ultimately, except for one event from his school days, the presence of the school as a character in the...more

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Apr 06, 2011 Bookmarks Magazine rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: may-june-2011

“What a masterful storyteller Ward Just is!” exclaimed the Minneapolis Star Tribune, mirroring general sentiment. All critics appreciated Ward Just’s realistic prose and the themes that run through much of his work, such as the alienation of characters who move from small towns to cities. They also thought the characters dreamed up for Rodin’s Debutante were superbly realized. However, they expressed different feelings about the book’s plot structure. Some reviewers thought Just had brilliantly...more

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Mar 01, 2011 Jill rated it 4 of 5 stars

Ward Just is a writer’s writer, as straightforward and gritty and no-nonsense as Chicago—the city from which he hails. His solid 17th novel carries a seemingly enigmatic title – Rodin’s Debutante – a curiosity, considering the book has nothing to do with Rodin or debutantes.

But wait – as in much of Ward Just’s work, there is complexity and hidden meaning behind the seeming simplicity. Sculpturally, Rodin – the progenitor of modern sculpture -- possessed a distinctive ability to model a complex,...more Ward Just is a writer’s writer, as straightforward and gritty and no-nonsense as Chicago—the city from which he hails. His solid 17th novel carries a seemingly enigmatic title – Rodin’s Debutante – a curiosity, considering the book has nothing to do with Rodin or debutantes.

But wait – as in much of Ward Just’s work, there is complexity and hidden meaning behind the seeming simplicity. Sculpturally, Rodin – the progenitor of modern sculpture -- possessed a distinctive ability to model a complex, turbulent, deeply pocketed surface in clay. Similarly, Lee Goodell, the key protagonist of Rodin’s Debutante, takes his own unformed life and sculpts it, in an education that stretches from the boarding school at the Ogden Hall School of Boys to the mean south side city streets of Chicago.

The story begins in the early 20th century with the bellicose Tommy Ogden, a rough-edged Chicago tycoon who thwarts his wife Maria’s desire to travel to Paris to commission her own Rodin bust; instead, he chooses to endow a Midwestern boy’s prep school. A Rodin bust of an anonymous debutante does eventually grace Ogden Hall’s Library, but it is not the bust of Maria Ogden, despite commonly accepted wisdom. It is “just appearances” and a metaphor for what life is all about.

Flash forward many decades. The story shifts to Lee Goodell. He and his family live in New Jesper, a quiet traditional town off the shores of Lake Michigan, where Lee’s innocence is shattered after a particularly violent sex crime of a classmate. Lee – a self-described observer of life – ends up at enrolling at Ogden Hall, where he excels; he, too, wants to sculpt. In a twist of fate, he meets the now reclusive millionaire and gushes to him, “I believe Rodin’s bust of your late wife is a wonderful work of art. It’s a great thing to have in the library. It’s an inspiration. It’s been an inspiration to me.” A bemused Tommy Ogden casually shatters that illusion…the first of many illusions that will be shattered for Lee.

And that is the book’s core theme: the divergence of false appearance and reality. Whether it’s the falsity of a respectable community where the truth never sees the light of day, the appearance of harmony in Hyde Park, which is rife with class and racial distinctions, or the falsity of the legend behind Rodin’s debutante marble statue, life is never what it seems, only what you make it.

The fact that Lee becomes a sculptor, too, is also no accident. He finds comfort in a slab of unformed marble, where possibilities are infinite, and where he has the control of shaping the outcome. In this career, the ideal of art and the reality of life are finally able to blend.

Lee Goodell is a good man…perhaps, a bit too good, which translates into not enough of the pockmarks and imperfections that lead to a fully-rounded and satisfying key character. Still, this is a solid piece of work, with sparse and powerful prose, rich observations, and a meticulously crafted plot. The sense of place, the crude glamour of rough-and-ready mid-century Chicago is spot-on. Rodin’s Debutante is a very worthy addition to Ward Just’s fine craftsman-like body of work.

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Apr 07, 2011 Mike Barresi rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

http://knowthyself-mb.blogspot.com/20...

I finished Ward Just's Rodin's Debutante two days ago and I can't even remember the last name of the protagonist. I think his name was Lee Goodell. The other main character, I can't remember his first name, but his last name was Ogden. Here's my problem with the book, I never understood the point of it. The first part was about Ogden and his hunting and and his fights with his wife and his creating a school for boys, called Ogden. This Ogden is an ass to e...more

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Mar 21, 2011 Mary rated it 4 of 5 stars

Set in twentieth century Chicago, this coming of age story is well written and I especially enjoyed the Hyde Park setting. Lee Goodell is a sheltered child the child of a judge in a small city on the lake north of metropolitan Chicago. A rape and a hobo's death changes his life, his perspective of his family, and he ends up attending a boarding school founded by a strange industrialist named Tommy Ogden. Ward Just uses sculpture as a means to present the growth and devlopment of Lee. The school...more

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Aug 07, 2011 Bill rated it 2 of 5 stars

Rodin's Debutante is not up to Just's high standards in such novels as An Unfinished Season and The Weather in Berlin. Rodin lacks focus. Is it about a Rodin bust of Marie, Tommy Ogden's wife or someone else? Does the answer show that you can't believe what everyone else thinks?

