Last week, I noted my pride that Perlstein blurbee Jefferson Cowie won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for history. This week, we recognize one of the two runners-up for that same prize—a fellow Perlstein blurbee! Two out of three aint’ bad, right?

Here’s what I said for the back cover of Garrett Graff’s Watergate: A New History:

“Garrett Graff aptly calls Watergate a 'Gordian knot of scandal.' This comprehensive, searching, yet elegant book untangles it more completely than any attempt so far. I learned a lot!"

Those who know my work know “I learned a lot!” is saying something. Watergate is at the center of two of my books, Nixonland and The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan. And, thing of it is, it’s more knotty than a Gordian knot: knots tied in knots, tied up into another set of knots. “Watergate” was a word signifying a group of corrupt events that happened, in secret, all through Richard Nixon’s first term, but only became understood as a “group of events” after one of those corrupt events—the burglary of Democratic National Committee office in June of 1972— stopped being secret, when the burglars got caught. Eventually, the word “Watergate also came to signify the work the president’s men, and also the president, did to cover up the existence of those events, and their ties to the White House—such as bribing those burglars to keep quiet in court. Meanwhile the word “Watergate” also signified the multiple overlapping and sometimes contradictory investigations, both journalistic and ones carried out within all three branches of government, each of those encompassing a complicated discourse about their jurisdictional legitimacy and proper processual course), that brought that skein of events into public awareness; and also, “Watergate” referred to all the actions Nixon did to sabotage those investigations—like trying to hold back the tapes in which many of those events were talked about, but which (he talking on those tapes) was not just evidence of past events, but also a real-time Watergate event to be discovered—like the time Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman said something on the tapes meant to create a record of his innocence during a discussion of how to cover up certain events, in the event those tapes did later become public, which they did. A cover-up of a cover-up, which in turn cued up another event: a count in his criminal indicment—an event about an event about an event about an event. Any given day, at the height of the public discussion of Watergate, serious news consumers had to (and, incredibly, did) keep all those levels of events straight in their head, in a constantly shifting sea of context. It was bewildering. Boiling it all down down into a single digestible narrative is like trying to summarize a Charlie Kaufman movie.

And yet, Graff accomplished that with greater aplomb than anyone before who’s attempted it. I admire him deeply for that; and also for what he does now.

Read his newsletter; it’s indispensable. I think of Garrett Graff as a journalistic unicorn: he does work that speaks with maximum accessibility in the idiom of normal Washington journalism; as a former editor of POLITICO Magazine and the Washingtontonian, that was his tribe. Simultaneously, he is one of the precious few escapes a the taint of that benighted tribe: its shallowness, its conformity, its sucking up, the banality, its #bothsides moral evasions. A spy in the house of normal, who never normalizes. A radical—his work gets to roots—who is all the more so precisely because he doesn’t appear to be one. He churns out books you can imagine getting sold in airports—like his recent book UFO: The Inside Story of the U.S. Government's Search of Alien Life Here—and Out There—who also can communicate to the kind of dude who buys books in airports about why, well, they need to be thinking about the possibility that the way politics works now may lead to the end of the world.

Here is how he did it in a “Fresh Air” interview from late 2023. Terry Gross called him back to an earlier one he did with her near the end of Trump’s first term about a POLITICO in which he warned people about the terrifying things Trump might might attempt to subvert democracy in his remaining weeks in office . Now that Trump was ramping up to his attempt to become president again, Gross asked, “So I'm wondering what you're thinking now about Trump and what happens if he does manage, in spite of all the indictments, to get reelected?”

“Let me give you an answer,” Graff began his reply, “that, unexpectedly, is going to connect to UFOs.”

“The scientists who work on SETI - the search for extraterrestrial intelligence - have this thing called the Drake equation. It’s an equation that is supposed to predict the number of intelligent civilizations out there and how many there are at any given time. The main variable scientists call L, which stands for the length of time that an advanced civilization lasts. To me, the challenge is L could turn out to be based on where humanity is heading, a pretty short number.

“And when you look around our world right now - you know, the challenges of technology and AI and misinformation and the challenges to democracy that Donald Trump poses, you know, the challenges of climate change - there’s no guarantee that human civilization is around for that much longer, and certainly not at a level where, you know, we would have the capability and the interest to explore the rest of the universe. So to me, you know, when I look at Donald Trump’s possible return to power, you know, what I’m thinking about right now is what it does to the L of, you know, American democracy and human civilization and how it could and almost certainly would accelerate the unwinding of, you know, modern American life.”

That is the kind of political journalism we need: stuff to get people thinking beyond the next election, to the stakes behind the whole thing. The Gordian knots inside the Gordian knots.

