The Books That Mattered

by Frye Gaillard

  A few years later, after the article was published to great acclaim in Harper’s, I ran into King one night in Washington. He was at a Georgetown club called the Cellar Door, and though I had never met him, I told him I had been moved by his story. He seemed pleased.

  “You know,” he said, and I remember this clearly, “I couldn’t write that story until The Old Man died.”

  In 1974, with the publication of The Old Man and Lesser Mortals, a collection of his magazine work, King offered more reflections on the title story. He recounted how, in flying back to Texas for the funeral, he gazed at the clouds outside the plane and seemed to sense, in their shifting shapes, certain mystical intimations about his father. And then came an image that was more concrete. During his final goodbye before an open casket, King noticed his father’s weathered hands, folded peacefully on his chest.

  They told the story of a countryman’s life in the eloquent language of wrinkles, veins, old scars and new. The Old Man’s hands always bore some fresh scratch or cut as an adornment, the result of his latest tangle with a scrap of wire, a rusted pipe, a stubborn root; in death they did not disappoint even in that small and valuable particular. No, it is not given to sons to know everything of their fathers—mercifully, perhaps—but I have those hands in my memory to supply evidence of the obligations he met, the sweat he gave, the honest deeds performed. I like to think you could look at those hands and read the better part of The Old Man’s heart.

  Two hours later, when the funeral was done, Willie Morris called to share his condolences. Larry King thanked him and then blurted out, “Willie, I can write it now.”

  In telling that story King offered, I think, an insight into the writer’s obsession—not a particularly attractive quality on the grand human scale—but most of us writers have it: that final and somehow inevitable distance from even the most personal of moments that can make us want to pull back and write. Yes, it is true that we try to capture and put into words some of those feelings that pour from the heart; but sadly enough, it is insufficient simply to feel them, to live the experience as most people do. Whatever the cost, to ourselves or other people, we are driven instead to write it all down. In seeing that beautiful demon in King, I recognized, as I reveled in The Old Man and Lesser Mortals, the same incurable malady in myself.

  I also remember my feelings of envy that King had Willie Morris as his editor. For four glorious years, from 1967 until a crash-and-burn ending in 1971, Morris served as editor-in-chief of Harper’s—an accomplishment made more remarkable by the fact that when it began, Morris was only thirty-two. At a dinner party during that first year, he was introduced to U.S. Senator Robert Kennedy.

  “You’re the editor of Harper’s?” Kennedy asked, with what seemed to be a kind of wry admiration. “And they tell me you’re thirty-two? You must be smart.”

  Very few people ever doubted that fact. Morris was a Mississippian by birth, coming of age in the town of Yazoo City, which lies at the edge of a string of hills that abruptly give way to the Mississippi Delta. “On a quiet day after a spring rain this stretch of earth seems prehistoric,” Morris wrote in North Toward Home, a memoir published as he took over Harper’s, “damp, cool, inaccessible, the moss hanging from the giant old trees—and if you ignore the occasional diesel, churning up one of these hills on its way to Greenwood or Clarksdale or Memphis, you may feel you are in one of those sudden magic places of America, known mainly to the local people and merely taken for granted, never written about, not even on any of the tourist maps.”

  At the age of seventeen, Morris left Yazoo City for the University of Texas, where he served as editor of the student newspaper and angered some of the powers in Austin with his editorials against segregation and censorship. He graduated in 1956 and headed to England on a Rhodes Scholarship, where, on a side trip to Paris, he met his fellow Mississippian Richard Wright. In recounting that meeting in North Toward Home, Morris says he asked Wright, as they talked one night in a little Arab bar, “Will you ever come back to America?”

  “No,” said Wright. “I want my children to grow up as human beings.”

  It should be noted, just for the record, that Morris was not above stretching the truth. He once declared on the David Frost Show that he had met William Faulkner, which he had not. But by the time he made it to Harper’s, truthful name-dropping was not a problem for him. During his brief, meteoric tenure, Morris persuaded some of the finest writers in the country, most of whom would become his friends, to contribute their finest work to Harper’s. From William Styron came a 45,000-word excerpt of The Confessions of Nat Turner. From Norman Mailer, 90,000 words—the longest magazine article ever published—about an anti-war march on the Pentagon, which, as a book, The Armies of the Night, won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award.

