I was simply blown away by the writing and the reminders to history.
Renata Adler, After the Tall Timber: Collected Nonfiction (New York:New York Review Books, 2015) (From "Toward a Radical Middle: Introduction," July 1969:"No famous or privileged white revolutionaries have gone to jail for long just yet. But obscure and black radical have, in numbers--which raise questions, I think, not so much of politics as of fame, privilege and the inauthentic revolutionary." Id. at 1, 7. From "Searching for the Real Nixon Scandal" (reprinted from the The Atlantic Monthly, 1976): "No one suggested, in 1968, that the Vietnamese kickbacks though foreign banks, went into American politics." "As, of 1972, I think they clearly did. Turning away from detail, one is truck by the logic overall. It does not make sense, for example, that the President's fund-raisers would put by far the greatest pressure of any political campaign in our history on so many sources, individual and corporate, and reject a contribution from the most logical of them all: the administration of South Vietnam, which had the most to lose if the President's opponent (who had announced a willingness to go, it must be remembered, to Hanoi on his knees for peace) actually won. And although the President might have liked to announce the war's end before any ordinary election, by the time he sent Haig to undo Kissinger's late October accords, he knew he did not need, in 1972, any peace to win. At the same time, Nixon never seems to have felt any diminution of need for campaign contributions. In the fall of 1968, the South Vietnamese had only to dig in the heels and wait, while the war cost Humphrey the election. By the fall of 1972, if they want the support of the administration, I think they had to pay." Id. at 366, 403. "The impeachment inquiry did what it could, and the President was removed. But we were, I think, of legal and political necessity, at the tip of the wrong iceberg. The story that required the end of the Nixon presidency, I think, was not Watergate--or even 'other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.' It was Treason and Bribery. I don't know what follows from it. I think it is the bottom line, It has brought a disorientation beyond reckoning. People died for it, We are going to have to live, I think, with that." Id. at 406-407. Also, see Emily Witt, "Outspoken Indignation," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 5/17/2015.).
# From Michael Wolff's "Preface," to Adler, After the Tall Timber, at x.
Renata Adler, Pitch Dark, with an afterword by Muriel Spark (New York:New York Review Books, 1983, 2013).
Renata Adler, Speedboat, with an afterword by Guy Trebly (New York:New York Review Books, 1976, 2013).