Crimes in the Blaze-o-verse, the lion’s share of them, come in three varieties: Black people wilding out; Democratic public officials abusing their offices, and…

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Three years ago in May, I enjoyed the delightful experience of one of my blurbed books winning the Pulitzer Prize for history. Here’s what the Pulitzer committee had to say about my friend Jefferson Cowie’s Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power:

“A prize-winning historian chronicles a sinister idea of freedom: white Americans’ freedom to oppress others and their fight against the government that got in their way.

”American freedom is typically associated with the fight of the oppressed for a better world. But for centuries, whenever the federal government intervened on behalf of nonwhite people, many white Americans fought back in the name of freedom—their freedom to dominate others.

”In Freedom’s Dominion, historian Jefferson Cowie traces this complex saga by focusing on a quintessentially American place: Barbour County, Alabama, the ancestral home of political firebrand George Wallace. In a land shaped by settler colonialism and chattel slavery, white people weaponized freedom to seize Native lands, champion secession, overthrow Reconstruction, question the New Deal, and fight against the civil rights movement.

”A riveting history of the long-running clash between white people and federal authority, this book radically shifts our understanding of what freedom means in America.”

And here’s what I said in my blurb:

"Jefferson Cowie has a knack for publishing instant classics: books that change historians' conversations. This is his most extraordinary yet. With eloquence and with brilliance, he delves deep into the annals of a specific place, Barbour County, Alabama, in order to excavate the foundations of America's darkest and most enduring story: how 'freedom' became a national alibi for cruelty, inequity, and reaction. As soon as I finished reading it, I wanted to start over and absorb it all over again."

Which is the honest-to-God truth.

A quick note about Jeff’s other instant classics:

• Capital Moves RCA’s Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor (2000) tells the story of a company that started as a government monopoly—basically, a gift from the state to help rich people get richer with an exclusive contract to manufacture radios for World War I. Every time its workers got organized enough to credibly start demanding a bigger piece of that gift, however, RCA moved production to a place where workers were not organized: first from Camden, New Jersey to Bloomington, Indiana; then to Memphis, Tennessee; then finally to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. At the time he wrote it, labor historians basically wrote two kinds of books: “community studies” that, often with a palpable air of special pleading, claimed to document a radical working-class consciousness deep in the 19th century that could be “recovered” by radical movements today; and, as he noted in the book’s introduction, books on labor in the 20th century where the “emphasis on culture and community all but disappears as economics, institutions, and the state takes center stage.” Capital Moves broke labor history out of that dualism.

• The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics, was expanded from a 2008 essay Jeff co-wrote with his mentor the late historian Nick Salvatore, “The Long exception: Rethinking the Place of the New Deal in American History,” in which they wrote, “while liberals of the seventies and eighties waited for a return to what they regarded as the normality of the New Deal order, they were actually living in the final days of what Paul Krugman later called the ‘interregnum between Gilded Ages.’” In many ways, the book that came out of it is an old-fashioned kind of political history, covering sweep of the entire story of modern America, from the Civil War to its year of publication— Donald Trump’s big year, 2016. It treated what used to seem like the culmination of American history—the New Deal project to build a socially democratic state, and a multi-ethnic, pluralist society, as an exception to the main currents of America’s modern history, which was plutocratic and racist. Its most haunting claim was that the reason America was briefly able to break away from the rule of capital was that a rare window of working class political unity opened up by the end of mass immigration in 1924, when American workers finally, for once—and never again—became more focused on fighting their bosses than on fighting each other, along ethnic lines. In other words, because there were fewer immigrants to hate, immigrant-hate being the rocket fuel that American plutocrats use to maintain their rule.

• What to say about Stayin’ Alive: The Seventies and the Last Days of the Working Class? As I put it in a 2010 review essay on histories of the 1970s that I was reading to prepare my own The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, “the only thing it resembles is itself.” It capture the feel of what it was like for working people to experience the New Deal Order transforming into something else: a zero-sum austerity game. A lot of its best stuff is about the popular culture—like his reading of Rocky as a plaint about affirmative action, where morally unworthy Black people, as represented by Apollo Creed, get all the spoils, and hard-working, humble white people like Rocky Balboa have to sacrifice everything just to get a shot.

Jeff’s next book? Born aloft by his Pulitzer, he’s s landed a gig as the biographer of Johnny Cash, with the cooperation (with complete editorial freedom) of the Man in Black’s family. It ought to be a humdinger.

