David Crumm > Recent Status Updates

Having now finished the lengthy section of Roberts' biography about early 1940, I now have to say I really have changed my mind about that film "The Darkest Hour," which I had enjoyed and I do think Gary Oldman deserved his Oscar. Roberts is exhaustive in searching for every possible perspective on events in those months. It reveals that movie to have been unfortunately fictionalized far more than I realized.

I just passed the May 1940 ascension of Churchill as wartime prime minister. What fascinates me is that Roberts' carefully researched version of those days differs significantly from the popular 2017 film, The Darkest Hour, for which Gary Oldman won an Oscar as Churchill. That movie jumbled some details of that May or changed them for dramatic purposes. Roberts details the accurate record from multiple perspectives.

Volume 2 opens with reporting on My Lai. In contrast, the vast majority of Ken Burns' 17-hour Vietnam documentary series is devoted to events before My Lai became public. The massacre took place in 1968 but was not widely known in the U.S. until late 1969. So, I'm curious as I begin this second volume how the Library of America editors considered My Lai as the mid point in reporting on the war.

As this volume is drawing toward its close, I'm finding some of the most thought-provoking pieces. I just read Jeffrey Blankfort's lengthy piece for Ramparts in 1969, which really stands out. He found a small town in the Appalachian region of Ohio where a startling number of young men had died in Vietnam, then simply talked to all the families and wrote the profile. A powerful group portrait of American trauma.

This section of the book includes an excerpt from The Selling of the President about how the legendary documentarian Gene Jones was hired by the Nixon camp to produce TV commercials and how cynically the team manipulated those messages to play on Americans' emotions concerning the war's many tragedies.

Now that I'm a third of the way into the book, I am impressed with how Egan has taken an infamous chapter in Hollywood history, one that sparked a horrendous amount of defamatory scandal mongering, and is sorting out the facts one step at a time. I'm increasingly impressed.

I am impressed that Joseph Egan is enough of a film fan that he spent years sifting through the Astor family and court records to write this magazine-style account. However, he's not a historian, because he writes with sweeping conclusions about the psychologies of the real people involved that a rigorous historian would not be making. I'm also reading the new Churchill biography now, which is researched that way.

Until this in-depth biography, I had not realized the extent to which Churchill was hands-on involved in several fronts during World War I. The fact that he was quite literally involved in trench warfare explains a lot about his fortitude in World War II.

I had not realized what a role Churchill played in the infamous Gallipoli campaign and that he also commanded troops literally down in the trenches of France in WWI.

This is really a remarkable collection. I just read an excerpt from Tom Wolfe about U.S. pilots flying over North Vietnam. I had forgotten Wolfe's ability to take us inside the lives of people with his often breathless narratives. This reminded me very much of "The Right Stuff."

This section includes an excerpt from Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night, which I recall at age 13 in 1968 when my father brought home a copy. I do recall looking into the book, then, and not liking what I thought of at the time as disorienting and hard to read, not to mention self indulgent. Now, reading this excerpt 55 years later, I'm astonished that it won both a Pulitzer and National Book Award.

This 2-volume Library of America set really is a mini-library of journalism published during the Vietnam War. I've now finished a section excerpted from New Yorker correspondent Jonathan Schell's 1968 book, "The Military Half: An Account of the Destruction ..." What is so remarkable about such texts is that Americans continued the senseless destruction of Vietnam for years beyond these truths being widely known.

The original reporting in this volume is astonishing. Just read Frank Harvey's casual reporting on the mass defoliation of Vietnam in which an officer proudly locks defoliant off his fingertip to demonstrate that "it's not poison." Then, the legendary Martha Gellhorn reported for Ladies Home Journal on the thousands of child casualties our forces caused. Astonishing that American opinion did not turn more quickly.

I've decided to go back and re-read Arthur Miller plays and discovered that Penguin has this edition of an early almost-forgotten play. This was written in the era when Miller was struggling to find his voice. It's based on a fairly abstract intellectual principle: Why is that some people seem to unfairly have all the luck? Does this mean the universe has no particular arc of justice? It's a 3-Act play of 6 Scenes.

There's so much in this biography that I did not appreciate about Churchill's life. For example, I knew that before WWII he had supervised the British Navy. What I did not realize was Churchill actually is credited with dramatic changes in that Navy prior to WWI. In fact, Roberts says that, had Churchill's life ended before WWII, he would have gone down in history as the man who prepared Britain for its role in WWI.

A fascinating insight from the opening chapters of this book, which cover Churchill's early machinations in British politics, is Roberts' analysis of why he was such an effective speaker. Churchill learned early to memorize his talks for the fresh effect of not seeming to use a text. He also learned the power of dramatic pauses. He became so famous as a speaker that he often earned money for his public appearances.

Roberts is exhaustive in reporting on each phase of Churchill's life. Fortunately for readers, there are fascinating twists and turns at every point in this larger-than-life story. One thing I had not fully appreciated was how essential Churchill's work as a journalist and author was in literally holding his household together. In many cases, Roberts charts how advances and freelance payments helped to pay the bills.