Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Friday November 5, 2010
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EIGHTEEN ACRES
Nicolle Wallace
Atria
ISBN 978 1 4391 9482 9
322 pages
$25
Reviewed by Patrick Anderson, who reviews mysteries and thrillers for The Washington Post
To say that Nicolle Wallace's "Eighteen Acres" is one of the best novels I've read about life in the White House may be faint praise -- there haven't been many good ones -- but her book is both an enjoyable read and a serious look at what high-level political pressures do to people. The novel will be talked about not only because its author served as White House communications director for George W. Bush but also because her three main characters are women: the president, her chief of staff and a television correspondent who is having an affair with the president's husband.
The president, 47-year-old Charlotte Kramer, is a shrewd and moderate Republican, given to salty language, who was a corporate executive and governor of California before advancing to the White House. Her chief of staff is Melanie Kingston, who is both the author's alter ego and her best-developed character. She's 37, quite attractive (all these women are quite attractive), hard-working and loyal but increasingly restive in the West Wing. You have to escape, she believes, before the job "turned you into someone you neither recognized nor liked." The reporter, Dale Smith, is 32 and fiercely ambitious to be a network anchor. The complicating factor is that she's fallen for Peter Kramer, the handsome lawyer who is the president's husband. He and his wife drifted apart as her political career began to soar and now lead separate lives except for an occasional photo op. He and Dale are in love but have no idea what to do about their secret passion.
The author is well aware that romance can blossom in the harsh world of politics; she met her future husband, Mark Wallace, when both were on the Bush team in the 2000 election. Still, she treads delicately with regard to her characters' sex lives. The Peter-Dale affair is spicy enough, but Melanie's on-again, off-again fling with a younger reporter is rather coyly handled, and the glamorous president seems doomed to celibacy. Even when her husband's affair becomes public, everyone remains quite civilized. The president's popularity even rises because the scandal humanizes her for many voters.
The tone of the book changes when the president visits the troops in Afghanistan. A series of spectacular events there includes a Taliban attack and a life-threatening injury to one character, and leads to a scandal that forces a Cabinet member from office. Granting that Big Dramatic Events are the stuff of popular fiction, these plot twists still seemed improbable. Wallace is more impressive when she sticks to the day-to-day realities of political life, which she knows well and relates with skill.
The novel climaxes with President Kramer's uphill battle for re-election. Wallace has played major roles in two national campaigns -- in 2004 and 2008 -- and she seems to have reached the same conclusion I did when I once spent six months traveling with a (successful) Democratic candidate for president. In a campaign, it's not your opponents in the other party you come to loathe. You're trying to destroy them, but that's not personal. The people you really want to throttle are your staff rivals, the ones who want to deny you the candidate's ear, who stand between you and the spacious West Wing office you so richly deserve. That war is fought not with long-distance missiles but up close, with stilettos. And sometimes, later, in novels.
"Eighteen Acres" (the title refers to the size of the White House grounds) isn't precisely a roman a clef -- there are, for one thing, no characters who suggest George or Laura Bush or Dick Cheney -- but Wallace does seem to be having a bit of sport with two of her erstwhile colleagues. Melanie's chief rival for the president's attention is a pudgy political guru whose ham-handed style offends her, as do his looks: "She stared at Ralph's ruddy complexion and receding hairline. He was so unattractive Melanie almost felt sorry for him." Hmm. Sound like anyone we know?
As for the other character Melanie seriously dislikes, let's note that Wallace was an adviser to the 2008 McCain campaign, and one of her chores was to shepherd McCain's surprise choice for vice president, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. According to numerous accounts, the two women clashed over many issues, including the style and cost of Palin's clothing and Palin's disastrous interviews with Katie Couric. In the novel, President Kramer decides to shake up her campaign by choosing a law-and-order Democrat named Tara Meyers as her running mate. This woman, although an effective campaigner, deeply offends our ladylike heroine: "Melanie disliked everything about Tara. She was loud, tacky, and rude. She seemed to calculate the least presidential approach to every situation and pursue it with vigor."
There's more, all delicious. I regret to report that on the last page of this entertaining, sometimes moving novel, Wallace has Melanie tell the president that she (Melanie) has been "too hard" on tacky Tara. It was the only time I thought the author wasn't playing straight with us.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE GUN
C. J. Chivers
Simon & Schuster
ISBN 978-0743270762
481 pages
$28
Reviewed by Mark A Keefe IV
It is indisputably the most produced and iconic firearm design in history. Its distinctive curved magazine and pistol grip are recognized even by those with little knowledge of guns: It is the Avtomat Kalashnikova designed in 1947 -- the AK-47.