… I try not to scoop my forthcoming book too much, but political journalism does such a shitty job explaining the context of today’s Republican authoritarian outrages that, sometimes, civic duty demands it. In The Infernal Triangle, you’ll read about how the Supreme Court’s recent green-light for Republicans to try to gerrymander their way to a permanent House majority is a direct descendent of a conspiracy to attempt the same after the 2002 elections delivered Republicans a majority in the Austin statehouse. One of its deputies summarized the work in an email: that the congressional map they passed “has a real national impact that should assure that Republicans keep the House no matter the national mood" …

… You can talk all you want about sauces and dry rubs, but if I’m judging a barbecue contest, a consistently perfect level of done-ness is how you win derbies … Another step along the way to the Republicans’ present triumphs canceling the People’s input in choosing members of the People’s House is also missing from journalistic accounts: “Project Redmap.” Note, however, that whereas in 2011 the work was dine secret, their brazenness has so metastasized that they now proudly do the work in plain sight … Another quote from the 2003 “no matter the national mood” email specifies the map’s consequences for the most powerful Democrat in the Texas U.S. House delegation: “Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha… The district simply disappears” …

… Who doesn’t love a blockbuster archaeological find, especially one involving—well, read to the end, on the artifact’s “unpleasant odor” … The Democratic leader whose House district was made—poof!—to disappear by Tom DeLay's dirty Texas redistricting project was Martin Frost, one of the party’s biggest cheerleaders for war in Iraq. He tried and failed to hold on to his seat with a desperate television commercial boasting of his intimacy with President George W. Bush. Then, the next year, he came close to winning the race to become chairman of the Democratic National Committee … The guy who wrote that email thrived as a lobbyist for the marketing company Nielsen, and presently serves on the board of an industry trade group for lobbyists. It’s not like this ever became much of a scandal, after all—nothing like, say, “Whitewater,” for which the Washington Post established its own dedicated investigatory unit, even though Bill and Hillary never did anything wrong in the 1978 scheme, but in fact were its victims … The Washington Post scoop drumming up solid evidence that the most powerful Republican in Congress was seeking no less than to stamp out government of the people, by the people, for the people, with malice aforethought—to “keep the House no matter the national mood”—appeared, not on the front page, but as a six-inch squib tucked away on page nine beneath a charming item on a day in the life of a 73-year-old beekeeper … Exception to the neglect of what should have been a world-shaking with long legs: this magnifico 2006 investigation by Jeffrrey Toobin … Bringing the horrors up to date: you know that creepy feeling you get when you casually mention some product in conversation, then suddenly start getting served up ad after ad for said product, and can’t figure out whether you’ve gaslighted yourself or if Black Mirror is actually real? The day that Rickipedia’s esteemed artistic director, Cousin Noah, sent me those snazzy Felix-the-Cat-inspired avatars you see above, I received the following for a fancy brand of watch …

…

On Facebook, a professor I know with family in Israel, a morally exemplary person as best I can tell—except, as so often is the case with the otherwise-liberal, on this one particular subject—expressed his rage at Nicholas Kristoff’s recent expose of the epidemic of rape by Israeli prison guards against Palestinian detainees, in particular his choice to publish the accounts of those he interviewed concerning “a feat that would be unprecedented in human, nay terrestrial, history, since dogs hitherto have never been successfully trained to rape people, or at least not a single verifiably documented such case exists.”

So, I checked it out.

I learned, very quickly, that there are many accounts of this happening from sources that people of this ilk tend to consider rather unimpeachable: Holocaust survivors. Here’s testimony from a prisoner at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Olga Lengyel, that you can read via the Internet Archive from a 1993 book entitled Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust, on page 129:

“I shall never forget the agony of one mother who told me that she was forced to undress her daughter and to look on while the girl was violated by dogs whom the Nazis had specially trained for this sport. That happened to other young girls. They were compelled to labor in the quarries for twelve or fourteen hours a day. When they dropped from exhaustion their guards' favorite form of amusement was to urge the dogs to attack them."

A Jewish resistance fighter who also ended up in Birkenau, known as Bronislawa Limanowska before she emigrated to Israel and changed her name Bela Ya’ari Hazan, made one of the first testimonies about concentration camp life, in 1945. (Here’s a BBC documentary on her; here’s a Jerusalem Post profile.) Her witness, published in 1991 as the book They Called me Bronislawa, included this account:

“Once while we were laboring in the field, an S.S. man approached one of the girls and dragged her to the nearby forest. She didn’t come back again. They forced her to have sexual relations with a dog. The girl couldn’t stand it, she begged afterwards that they kill her. We heard her screams. The male and female S.S. staff guffawed sadistically about what went on in the forest and added, ‘The dog found itself an excellent pleasure-object.’ We trembled at the thought: who would be the next in line? Scenes like this happened over and over. We began to fear going out to work lest we too would be put to that terrible test. We decided among us, that if another instance of that sort would occur, then our entire Kommando would revolt. We wouldn’t allow them to use the girls for these brutal acts; better we should die than live a moment like that. After the third incident of rape, when they just started dragging the girl away, we began a terrible screaming. We were some twenty girls. Immediately the SS staff who were with us in the field came and hauled us off to punishment in the ‘punishment cell.’ This was a cellar divided into small cells. At the center of each was a crate to use for our bodily wastes. Four girls were shoved into each cell. The space wasn’t sufficient for us to sit down, so we had to remain standing day and night. Once a day we were given food. They kept us like this for four days and four nights. But we had some consolation: that we didn’t allow such acts to happen with us.”

