THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader Typecasting Back in our February 25 issue, western writer Bill Croke reviewed Judy Blunt's prize-winning memoir Breaking Clean—regretting some of its easy feminist tropes, but...
...Meanwhile, as an occasion for mockery, the announcement that Gwyneth Paltrow will star in a movie about the poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes is hard to resist...
...Perhaps even more instructive than Schlesinger's storied career is the tale Troy tells of Eric Goldman, Princeton historian and resident egghead in the Johnson White House...
...Blunt has since admitted the story was invented...
...Well, yes, life enhancing...
...Even back in the Kennedy White House, Arthur Schlesinger Jr...
...suffered from this problem...
...In a chapter that should serve as a warning to people of brains who come to Washington looking for power, we learn that the Ivy League professor stooped not only to drafting speeches for the first lady but also for her teenaged daughters...
...So she is come to this rare pass, as Plath wrote in "The Queen's Complaint," Whereby she treks in blood through sun and squall / And sings you thus: / "How sad, alas, it is / To see my people shrunk so small, so small...
...Like many other reviewers, Croke mentioned the scene in which, as punishment for not having lunch ready, Blunt's father-in-law took her typewriter into the barn and smashed it to pieces with a sledgehammer...
...God forbid we take this as representing something dark and melancholy in human nature...
...The story has a terribly sad ending," the head of BBC Films David Thompson admitted—but, he added, "I think we can show that [Plath and Hughes's] marriage had many strong points and that the film can, in a way, be life enhancing...
...The hottest ticket in town, however, became a publicity disaster when Robert Lowell, who'd already accepted an invitation to read from his poetry, wrote back to say that he wouldn't be coming on account of the administration's "strange" and "chauvinistic" actions in Vietnam...
...In Intellectuals and the American Presidency Troy also takes a close look at the incredible energy of Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the Nixon White House...
...Bottum Books in Brief Intellectuals and the American Presidency: Philosophers, Jesters, or Technicians...
...Examining the style and responsibilities of a succession of scholars and generalists to play intellectual mascot at the White House, Tevi Troy tackles their common lack of a clear job description...
...Troy's chapter on the 1990s opens with a profile of William Galston and ends with a profile of Sidney Blumenthal—which shows the decline of the Clinton presidency during its eight years...
...I mean, here's the story of a talented and sad woman who, at age 30, turned on the gas and lay down in her kitchen— having first set out her children's morning milk...
...Although he helped draft speeches, set up a White House library, and served as emissary to the Northeastern intellectual elite, it was said that his job came with "a good address, but no clear responsibilities...
...He bucked the odds to generate significant buzz for a one-day festival of the arts to be hosted at Johnson's White House...
...David Skinner...
...The swan-necked Paltrow bears about the same relation to Sylvia Plath as the swan-eyed Hugh Grant does to Ted Hughes...
...A notice of the book in the local newspaper prompted Blunt's father-in-law to respond, "When people ask me what is the best way to smash a typewriter, I have to tell them I don't have any idea...
...I've never tried to do it...
...Unfortunately, it also turns out to be made up—more proof of the iron law that when a story is too perfect to be true, it isn't...
...by Tevi Troy (Row-man & Littlefield, 254 pp., $27.95...
...Goldman's Kennedy-esque festival of the arts became the centerpiece for a news cycle of stories about Johnson's un-Kennedyesque relations with intellectuals...
...As an image for the woes of an aspiring writer and oppressed woman, the scene was hard to beat...
...The Standard Reader Typecasting Back in our February 25 issue, western writer Bill Croke reviewed Judy Blunt's prize-winning memoir Breaking Clean—regretting some of its easy feminist tropes, but praising its account of a childhood and marriage on the Hi Line in northern Montana...
...But after Moynihan the story became less romantic, as presidencies grew less salon-like and think tanks more important than brainy freelancers...
...It wasn't until Clinton that the position came back into vogue...
...Goldman's humiliation hardly ended there...
Vol. 7 • June 2002 • No. 37