Although it bears Mikhail Kalashnikov's name, the AK's ubiquitous presence on the world stage more than six decades after its adoption as the standard Soviet-issue rifle can be squarely laid at the feet of Joseph Stalin, and its spread pinned on his successors. Although Cold War-secrecy will prevent us from ever knowing the true number of AK-47-based rifles produced, some estimates put it at more than 100 million.
In "The Gun," Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, former Marine officer and Gulf War veteran C.J. Chivers sets out to "lift the Kalashnikov out of the simplistic and manipulated distillations of its history." In that he succeeds admirably by putting the gun into its social, historical and technological context in an evocative and eminently readable narrative. He chronicles the evolution and employment of fully automatic firearms, the development of the Kalashnikov and how it redefined modern warfare from the rifle's use in Hungary in 1956 to Afghanistan today. What Chivers doesn't do in "The Gun" is descend into a technical description of the numerous AK makes, models and manufacturing variations; nor does he engage in a debate on domestic firearms legislation.
Chronicling the early quest for handheld firepower, Chivers concentrates first on two American inventors -- Richard Gatling and Hiram Maxim -- and their designs. The Gatling was a manually operated, artillery-sized multi-barrel gun capable of a huge rate of fire, allowing small groups of late 18th-century Europeans to subjugate indigenous peoples throughout the world -- so long as the guns worked. Weighing about a ton, the Gatling had little battlefield mobility, had to be cranked by hand and was not very reliable. When the Gatlings went down, often so did the small groups of European soldiers. It was Maxim who harnessed the excess energy of fired cartridge to devise an absolutely reliable smaller machine that loaded and fired itself and would do so as long as ammunition was fed and the trigger pulled. Used in British colonial conflicts, such as in the Battle of Omdurman, in 1898, the Maxim performed even better than advertised, putting Gatling out of business. Summing up the advantage, Chivers quotes the French writer Hilaire Belloc in his 1898 narrative poem "The Modern Traveler": "Whatever happens, we have got the Maxim Gun and they have not." Ironically, it is those "have nots" with Kalashnikovs that are the source of much instability in the world today.
When the major European powers turned the Maxims on one another during World War I the business of killing entered the industrial age, and the "Devil's Paintbrush" decimated a generation. The leap from the ponderous Maxim to the AK is great, and the author necessarily covers many significant weapons only briefly. Gatling sought to "invent a gun which would do the work of 100 men" but it was with the Kalashnikov that such power could be placed in the hands of one man.
Although preceded by the German Sturmgewehr and its 7.92 mm Kurz cartridge, the AK-47 marked the maturation of the assault rifle concept: a rifle with high-magazine capacity and selective fire that allowed one shot to fly with each pull of the trigger or, with the flip a switch, ammunition to be discharged in fully automatic mode. The chambering, neither an overpowered full-size rifle nor a smaller submachine cartridge but somewhere in between, was the M1943 -- later the 7.62x39 mm. The intermediate-sized M1943 cartridge allowed that handheld firepower to be controllable.
The full story of the AK's design and development is opaque, contradictory and will likely never be fully sorted out. A former Moscow bureau chief, Chivers had access to official sources in post-perestroika Russia and a deep understanding of the nature of the Soviet system, and he is a seasoned enough journalist not to swallow the party line on the AK-47 or anything else.
Kalashnikov did not design the gun in a vacuum; it was done with the full resources of the Soviet Union behind him. He had access to previous arms designs, and the end result was a brilliant amalgamation of the best features in a one robust, reliable, simple-to-understand-and-operate rifle. It worked in any environment, was easy to manufacture, and could be assembled and disassembled with little guidance.
The same state that devoted a large proportion of its gross domestic product to the manufacture of firearms both blurred and then overinflated the genius of Mikhail Kalashnikov -- not only to protect the motherland but also to project its national will and export its ideology. Through Soviet assistance programs and the construction of satellite factories all over the world, the AK became the genie let out of the bottle. It went from a tool of Soviet state power to a tool of repression, terrorism, insurgency and crime. It became, as ably put by Chivers, "Everyman's gun." But it wasn't limited to men only -- it also became a tool of violence and mayhem used by child soldiers.