I’ve transcribed also testimony of a survivor named Rachel Hanan, imprisoned at the Duderstadt and Theresienstadt camps, gave this video interview with the USC Shoah foundation. Here is what she says at 1:26:20, right after she describes summary executions for prisoners stealing potatoes:

“Besides that, you know, there were other punishment that they can do to you. Especially, you know, there were those dogs. There were those dogs in the camp, you know, very huge dogs, we were afraid of those dogs more than the Germans, because they were trained, you know, trained to make sex with girls. So if they want to punish you, they will take these horrible big dogs, and they force you, there, to make—whatever. In [one case] it happened that it was a French lady, and she had a beautiful daughter of sixteen. She was really beautiful. And then, you know, they force the girl—I don’t know what she had done wrong—to do that with the dog. The mother was watching. The girl died before the dog was [finished]—was vicious, and big, and whatever. She died on the spot. And the mother, she couldn’t stand it any more. She went and chained herself to the barbed-wire, you know, the electric—and, you know, she died as well.”

**

Then there were the victims of the infamously Nazi known as the “Butcher of Lyon,” for the French city where he was Gestapo commander, infamous in the eyes of history for his sadistic methods of torturing Jews. In Unhealed Wounds: France and the Klaus Barbie Affair (1985) we read on page 94:

"Barbie kept two German shepherd dogs. One was trained to lunge and bite. The other was trained to mount naked women who had first been ordered on their hands and knees. A humiliation that cut deeper than the whip, than having one’s fingernails pulled."

Two years after that book came out, on trial in Lyon for crimes against humanity, Barbie was forced to face his accusers, one of whom, Mario Blardone, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s dispatch, “told the court he had seen one defendant try to have a young girl raped by a huge Alsatian dog.” (Blardone “recoiled at the sight of Barbie. ‘This face…I want to look at his eyes, those eyes. Yes, Mr. President, he is the man I testified about.’")

Are these accounts “verifiably documented”? They are, at the very least, strikingly consistent, and at least somewhat convincing. Unless, that is, you want to impute a conspiracy of Holocaust survivors to make them up. Folks claiming not merely that Israeli guards didn’t train dogs to rape prisoners, but that dogs could not possibly have raped prisoners: is that really the hill you want to die on, after reading them?

Or at least that’s the vibe I got every time we and he crossed the threshold of a pet store or a veterinarian. Places that see lots and lots of dogs always made like he was the most charming they’d ever met. (They can’t possibly do that for every dog, can they???)

Ziggy went to the Great Field Of Acres Of Edible Goose Poop In The Sky last December. I’ve only now been reviewing the receipts of our adventure together, the three of us, and that’s what I want to start sharing with you today. Yes: just a start. A model like this, you can’t stop at twenty: no way. So, this one will be a series. Here is your first installment: ZIGGY AND BLANKETS.

That pup could totally rock a blanket.

Bonus couch content…

Last but not least, our hero visits New Orleans and pays tribute to his spirit animal, the funkiest drummer of all time, Ziggaboo Modeliste. Clock his masterpiece groove in “Cissy Strut.” Or, as our Ziggaboo used to call it, “Ziggy Strut.” Psh psh.

I don't know which will be the case this time, but he just told me the UN's World Food Programme is suspending down food kitchens in Gaza. I don't see anything about this in the news. Watch for it. I will follow up as news develops, or doesn’t.

(Some context from a UN expert I know, Mark Leon Goldberg, who tells me me: "The WFP, as a general rule, prefers cash transfers to direct food distribution models when such an option exists. It's both cheaper and supports the local bakeries/markets, etc. This is how most WFP assistance works in Gaza. The WFP does operate some kitchens in Gaza, where they sell bread at subsidized prices or give it away for free--but they are transitioning away from that model and towards direct cash transfers. (Alas, because of funding shortages, the rations are only at 75% of what they should be.)"

(I shared the above with Ahmed, who replied, "All the places that distribute food have stopped, even the place where we usually get it. I hope my family's name will be added to the cash assistance program.”)

Meanwhile, I’d like you to meet Ahmed and his family. I’ll be sharing more about them in the future.

Here he is with the remains of his house.

I maintain an active GoFundMe campaign for the family. Here are some pictures of things they’ve been able to buy thanks to gifts from my readers over the year, like his daughter Ruth’s first ever taste of meat, treats for one year’s Eid festival, and new clothes for another.

