Richard Reeves oin Political Books
Richard Reeves on Political Books One day last October I stopped by my publisher’s office to clean up a few final details on a book I had just completed on the 1976 Democratic National...
...I’m not saying that we all liked Carter...
...I care,” he said...
...if Carter ever sees me, he’ll know who I am...
...Maybe for all the wrong reasons, but maybe he’ll be able to say ‘I told you so, no one I don’t know can run the country.’ ” We, journalism’s lost generation, may have to start all over again...
...The vein in his right temple began to pulse...
...He has disappointed us with his shaky start...
...they began mocking him...
...To me, he was a transitional fjgure who understood symbolic communication in mediaworld...
...Is Carter going to make it...
...Our lives and ambitions happened to come together-to mutual benefit...
...He was, as I thought about it, the candidate of a frustrated generation of American political reporters...
...I think so,” I said...
...We knew him, we had forecast his triumph, we had checked out our new desks at the White House, and we had begun our Carter books-the books we expected to take us into the first rank of our little business...
...Richard Reeves on Political Books One day last October I stopped by my publisher’s office to clean up a few final details on a book I had just completed on the 1976 Democratic National Convention...
...Listen,’ he hissed, ‘I’m not a liar.’ He stalked out of the restaurant, still hungry and mad as hell...
...For years, we had seen our business defined by a generation that came along with John F. Kennedy -the Hugh Sideys and Joe Krafts -who had been able to report politics as the institutionalized ambition of their candidates, the Kennedys, Nixon, Humphrey, and Rockefeller...
...Jimmy Carter, it turned out, was my candidate...
...Humphrey...
...Wooten’s book is worth that kind of money not only because he is a fine writer, but because he was there in the beginning...
...I didn’t know you cared...
...He stared at the reporter, his pale eyes unblinking...
...As they used to say of John Lindsay, Carter is giving good intentions a bad name...
...Then: “Carter stopped fiddling with the silverware...
...His voice was almost a whisper...
...We began touting Jimmy Carter in early 1976...
...All of which is prologue to noting the March publication by Summit Books of Dasher: The Roots and Rising of Jimmy Carter by James Wooten...
...they weren’t...
...He stopped playing with the little napkin...
...We were there...
...The book will be the main selection of The Book-of-the-Month Club, which means more than $100,000 to my buddy and generational peer...
...The irony came later when the Old Guard had to adopt its own outsider, Jerry Brown, to try to stop our outsider...
...There’s a pattern to bookstore orders for Convention...
...Shit, it does...
...You better care, too...
...In fact, I would guess that most of the reporters who started out with Carter do not like him at the moment...
...Liking was never part of it...
...Richard Reeves is the author of Convention His column is a regular feature of The Washington Monthly...
...We were already committed to Carter...
...Well,” I said, “we’ve all already done books on Carter...
...Then we found someone they didn’t know-an outsider...
...When Ken Auletta of More magazine interviewed reporters on the Carter campaign about what his success meant to them, he got his best answer from Curtis Wilkie of The Boston Globe : “I’m going to be in a position to actually know a President and Vice President of the United States and be able to say to my kids-if Carter wins-that I covered probably the most remarkable political story of the century...
...I should have figured that out before...
...They want 50 copies if Carter wins, but only 10 if Ford wins...
...Hugh Sidey, Joe Kraft, Ben Bradlee, the rest, they can’t match that...
...to James Reston, he was the slightly laughable “Wee Jimmy...
...If Carter had lost, the book wouldn’t have been worth 10 cents-I guess mine wouldn’t have been worth much more...
...You know, Hugh Sidey may turn out to be right,” said another Time correspondent...
...Worse, he may give a bad name to reporters who favored outsiders...
...I was having lunch the other day with Brown’s campaign manager, Mickey Kantor, and he asked me whether I could explain something that had surprised him when Brown entered the race: How could it be that the younger press was so hostile to Brown, their generational kinsman, while older reporters, Reston, Dave Broder, Sidey, Mary McGrory, were so friendly...
...He can recall sitting with Carter in a dingy little restaurant in New Hampshire at the beginning of the campaign and baiting the candidate about a meeting with William Loeb, the publisher of The Manchester Union-Leader...
...The political thing to do is to say it doesn’t matter to me...
...This column is my explanation...
...asked Dan Okrent, the editor-in-chief of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich...
...When Jimmy Carter, now President, flew into Los Angeles late this October, a young reporter asked why Jim Wooten, Marty Schram, and I were all watching Jerry Brown instead of Carter...
...My generation-people like Johnny Apple and Jim Wooten of The New York Times, Jack Nelson of The Los Angeles Times, Marty Schram of Newsday, Patrick Anderson, and a lot of others...
...No President ever knew who Curtis Wilkie was...
...The lines were drawn-in shorthand: Carter vs...
Vol. 9 • December 1977 • No. 10