The AK caught Western ordnance officials asleep at the switch, technologically and tactically. After samples of the AK became available, they missed the point of the gun. Due to a series of missteps -- well described by Chivers -- the United States fielded a rifle initially inferior in reliability to the AK, resulting in needless American deaths in Vietnam. It was so bad that some, such as Marine Gunnery Sgt. Claude Elrod, carried an AK-47 instead of an M16 in combat. Several wars later, the M16A2 and M4 are reliable systems.
Stalin's totalitarian state crumbled, but his assault rifle soldiers on.
Mark A. Keefe IV is editor-in-chief of American Rifleman, a journal of the National Rifle Association.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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POISONING THE PRESS: Poisoning the Press Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson, and the Rise of Washington's Scandal Culture
Mark Feldstein
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 978-0374235307
461 pages
$30
Reviewed by Evan Thomas
President Richard Nixon was looking for some dirt on Jack Anderson. Maybe, the president suggested, Anderson was having a homosexual relationship with the Navy petty officer, Charles Radford, who had been leaking top secret documents to the muckraking columnist. "Homosexuality destroyed" the Greeks and Romans, Nixon had earlier informed his aides. "Aristotle was a homo. We all know that. So was Socrates." Never mind that, between them, Anderson and Radford, both Mormons, had fathered 17 children and would remain married to the same women for over 40 years. Nixon's aide Chuck Colson ordered the White House Plumbers on a fruitless investigation of the columnist, whom the president regarded as White House Enemy Number One. All very outrageous, but then Anderson himself was constantly investigating flimsy or preposterous allegations of homosexuality involving, among others, Nixon White House aides H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman.
You might say that Richard Nixon and Jack Anderson deserved each other. Both had been hardscrabble boys roiling with resentment; both converted their insecurities into phenomenal drive. For years, newspaperman Anderson had been out to get Nixon, while Nixon regarded Anderson as a vile body that had to be eliminated, perhaps literally.
In his entertaining and well-researched account, Mark Feldstein argues that the Nixon-Anderson vendetta was somehow behind the rise of the culture of scandal that has poisoned Washington over the last 25 years or so. That seems a stretch. Many factors went into the souring relations between reporters and politicians, starting with LBJ's "credibility gap" during Vietnam. But it is true that Nixon's obsession with Anderson helped set the stage for Watergate.
Jack Anderson is largely forgotten now, but he was feared, if not exactly respected, in the 1960s and '70s. Starting in the '40s as a legman for Drew Pearson's Washington Merry-Go-Round column of gossip and scandal, Anderson had absolute faith in himself as a righteous scourge, even if he had to pay bribes and root through other people's garbage cans to get scoops. He was initially seen as uncouth -- he dressed poorly and felt uneasy at Georgetown dinner parties. But by the time of the Nixon Administration, he was breaking big stories so often (winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1972) that Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham invited him to her office and offered to move his column from the funny papers, where it had been relegated. Anderson declined; he liked, he said, to write for regular folks.
Nixon was so infuriated by Anderson's stories that he ordered the Plumbers to assassinate the newsman. Or so two of Nixon's henchmen, G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, later claimed. They planned to kill the columnist by slipping drugs into his food or arranging a hit to look like a street mugging. (Hunt had the brilliant idea of putting LSD on the steering wheel of Anderson's car, where it might be absorbed into his skin, causing him to drive off the road.) The mission, they claimed, was aborted by the White House.
Colson, who ran the Plumbers, always denied any scheme to murder Anderson. But author Feldstein, a former investigative reporter who teaches journalism at the University of Maryland, makes a plausible case that the plot was real and at least tacitly approved by Nixon.
Anderson never had any doubt that Nixon was out to kill him. Anderson broke a few Watergate stories, but not nearly as many as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, and after Watergate he seemed to fade. His column became increasingly unreliable as its author engaged in dubious moneymaking schemes. Anderson was, however, a reporter to the last. Dying of cancer and Parkinson's disease in 2005, he asked Colson, who become a Christian missionary, to visit him in the hospital. The talk between the two was warm and forgiving. "There's one thing I'd like to know," the old newsman finally said. "After all these years, what really happened?" Colson turned cold and denied everything. Anderson was never able to break the story of his own assassination plot.
But he died trying.
Evan Thomas, a former editor at Newsweek, is author of "The War Lovers" and a forthcoming biography of President Eisenhower.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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