You can donate to the campaign at this link.

Back in ye olde Tea Party days, Dick Armey, the former Republican congressman who ran the Koch Brothers outfit that Astroturfed much of the movement into existence, traveled the circuit with a warmup act: an African American radio host named Mason Weaver, author of a book called It’s OK to Leave the Plantation. “You see, slavery was a choice,” Weaver would say. “The master didn’t lock up those slaves at night. There was no ball and chain. They stayed because they thought like a slave. We don’t need hope and change. We are Americans. So we are free. What the heck are we going to change to? Back to slavery?” The John Birch Society retained a similar circuit-riding Black speaker in the 1960s, a former Communist who let his audience in on a secret: the civil rights movement was a Soviet plot to seize the states of the Old Confederacy, as revealed in a Soviet government document from 1928.

The presence of Black people is indispensable to reactionary formations like these. It is how they convince others, and themselves, that they are not racists. Even though, of course, in actual fact, it is the most racist thing about them.

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… In response to yesterbday’s blurbsday, folks are telling Texas stories. Here’s one of mine. I’d just spoken at a nice little college in the Lonestar hinterlands. Our first stop, after the lecture, is the local barbecue joint. A portrait of Ronald Reagan in a cowboy hat hangs on the wall. It reminds me of the time, I tell my hosts, of this one time at one of the Republican National Conventions I’d attended. I’m at one of the concessions stands to grab dinner. It’s right next to the tunnel where the Texas delegation is sitting. Hard to miss, they’re famous at these shindigs, going back decades, for their matching Texas-flag shirts and white cowboy hats. (Nothing says FREEDOM! like a uniform.) Anyway, I’m holding the table enthralled (I hope) with the following tale:

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I met Jeff Roche some twenty years ago at an academic conference on the history of conservatism, not long after he published an article called “Cowboy Conservatism,” a chapter in an anthology he co-edited with David Farber called The Conservative Sixties. He said he was working on a book on Texas conservatism. I don’t know that our paths ever crossed in the interim, nor if I had read any other of his work, when he approached me last year to tell me that book was finally coming forth, and asked if I wanted to check it out for blurb consideration. I was glad to do so, with my usual caveat: if I didn’t love it, I wouldn’t blurb it.

Reader: I loved it.

I wasn’t anywhere prepared for how stylish, well-constructed, and deeply insightful it would be: history on a grand scale, by a genuine craftsman. What I tried to convey in this endorsement is how, as with all truly delightful nonfiction, it makes itself appealing even to readers who aren’t particularly interested—or didn’t know they were interested—in the specific subject. It does what all great history does: demonstrates how something unique and new ever comes into the world. In this case, it is the creation of a society out of what previously was a wasteland, in the scrublands of West Texas, settled by barely anyone willing to give any kind of liberalism the kind of day, led by an only-in-America cadre of weirdos whose uniformly right-wing political style became shockingly influential for the rest of the country.

And, the man really knows his way around a sentence.

Here’s the blurb:

“I didn’t think I cared about how cattle drives worked in nineteenth-century West Texas. I had no inkling of how that might explain why Amarillo is presently the most right-wing city in the nation. But now I do. What this splendid book demonstrates is how, in the hands of a practitioner of style and erudition, narrative history can bridge centuries, making the connections between Then and Now feel both natural and fresh.”

“Centrarchidae, better known as sunfishes or centrarchids, is a family of freshwater ray-finned fish belonging to the order Centrarchiformes, native only to North America,” says Wikipedia. “There are eight universally included genera within the centrarchid family…”—yada, yada, yada; all I know is, they’s purdy.

As you can see, sunfish rep all kinds of colors and patterns. Some of that is different species: bluegills, redears, pumpkin seeds, green sunfish, longears, etc. …but, honestly—Maybe they camouflage to their surroundings?—every specimen looks different from every other specimen. That’s the pleasure of pulling them out of the water. Anglers fetishize size: one’s “PB”—personal best—always earns the most huzzahs on social media. But my personal Personal Bests are the purdiest ones. Like this one. Look at those yellows, oranges, greens, browns! All no bigger than my hand.

Sunfish overlap considerably with a category anglers call “panfish.” The definition is gustatory, not Linnean: “of the size to fit in a pan.” All these, I think, were too small to harvest, so you need not mourn. They ended up back in the drink (Lake Tanglewood, Lake Wildwood, the Chicago River, some body of water of a forgotten name in Arkansas where I road-tripped with my buddies for the eclipse last year), not inside the Rickipedian.

Sometimes, they’re so translucent you can almost see through them.

Some sunfish look like suns.

Some are as almost as stripy as tigers.