  Morris also had his own stable of regulars—Larry L. King, Marshall Frady, David Halberstam, Peter Schrag—all of whom were deft practitioners of transforming journalism into art. Not that they had a corner on the market. Tom Wolfe, if anything, has received more notice over the years as the leading apostle of “the new journalism.” Born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1931, Wolfe earned a Ph.D. in American Studies in 1957, and hated graduate school with such an unhealthy passion that he fled to the low-rent world of newspapers—ultimately to the New York Herald Tribune, where he found a newsroom so unkempt (“a promiscuous heap of junk”) that he thought it must be journalistic heaven.

  One of his Herald Tribune colleagues was columnist Jimmy Breslin, “a good-looking Irishman,” as Wolfe described him, “with a lot of black hair and a wrestler’s gut . . . a bowling ball fueled with liquid oxygen.” Once in 1965, Breslin made a trip to Alabama, traveling from Montgomery through the rolling countryside of Lowndes County, a haunted landscape of low-lying swamps and Black Belt prairie, resembling, oddly, something in South Dakota or Kansas. Breslin’s destination was the village of Hayneville where the accused killers of Viola Liuzzo—a civil rights worker shot to death on a lonely stretch of Lowndes County highway—were about to go on trial.

  In some ways, Breslin covered the story like any other reporter, churning out his copy for a daily deadline, but throwing in unexpected details—a mule grazing in a field near the courthouse, a deputy sheriff spitting out the window, a defense attorney with a pair of pistols in his briefcase and a Klan insignia on his lapel. It seemed to Wolfe, particularly in the early 1960s, that Breslin was engaged in a new enterprise, producing what were, in effect, short stories “complete with symbolism” and novelistic detail, but all on deadline and all within the bounds of the literal truth.

  Soon there were other practitioners of the craft, working in forms even more sophisticated—Gay Talese profiling Joe Louis in the pages of Esquire, presenting a portrait, not of a sports hero in his prime but of an aging champion trying to find some meaning in his life. Even more ambitiously in 1966, there was Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, the book-length account of a quadruple homicide in Kansas—a random crime by a pair of drifters, neither with the gumption to do it alone, reconstructed by Capote in all its nihilistic detail.

  Last but not least in Wolfe’s estimaction was the splendid work he was doing himself, most of it for the Herald Tribune and Esquire. Some of the pieces he turned into books, culminating in 1979 with The Right Stuff, his iconic story of America’s astronauts. Wolfe’s article of faith, his cornerstone understanding of his craft, was that all the devices available to the novelist—extended dialogue, point of view, the careful development of character and plot—were available to the nonfiction writer as well. The key was to push reporting to a whole new level, gathering information that more conventional journalists might regard as out of reach.

  “Your main problem as a reporter,” Wolfe wrote, “is, simply, managing to stay with whomever you are writing about long enough for the scenes to take place before your own eyes.”

  The kinds of scenes Wolfe had in mind were like the follow
ing from “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers,” an essay written in 1970 about an anti-poverty office in San Francisco, where a curious ritual played out periodically. Ghetto radicals of various persuasions would descend on the office and badger some poor and hapless bureaucrat, who in turn would fidget and squirm but offer them almost nothing in return.

