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It’s not a full-scale memoir. I am, in fact, planning to write such a memoir and readers who prefer longer books will not be unhappy with its length.
It’s about what it was like to imagine that I had, during the years I had been a journalist, learned something about how political power worked—and then to realize, as Robert Moses talked, that compared with him I knew nothing, nothing at all; that there was a whole level of political power, not what I had learned from textbooks and lectures in college and not even what I had learned as a political reporter, but a level of which I had hardly ever conceived.
It’s the research that takes the time—the research and whatever it is in myself that makes the research take so long, so very much longer than I had planned.
Why political power? Because political power shapes all of our lives. It shapes your life in little ways that you might not even think about.
Every time a young man or woman goes to college on a federal education bill passed by Lyndon Johnson, that’s political power. Every time an elderly man or woman, or an impoverished man or woman of any age, gets a doctor’s bill or a hospital bill and sees that it’s been paid by Medicare or Medicaid, that’s political power. Every time a black man or woman is able to walk into a voting booth in the South because of Lyndon Johnson’s Voting Rights Act, that’s political power. And so, unfortunately, is a young man—58,000 young American men—dying a needless death in Vietnam. That’s political power.
he had a deep prejudice against graduates of prestigious universities, and during his years at Newsday had never hired one, let alone one from the Ivy League. They hired me as a joke on him while he was on vacation. He was so angry that I was there that during my first weeks on the job, he would refuse to acknowledge my presence in his city room.
“Just remember,” he said. “Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddamned page.”
To really show political power, you had to show the effect of power on the powerless, and show it fully enough so the reader could feel it.
I’m only asking you to call one more time, I said, and I want you to say just one sentence to him: tell him that no matter how many buildings he puts Herman Brown’s name on, in a few years no one is going to know who Herman Brown was if he’s not in a book.
While if you asked them a direct question, they would always tell you the truth, they wouldn’t volunteer anything; their answers would be terse, brief.
while I am aware that there is no Truth, no objective truth, no single truth, no truth simple or unsimple, either; no verity, eternal or otherwise; no Truth about anything, there are Facts, objective facts, discernible and verifiable. And the more facts you accumulate, the closer you come to whatever truth there is.
I get asked why it takes me so long to produce my books. Let me tell you that trying to track down someone who has left the United States years before and returned to someone where he “moves around a lot” is not a matter of hours.
Of course there was more. If you ask the right questions, there always is. That’s the problem.
By “a sense of place,” I mean helping the reader to visualize the physical setting in which a book’s action is occurring: to see it clearly enough, in sufficient detail, so that he feels as if he himself were present while the action is occurring.
Because being charming, being friends, wasn’t what mattered to Johnson. What mattered to him was winning, because he knew what losing could be, what its consequences could be.
Anyway, to get to see Herman Talmadge, you drive south out of Atlanta on Herman Talmadge Highway. You get off at the exit marked “Herman Talmadge Boulevard.” You drive on Herman Talmadge Boulevard to Lake Talmadge.
Power doesn’t always corrupt, and you can see it in the case of, for example, Al Smith or Sam Rayburn. There, power cleanses. But what power always does is reveal, because when you’re climbing, you have to conceal from people what it is you’re really willing to do, what it is you want to do. But once you get enough power, once you’re there, where you wanted to be all along, then you can see what the protagonist wanted to do all along, because now he’s doing it.