“There’s sort of a blue-green, and a green-blue,” Mrs. Rickipedian, a wiz at matters chromological, observes of this one:

Okay. Enough words. Let’s get fishical. Fishical. Fishical. Let you see their bodies rock.

I’ll lead with the part that I, at least, thought was a hoot. At the time I tracked it down, a certain Donald John Trump was still a political novelty, and one of the things people were making fun of was his passion for well-done steaks: something only a boob would prefer.

Well, lookee here, fourth line from the bottom…

The interesting part of all that is that, as I reported in Reaganland: “Most politicians skipped the meal, arriving only in time for their speech. Richard Nixon certainly did; he believed it made for amore dramatic entrance. Not Reagan. The meal was when he read the mood of the room, the better to calibrate his performance—even though, for the most part, he said the same words every time. ‘He listens to the introductions,’ [two] columnists wrote, ‘or the Rotary Club business, with that same air of interest bordering on wonder. You would never know he has heard it all a thousand times in a thousand dining rooms.’”

The rest, most of you might find snooze-y, but not I, for whom this doc was raw material for conveying how indefatigably the most image-conscious politician in the history of the planet staged his shows—with no detail being too small to attend to in advance: how, “upon his introduction, he would stride dramatically via ‘a safe, uncluttered passageway’ (per the advance manual) to a podium(‘sturdy and if too short blocked up with bricks or 2X4s,’ free from ‘ashtrays, gavels, etc.’) set to his six-foot-one height. He would plant himself at a mark taped down to ensure advantageous camera angles. He would pop out his right contact lens so he could simultaneously read the text in front of him with one eye and read the reaction at the first row of tables—never more than eight feet away, so he would have faces to look directly into, to enhanced the aura of sincerity—with the other. Lighting was carefully specified; once, but never again, Michael Deaver, who almost always traveled with him to such events, dimmed the houselights before he spoke. Reagan snapped at him: ‘Mike, don’t ever let them turn down the house lights again. It causes me to lose my eye contact.’ On important occasions, his wife Nancy accompanied him—and ‘as she watches her husband give tthe speech she has heard countless times before,’ a reporter marveled, ‘her look of rapt, wide-eyed adoration never falters.’”

One more interesting detail: the guy in charge of pulling plans like these together ever since 1976 for the Governor, whose name was David C. Fischer, was rewarded with a plum White House job as presidential body man, then left to cash in with a lucrative consultancy, with one of his clients being the “National Endowment for the Preservation of Liberty,” the White House front group in charge of raising off-the-books donations from the blue-haired heiresses of the right to fund the Nicaraguan Contras; his job, he explained under immunity to the Iran-Contra special prosecutor, was securing Oval Office grip-and-grins for the donors.

There used to be a popular blog from a libertarian investor named Donald Luskin called “The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid.” (In 2001, his hedge fund went out of business. In 2008, he said the economy was doing great the day before the Lehman Brothers collapse.) “The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid” would also be a great designation for what what is generally termed, following industry propaganda, “artificial intelligence.” The other day I asked my phone to tell me if the John Lewis Voting Rights Act banned gerrymandering. It replied as above. Now it can be told: John Lewis did not wear “white sack” in relation to gerrymandering … The Navy SEAL whose testimony saved Eddie Gallagher from the brig(check out Alex Gibney’s indispensable documentary) is now a neo-Nazi, officially …

… This item about evidence the Trump administration is seeking bureaucrats to terminate specifically because they are god at their jobs reminds me of a great quote from Tom Frank’s The Wrecking Crew (2008), uttered by the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 1928: “A thoroughly first-rate man in public service is corrosive. He eats holes in our liberties. The better he is and the longer he stays the greater the danger. If he is an enthusiast—a bright-eyed madman who is frantic to make this the finest government in the world—the black plague is a housepet by comparison.” … Haaretz interviews an escapee from one of Israel’s grotesque, state-subsidized ultra-Orthodox communities: “It’s a slave economy, if not outright human trafficking” that “bypasses the state...in exchange for 18 guaranteed Knesset votes….an autonomous system that also produces…the infantilization of the natives.” … The struggle against attempts to ban the mailing of abortion pills should remind us, as I wrote in 2024, that like the 19th century slaveocracy, MAGA is imperialist … Welcoming Rickipedia’s latest subscriber, David Ferguson, old-school blogger extraordinaire…

Politics, we noted in the first installment in this series, is teaching. Glenn Beck’s dark empire does that well. The most important thing they teach is to always be afraid. That the world ordinary, decent folks are forced to endure, at the hands of the islamocommienazis out to turn your son into a daughter, is a sheer, unmitigated hellscape. Here’s how that part works.

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That is Marge, proprietress of Marge’s Bait and Tackle in Henry, Illinois.