  “Well,” says the Flak Catcher, “I can’t promise you jobs if the jobs are not available yet”—and then he looks up as if for the first time he is really focusing on the thirty-five ghetto hot dogs he is now facing, by way of sizing up the threat, now that the shit has started. The blacks and the Chicanos he has no doubt seen before, or people just like them, but then he takes in the Filipinos. There are about eight of them, and they are all wearing Day-Glo yellow and hot-green sweaters and lemon-colored pants and Italian-style socks. But it’s the headgear that does the trick. They’ve all got on Rap Brown shades and Russian Cossack hats made of frosted-gray Dynel. They look bad. Then the man takes in the Samoans and they look worse. There’s about ten of them, but they fill up half the room. They’ve got on Island shirts with designs in streaks and blooms of red, only it’s a really raw shade of red, like that red they paint the floor with in the tool and dye works. They’re glaring at him out of those big dark wide brown faces. The monsters have tight curly hair, but it grows in long strangs, and they comb it back flat, in long curly strangs, with a Duke pomade job. They’ve got huge feet, and they’re wearing sandals. The straps on the sandals look like they were made from the reins on the Budweiser draft horses . . .

  I loved Wolfe’s writing the first time I read it. How could you not? It was all so colorful and entertaining, so irreverent and bold, and his own regard for what he was doing was not the least bit modest: “dethroning the novel . . .” he wrote in 1973, “starting the first new direction in American literature in half a century.” Not that he gave himself all the credit. There were twenty or so others he also admired, swashbuckling “new journalists” like Hunter S. Thompson, who wrote about those bizarre, hidden corners of American life—the Hell’s Angels, for example—that lent themselves to a style as outrageous as Wolfe’s. I remember trying it myself one time, writing an article under the influence of Wolfe, and among the greatest of its aesthetic disasters was that it actually got published.

  There was something about Wolfe’s brand of brilliance—a relationship with many of his subjects that seemed to resemble a heat-seeking missile—and for many of us it simply didn’t work. Over time, I came to believe that the missing ingredient, despite all the flash and dazzle and style, was heart: intimations of empathy, or even of respect, for many of the people he chose to write about. In Harper’s, however, heart was a quality I found in abundance—in the work of Willie Morris and his quite remarkable stable of writers.

  II

  I don’t remember when I first read David Halberstam. It may have been a Harper’s article, “The Very Expensive Education of McGeorge Bundy,” which later grew into The Best and the Brightest, perhaps the most admired of Halberstam’s books.

  Before he began his career as a journalist, Halberstam was a Harvard man, which connotes his level of intellect but not necessarily his view of the world. Upon graduation he headed south to Mississippi and took a job with a small-town paper, the West Point Daily Times Leader, where he knew he could cover a little of everything. He also knew in 1955 that Mississippi would put him squarely in the middle of the gathering storm over civil rights, and he wanted to be where history was being made.

  Halberstam always seemed to operate on that margin between journalism and history, moving on from Mississippi to cover the Nashville sit-ins for the morning newspaper in that city, before finally landing at the New York Times. There, he covered the war in Vietnam, arriving in that ravaged countryside just as America was increasing its role. On June 11, 1963, he witnessed the self-immolation of Thich Quang Duc, a monk protesting the oppression of Buddhists by the government of South Vietnam.

  In those early years, Halberstam was one of a handful of reporters who wrote with increasing skepticism about America’s Vietnamese allies—and soon about those U.S. generals who kept seeing “light at the end of the tunnel.” His work quickly won him a Pulitzer Prize, and then as later, the widespread admiration of his peers.

  “Halberstam,” wrote Larry L. King, “was . . . a man of utmost integrity whose bullshit detector was infallible . . . He was as intent as a Super Bowl linebacker and just as likely to tackle anybody who intruded on his territory. He may be the most fearless man I ever met.”

  One of Halberstam’s lesser known writings about Vietnam was a brief biography of Ho Chi Minh, an extended essay of 40,000 words published in 1971. I found Ho, as the book was known, to be as revealing as any single thing I read about the war. It was rare indeed for a western journalist to attempt, objectively and without polemics, to enter the mind of Ho Chi Minh, the Communist ruler of North Vietnam and maddening adversary of the United States. “Ho Chi Minh,” Halberstam wrote, “was one of the extraordinary figures of this era—part Gandhi, part Lenin, all Vietnamese. He was, perhaps more than any single man of the century, the living embodiment to his own people—and to the world—of their revolution.”