Tommy Ogden is the scion of a railroad baron and, as such does not work but hunts. He deciders to turn the huge family mansion into a boys' school. The school, at best, is mediocre plagued by high turnover in the staff an...more

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Feb 21, 2011 Cynthia rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: books-read-in-2011

Lee Goodell grows up in a tiny town just outside Chicago in the 1940’s. His father is an influential judge and an unofficial elder of the town. A tragedy occurs to one of Lee’s classmates and he secretly listens as a cabal consisting of a policeman, the owner of the local paper takes place in his father’s study. This group decides how to handle, or not handle, the situation. They gloss it over and the immigrant mother and daughter quietly leave town. Problem solved! Consequently Lee’s mother bec...more

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Apr 11, 2011 Kasa Cotugno rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: vine

I wanted to like this book much more than I did. It seemed as if there was a plot just waiting to come out, but it never quite jelled for me, as most of Just's books. It is old fashioned story telling with modern twists, but the characters' characters seem inchoate and there is a surprising lack of originality. Ogden, who donates his mansion to make it a school for misfits, seems to have enormous wealth that never runs out. Not possible or realistic given his lifestyle. Lee never seems to grow e...more

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Mar 07, 2011 Lobstergirl rated it 2 of 5 stars

Recommended to Lobstergirl by: Kirk Douglas

Shelves: fiction

This is an "emotionally potent novel," says the dust jacket, but the opposite is true. Like all of Just's novels, which are often about a young man coming of age in midcentury America, this one is emotionally dead, its characters remote. Just's style is distant, so we always feel at a remove. Has anyone ever cared what happened to one of these characters? They always seem to be sleepwalking through life. His habit of not using quotation marks adds to the sense of dialogue being spoken by ghosts....more

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Aug 08, 2011 Virginia Walter rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: adult-fiction

Lee Goodell's story is linked with that of Tommy Ogden, an eccentric Chicago millionaire of the era of robber barons. Lee, raised in a small town outside of Chicago, goes to the boys' prep school founded by Ogden and from there goes on to the University of Chicago and a career as a successful sculptor. He rejects the conservative politics of his boyhood as he embraces the values of his new life in liberal Hyde Park, but incidents from his life in the small town where his father was a judge never...more

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May 14, 2011 Jennifer rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, historical, prize-winners

Ward Just was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for a previous book, An Unfinished Season.

I liked the characters in this book and the writing but the story didn't seem to get anywhere. There waa murder and a rape that weren't solved. And no attempt was made to solve it. The main character just lived his life - went to school, became a successful sculptor, married, had children. I did love a section in the book about his childhood, when he and a friend roamed this scrubby uninhabited area...more

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Aug 17, 2012 Joanne Gass rated it 4 of 5 stars

I think Ward Just has set out to explore the political and personal idiosycreses of Americans in the twentieth century. At any rate, this one is about the mid-west and the loss of innocence of the people of a small town outside of Chicago. After having read an inordinate number of novels this year about old men trying to make sense out of their lives, it was a relief to have the protagonist be a young man finding his way in life(not an original plot line either, I know). I liked this one very mu...more

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Nov 29, 2011 Kim Meyers rated it 4 of 5 stars

Coming of age story grappling with memory and how different characters view the same situation, as well as how it shapes their lives. Lee Goddell tries to find meaning in life, much as he tries to discover form within marble as a sculptor. When he is a boy in small town New Jesper, Illinois, a heinous crime happens to one of his classmates and he witnesses how his father, the Judge, and other leaders deal with the issue, more concerned with how the crime will affect the town’s reputation than on...more

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Mar 10, 2011 Julie Smith (Knitting and Sundries) rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: netgalley, reviewed

FIRST SENTENCE: This is a true story,or true as far as it goes.

The novel opens with the story of an anonymous debutante whose home is Astor Street in Chicago, traveling through Europe with her mother, who visits Rodin's atelier in Depot des Marbres, where the artist sculpts a bust of her for her eighteenth birthday.

