The Politician as Novelist
MARTINETTI, RONALD
The Politician as Novelist On Instructions of My Government By Pierre Salinger Doubledav. 432 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by Ronald Martinetti Contributor, "Book World,' "Wall Street Journal" THE...
...Almost as disturbing to the ambassador as the rapidly deteriorating political situation are secret negotiations taking place between the desperate Santa Claran government and members of the U.S...
...underworld interested in developing the country's tourist industry...
...First attracted to government service by the idealism of the New Frontier, Hood quickly became a trusted Presidential adviser, accompanying and being photographed with Kennedy in Caracas and Bogota, with Johnson at El Paso...
...Shrimp poulette, salade nicoise, suckling pig—the courses keep coming, in times of lull or of crisis...
...The official American representative in Santa Clara is Samuel V. Hood, an able and conscientious career diplomat...
...Salinger's Mafiosi, however, are not the older breed of psychopaths who pumped each other with dumdum shells, but "a new and elite generation...
...In Santa Clara, his first ambassadorial assignment, Hood's position is both difficult and delicate: He is caught between wanting to avert "another Cuba" (it is an election year) and trying to avoid familiar charges that America is keeping in power an unpopular and repressive military regime...
...Set in a mythical South American nation, Santa Clara, the story centers around a growing chain of economic and political crises which threaten to wreck the country and bring to power a government sympathetic to Red China...
...Am I not a man...
...Reviewed by Ronald Martinetti Contributor, "Book World,' "Wall Street Journal" THE HONORABLE Pierre Salinger, ex-Presidential press secretary, sometime businessman and former United States senator from California, has written a novel...
...The book is good entertainment pure and simple: The plot moves along smoothly, the writing is straightforward and clear, occasionally striking a nice ironic note...
...he also throws in romance (though, curiously, no sex) and glimpses of high living, including gourmandise...
...Several years ago, when Salinger first announced he was working on a novel, one critic, a former Kennedy intimate who later soured on the Administration, quipped: "Harold Rob-bins may be in the sort of danger that George Murphy never was...
...Suave, well-educated, endowed with maximum reader appeal, they go about their business—negotiating shady deals and conning public officials—with the aplomb of any rising young corporate entrepreneur...
...Salinger's one serious failing is a habit of lapsing into a kind of mock Spanish dialogue (perhaps the result of having read too much Hemingway...
...That now seems a rather shrewd comment and, all things considered, perhaps not as unkind as it was meant to be...
...asks one character...
...All this is amusing to read, of course, and one suspects that Salinger, whose engaging quality of self-deprecation was his trademark as White House press secretary, harbors no pretenses about producing literature...
...Here, aiming at a popular audience, Salinger shows he is right in step with the times, since it appears that the Mafia capo has now displaced the Jewish mother and even the mad psychoanalyst as an indispensable character in every best seller...
...It is a political thriller, an undeniably good one that is as readable, entertaining and implausible as the very best in the genre...
...Caught up in the drama are the various feuding factions within the Santa Claran government, the Marxist opposition, the cia (naturally), and those two powerful Latin brotherhoods dedicated to economic development, the OAS and the Mafia...
...The Mafia is not Salinger's sole concession to popular taste...
...nothing, it seems, can make palatable that most awful of American tragedies: missing a meal...
...Si," replies another reassuringly, "mucho hombre...
Vol. 54 • June 1971 • No. 12