I’ve mentioned the dacha I keep nearby in Marshall County, and that I’d be reflecting from time to time on my observations of rural small-town life and what I’ve termed its “poignant dialectic”: “its glories, which do not doubt are genuine, and also profound, dangerous dermerits, which by Year Ten of the reign of our Dark MAGA Lord are all too well known.” Places like Marge’s are one of the glories. Hang on after the jump, and we’ll wend our way through to one of the more headache-inducing demerits.

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My late friend James Weinstein started In These Times magazine in 1976 with the dream of matching the accomplishment of Appeal to Reason, a socialist magazine that reached over half a million readers at its height in 1910. The goal was a radical politics for the folks next door, not the rarified few. Jimmy had a cousin who joined the Weathermen in going “underground” after a bomb they were building to massacre hundreds of soldiers at a New Jersey Army base blew three of themselves up instead. Once, at one of our regular lunches in the early 2000s, I asked Jimmy what he would do if his cousin ever knocked on his door, seeking refuge. Jimmy scowled back, “Turn him in to the FBI, for destroying the left!”

Today’s Thurbsday blurb concerns the “Weather Underground,” which was what Weatherman dubbed itself during the years its surviving members lived one step ahead of the law, under assumed identities, plotting “revolution” all the while. Two of them, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dorhn, are now fixtures on the Chicago left, whom you always see swanning about town. I’ve never been particular fond of them. When Bill was making the promotional rounds for his self-serving autobiography, he told the New York Times, “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” It was his bad fortune that the interview appeared the morning ofSeptember 11, 2001. He had always been morally evasive, and the evasions started with the book’s title, Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Antiwar Activist. Bluntly, Ayers was not an “antiwar activist.” He was a war activist. Weathermen literally declared war against the United States, fantasizing that that could spur a mass rebellion to overthrow the federal government and transform America into Marxist republic by directing, from their secret redoubts, a guerrilla army of Black militants, white juvenile delinquents (they would prowl around working class high schools to try to recruit them), pre-dawn mad bombers, and…well, just to type it is to descend into giggles.

Seven years later, after Ayers’ acquaintance with Barack Obama became an issue in the 2008 presidential campaign (everyone in the Chicago progressive nonprofit world has an acquaintance with Bill and Bernardine, their house being the setting for dozens of right-thinking receptions, galas, and cocktail parties over the years), Terry Gross subtly ground him to dust on Fresh Air for his slippery moral and political reasoning.

I wrote something about all of that here. But the story was never told better than from an unlikely source: Ayers and Dohrn’s son, playwright Zayd Ayers Dorhn, in his magnificent podcast Mother Country Radicals. It took a loved one to get B&B to speak with something close to the candor that they have always owed the rest of us fighting for justice and peace, if not for “destroying” the left, for at least greatly hindering its potential mass appeal—and mass power.

Now, Zayad has given us the gift of a memoir. It’s not an indictment of his parents; there is way too much love for that, and it is way too much an actual work of art for that. Here was my original blurb, as drafted:

“One of the strangest tales of our times, the rise and fall of the Weathermen, has been told so often it can feel almost..stale. Conjured into presence by a genuine literary master, recollecting what he saw as an sensitive child, it catches fire again, illuminating a strangeness with which we all wrestle: the mysteries of filial love and resentment.”

I like it! What I was getting at is that, while book is most decidedly useful as a richer retelling of the Weatherman story, what makes it literature transcends the historical specifics: stuff that will resonate with anyone who, well, has had parents—even those who did not teach you how to shake a police tail by the time you were out of toddlerhood.

Blurbing also, alas, being marketing, the blurber’s own literary intent can get sacrificed along the way. Here’s what they ran:

“Conjured into the present by a genuine literary master, recollecting what he saw as a sensitive child, the oft-told tale of the Weathermen catches fire here.”

Zayd’s doing three events in Chicago to celebrate its official May 19 publication date:

• MAY 21 - party at Haymarket House

• MAY 22 - reading/q&a event at City Lit Books

• MAY 26 - in conversation with Alex Kotlowitz at Bookends and Beginnings

My first book has a mercurial history. The genesis of the project was, as I’ve oft repeated in intererviews, a youthful obsession with the 1960s, nourished within the bowels of a gargauan, musty used book warehouse in my hometown of Milwaukee. Then, in New York, in my capacity as a baby editor of a magazine covering academia, I learned, at a history conference, of a fascinating generation gap in ‘60s scholarship, exemplified by a notion younger scholars were developing to revise the New Left and civil rights-centered narratives of their elders: conservatives won the ‘60s.

It wasn’t long after that I had my first book contract—a tiny, tiny book contract, for a project that, without the miraculous intervention of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant (fuck you very much, Donald J. Trump), I likely could never have completed at all.