  Born sometime around 1890, Ho had lived through colonial oppression by the French, by the Japanese during World War II, and by the French again in their ill-fated war in the 1950s. Always an enigma, a Communist who quoted the American Declaration of Independence, Ho was, as Halberstam understood him, a Vietnamese nationalist all the way to the core.

  “He was the gentle Vietnamese,” Halberstam wrote, “humble, soft-spoken, mocking his own position, always seen in the simplest garb, his dress making him barely distinguishable from the poorest peasant—a style that Westerners for many years mocked, laughing at the lack of trappings of power, of uniform, of style, until one day they woke up and realized that this very simplicity, . . . this capacity to walk simply among his own people was basic to his success.”

  Despite his Communist ideology, which so troubled the makers of American foreign policy, Ho became for the Vietnamese people a powerful symbol of their urge to be free. He had inspired in them a willingness to fight for as long as it took, and thus the American war effort—a high-minded attempt, when it began, to stop the spread of Asian communism—was doomed. The only question was how much pain we were willing to inflict—upon the Vietnamese and upon ourselves. That was the message of Halberstam’s reporting, controversial at the time (and perhaps even today), but to me the highest calling of the craft: speaking the truth, even to people who don’t want to hear it.

  I think I sensed about Halberstam then what Willie Morris would write of him later: “I had never met a man, and never would, with such a blend of belligerence and sweetness, nor one who so loved the possibilities of America.”

  Of all of Halberstam’s work in those days, there was one book in particular that became for me a temporary obsession. I was in my early twenties then, contemplating a career in journalism, but drawn also to the great political struggles of the times. More specifically, I was drawn to U.S. Senator Robert Kennedy, who, in 1968, was making a star-crossed run for the presidency.

  Halberstam set out to cover that run, first in a lengthy profile for Harper’s, and then in a book with the poignant title, The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy. I thought it was political reporting at its best, reminding me a little, in 1968, of Theodore White’s The Making of the President, 1960, which I had read in high school. But Halberstam’s work was even stronger, not quite detached, but guided by a kind of hardheaded respect as he picked up Kennedy’s story in 1967. In September, a young peace activist named Allard Lowenstein, a friend and informal adviser to Kennedy, urged him strongly to run for president—not in 1972, when most political pundits agreed that Kennedy would be the odds-on favorite, but immediately, in 1968, when the country seemed to be coming apart: mired in the war in Vietnam, defined by issues of poverty and race, divided by r
iots in the inner cities every summer, and led by a president, Lyndon B. Johnson, who seemed to embody everything that was wrong.

  That was Lowenstein’s view, and to some extent it was Kennedy’s too, but in the fall of 1967 Kennedy played Hamlet, unable to decide if he would make the race. To challenge a sitting president in his own party—a powerful, vindictive incumbent—and to come up short would be, for Kennedy, the self-destruction of his political future. So Lowenstein moved on, eventually persuading Eugene McCarthy, a cool, cerebral, anti-war senator from Minnesota, to become the candidate of the “Dump Johnson” movement.

  Then in 1968 all hell broke loose. On January 31, Communist forces attacked more than a hundred cities in South Vietnam, shattering the illusion that the war was going well, and providing a sudden, unexpected surge for McCarthy. Kennedy began to rethink his decision not to run, but still he waited. On March 12, McCarthy won a surprising 42 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary, demonstrating the vulnerability of President Johnson, and four days later Kennedy entered the race.

  By any standard the decision was graceless and poorly timed. “The Kennedys,” conceded historian Arthur Schlesinger, “always do these things badly.” But Kennedy, as Halberstam noted, suddenly seemed like a man set free. He campaigned with passion in the Indiana primary where he somehow managed to win the support of inner-city blacks and blue-collar whites, two groups who viewed each other with suspicion. And then came the shattering word in April that Martin Luther King Jr. had been murdered in Memphis. Kennedy heard the news on a plane to Indianapolis where he was scheduled to appear at a campaign rally in the inner city. All across the country ghettos were burning, with mobs and looting and scattered sniper fire, but Kennedy insisted on keeping his appointment.