PART I Last May my whole family drove out to JFK Airport to meet Raymond. He had been gone for six years, and Dad was carrying his camera as if Ray were some kind of movie star. Usually, I was nervous around Ray, but I wasn’t that day. Partly because I didn’t live at home […]
Playing President is not a book title selected casually, but a distilled opinion gleaned over forty years of journalism, covering our most important democratic exercise. After decades spent interviewing dozens of leading presidential candidates, including those who ended up in the highest office, I came to the conclusion that the process endured in obtaining electoral […]
The Prologue: The End No living thing flew over the village of Gibbeah, neither fowl, nor dove, nor crow. Yet few looked above, terrified should an omen come in a shriek or flutter. Nothing flew but dust. It slipped through window blades, door cracks, and the lifting clay of rooftops. Dust coated house and ground, […]
One summer a few years ago, on a particularly inebriated afternoon at a house some friends of mine were looking after in upstate New York, I came across a small book of maxims of good behavior purporting to be by George Washington. The sheer oddity that our Founding Father had penned lines such as “Rinse […]
Jerusalem’s Landing, Vermont Saturday September 30, 1933 I laid down my pen and stared at the page. I was seated at the small desk in my kitchen, which also serves as my official office, going over the list of delinquent taxes, which as town constable it is my sworn duty to collect. In truth, I […]