Then, long before it was completed, another miracle: I was named in the 2000 edition of the annual “Writer on the Verge” list from the Village Voice’s literary supplement, VLS. (Never let it be said that connections don’t matter on the NYC literary scene : the editor of VLS was the wife of the editor who signed up the book.)

So, so far so…great! What a privilege, and what a thrill.

Next came publication, and a passel of flattering reviews, the first of which, by an early adopter of Trump-style anti-immigrant politics on the right named Christopher Caldwell, called it “independent, un-bought-out and, in the best sense, radical,” the most prominent of which by future former conservative William Kristol, in the New York Times Book Review.

Then—WHAT?????—the Los Angeles Times Book Award.

Memorable scenes: telling Kurt Vonnegut, at a Manhattan party for nominees, that I was one of those nominees, and hearing him reply, like a vision popping up in a movie cameo, “I hope you win!”

Then, at the book festival they flew me to at UCLA: An oversized golf cart upon whose back seat sat Steve Martin and Christopher Hitchens, getting ferried to their separate events. Gore Vidal, upon what seemed like a throne, right there in the corner of the green room, guarded from any unwelcome approach by the Nation’s Victory Navasky, looking like a mideaval king’s Esquire of the Body.

Then, the award ceremony. The envelope was opened and my name read off, Oscar-style, by a writer I greatly admired. (Another writer I greatly admired had been one of the judges.) Afterward, George Plimpton congratulated me at the bar.

(Aside: does anyone beneath A Certain Age know about George Plimpton? That “literary celebrity” was a thing? That these folks used to be on TV! [editor’s query: Do kids know what “TV” used to be, anymore?])

So, thrill after thrill; and, not incidentally, a nice book contract, almost enough to make a living on this time, for the sequel, Nixonland.

Then, though, a shock. I had accepted the first offer from the editor who approached me to see if I had a book idea, without looking further, because, I was told, that publisher, though commercial, kept quality books in print forever, like academic publishers do.

In 2007 they unceremoniously took it out of print.

That decision was apparently computer-assisted, to optimize each square centimeter of warehouse space for financial efficiency. It was my first of many encounters with the narrowing aperture for non-pecuniary, literary judgement in the literature industry. An actual human being might have arrived at a better financial decision. In the run-up to the 2008 Democratic Party nomination fight, partisans of the blog-based Netroots wing of the party were adopting Before the Storm as a must-read—as a guidebook for how an ideological insurgency could take over a party nomination process, modeled on the 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign, building upon the work of the 2004 Howard Dean campaign. That was why, shortly after that unfortunate corporate decision, a New York Times publishing reporter wrote a post entitled “The $131.09 Perlstein Paperback.” That was the price used copies were fetching on eBay.

Then, around 2010, what was then known as Nation Books, now Bold Type Books, rode to the rescue, offering to put out a new edition, unchanged from the first except for the paper stock.

**

Fast-forward to last August, when Bold Type’s marvelous principal Brandon Proia, whom I adore, sent me a bolt from the blue:

“I’m writing because we have been taking a fresh look at the current edition of Before the Storm and wondered whether you would be amenable to the notion of refreshing/reimagining the jacket. As we see it, the current design has started to look a bit dated, it doesn’t look terrific on online bookselling sites…”

yes I said yes I will yes!

**

The cover discussion was, as you can imagine, quite fun. When the first reprint opportunity came around, I had thought of this image, located by the redoubtable Cold War archivival wizard Bill Geerhart, as an outstanding switch-out for the original, because it gets across—out with the old, in with the new—a key theme of the book: the errant conviction of all the day’s “experts” that, because Barry Goldwater got trounced by Lyndon Johnson in a landslide, conservatism was finished as a force in American politics.

But the graphics folks said that a black-and-white image wouldn’t serve the purpose of making the cover pop on social media, which made sense; and a colorized version didn’t look right. I love what they came up with instead. The new color scheme replaces the peppy, patriotic, feel-good red, white, and blue of the original—

with a hint of desert menace. Zooming closer in on the shotgun (not a rifle, as originally indicated in the text; back then, baby wingnutologist that I was, I didn’t know the difference) makes it less cartoonish, as does elminating the snazzy stars, and more scary; as does the closer-in cactus (ouch!). The whole thing, in fact, perfectly serves the most important contribution of the new addition, my Afterword, reflecting upon what what I had written in the closing years of the Clinton Years, in the crepuscular light our own dark days of MAGA and Donald J. Trump.

I’ll have more to say about that Afterword by the by, because I think it’s an important piece, my first serious reflection on the sweep of my life’s work in the light of the book’s most abiding theme: that, as I wrote in the original preface, this was one time when history was written by the losers. That is our history: the one we are suffering now.

Watch this space. In the meantime, watch for the new edition, on sale this coming December.