We then meet Tommy Ogden near the start of the first World War, a wealthy man whose first love is shooting and the thrill of the hunt, at his dinner table, in a heated argument with M...more

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Aug 22, 2012 William rated it 3 of 5 stars

This is the first book by Just that I have read, surprising because it's his 17th novel. The books strikes me as more form than substance. The prose is stylish, but the plot seems contrived and the characters are somewhat flat. For instance, I was puzzled by why Lee, the protagonist, or perhaps his parents, would choose a school as peculiar and substandard as Ogden Hall, and the whole plot hinges on this choice. It doesn't help that none of the characters appealed to me very much.

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May 30, 2012 Rachel rated it 2 of 5 stars

By the time I was halfway through the book and well into "Part 3" I realized this book has no idea what it wants to be.

The main character isn't even introduced until well into the novel, by which point we've been through what feels like a hundred jerky POV shifts, including a foray into first person to let the main character narrate (though it is not obvious by this point that he is, indeed, the main character).

As a side note, before giving up on this book I thought I'd check out the NYT review...more

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Dec 23, 2010 Krista (CubicleBlindness Reviews) rated it 3 of 5 stars

If you are fans of Ward Just, you will not be disappointed in this new coming of age story. It goes full circle from a young boy, son of a Judge who overhears about a school mate being raped, changing schools and discovering his love for scultpture as well as eventually falling in love himself and travelling the world. This story has well developed characters and a well rounded plot that will leave you wondering about your own schooling, friends and loved ones. There is beautiful imagery of Rom...more

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Apr 22, 2012 Paddy rated it 3 of 5 stars

Any writing by Ward Just is a gift to readers. Although this novel lacks the depth of Exiles in the Garden (2009) and jumps around unevenly, I was pleased to be reading it from start to finish. His portraits of small-town midwest life and Chicago in mid-20th-century sparkle and remind me of how Wallace Stegner described Salt Lake City in Recapitulation. Ward Just is not as well known as he should be.

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Sep 03, 2011 Caroline rated it 3 of 5 stars

This is a strange one. The writing is exceptional, but the structure is basically unsound, and the narrative voice reels around like a folk dance. I think the point was to contrast 2 artistic types, and that the contrast may have had something to do with empathy. Beyond that, I'll have to peruse the reviews here and see if someone's willing to clue me in.

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Jan 31, 2013 Ann rated it 4 of 5 stars

Similar to Sense of an Ending, this book takes us on a journey about one man's life and how important his memories of childhood, how correct or mistaken they are, shape his life. His prose is precise and unpredictable and filled with wry humor. Want to read his other books...Echo House/An Unfinished Season.....

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Sep 08, 2011 Laura rated it 3 of 5 stars

Read this on vacation last week. Very good. Involves issues of power and conscience and how memory is shaped by one's experiences. Involves lawyers, Chicago's South Side, crime, coming-of-age of a young boy. Confession: picked it because it was on the President's summer reading list.

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Apr 02, 2011 Linda rated it 4 of 5 stars

Just is a fine writer. Here he writes about Chicago in the early
part of the twentieth century and a town New Jesper that could be
Waukegan or Evanston. His hero Lee Goodall becomes a sculptor while
he studies at the Univeristy of chicago. The background of Hyde Park
and the Fifties was well done. The novel has no real ending, it just
floats away.

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May 06, 2012 Susan Zinner rated it 4 of 5 stars

Liked this quite a bit; reminded me a bit of "To Kill a Mockingbird," where a child learns about a violent crime and it haunts him throughout his life as he watches how the adults in his life deal with this violenct act; good depiction of Hyde Park in Chicago...

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Apr 24, 2011 Ellen rated it 2 of 5 stars

What's the difference between a spare narrative and one that just doesn't have enough story? I read this one because it had gotten a lot of good reviews and as an author who writes about Chicago, it felt like one I "should" read. Luckily it was a quick read, but nothing much seemed to happen and lots of ends were left untied. An altogether dissatisfying read.

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May 28, 2011 Kim Berkshire rated it 4 of 5 stars

My first Just book. Title caught my interest at the library. Loved loved loved the rich writing; I found myself going back and re-reading long paragraphs, although I can't use that as an excuse for why it took me more than three weeks to read it. Like other reviewers, would have liked to see some resolutions of the murder, the rape, the disappearance of Magda at the end, even the comings and goings of some of the less starring characters. But that's a small complaint. Will definitely read him ag...more

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Aug 26, 2012 Rosemary rated it 3 of 5 stars

I read this because of a review in the paper. I enjoyed the book, but I think perhaps this just isn't my genre (coming of age)...It was interesting to read the book set in Chicago-since I have family there and from there.

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About Ward Just

Ward Just (born 1935) is an American writer. He is the author of 15 novels and numerous short stories.

Ward Just graduated from Cranbrook School in 1953. He briefly attended Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He started his career as a print journalist for the Waukegan (Illinois) News-Sun. He was also a correspondent for Newsweek and The Washington Post from 1959 to 1969, after which he left...more

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