Book: “Seven Days in May”

While watching the news last night about General McChrystal and President Obama, I turned to my wife and said, “This sounds like ‘Seven Days in May.’” This morning, Maureen Dowd mentioned the 1962 novel by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey ll, and a few minutes ago a good friend e-mailed and asked if McChrystal should be cast in a remake of the 1964 film, which starred Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas with John Frankenheimer directing and Rod Serling adapting.
All this talk made me pull out a copy of the book, a yellowed Bantam paperback published 47 years ago. I remember the novel as a compelling, provocative page-turner—qualities bestselling commercial novels routinely possessed then but rarely do now.
The plot revolves around a conspiracy by the Joint Chiefs to take over the government via a military coup. Their motivation: the president has—in their eyes--gone soft on Communism as he negotiates a disarmament agreement with the Soviet Union. Heading the coup attempt is a charismatic Air Force general named James Mattoon Scott (a blend of Douglas MacArthur, Curtis LeMay and a retired, rabid anti-Communist general named Edwin A. Walker (interestingly, Lee Harvey Oswald tried to kill Walker several months before the Kennedy assassination)). A Marine colonel named Martin “Jiggs” Casey sniffs out the plot, and after many twists Scott and his co-conspirators are forced to resign. It’s a great read.
Now clearly McChrystal wasn’t James Mattoon Scott (I say “wasn’t” because it’s just been announced that McChrystal’s resignation has been accepted). McChrystal and his aides were openly contemptuous of the Obama administration (just check out the story in Rolling Stone), something General Scott and his followers manage to avoid, although Scott in private disdains the president’s perceived weaknesses.
“Seven Days in May” is melodrama—but melodrama of the first rank, and all these years later it remains a cautionary tale for what could happen someday.
Thankfully, General Stanley McChrystal is no James Mattoon Scott.

The Liter’y Life: 2

“Obama Is From Mars, Wall Street Is From Venus”
By John Heilemann
The best piece yet on Obama’s relationship with Wall Street, explaining his loyalty to Larry Summers and Tim Geithner and why certain decisions were made. What’s most frightening is Heilemann’s convincing contention that the Wall Street community—particularly at the top—simply don’t get to this day why what they did was so bad and why the great unwashed should be so angry. They also feel betrayed by Obama because many of them supported his campaign and now even the hint of financial reform—no matter how genteel—has them frothing at the mouth as if Wall Street is soon to be turned over to the ghost of Joseph Stalin.
http://nymag.com/news/politics/66188/

The New York Review of Books/June 10, 2010
“The iPad Revolution”
By Sue Halpern
A clear-headed look not just at Apple’s newest must-have gadget but also a study of other electronic devices like Amazon’s Kindle and the Nook (from Barnes&Noble). Full disclosure here: I have a Kindle and love it, particularly for the ease of downloading a book in less than a minute (talk about immediate gratification). Also, I’ve pretty much run out of room for books here in the Berkeley house (we have roughly 2,500 volumes—but who’s counting?)*, and the Kindle obviously solves the space problem. That said, I tend to read thrillers and mysteries and classics on the Kindle, while ordering hardbacks for new books I think I’d like to keep (right now I’m reading an excellent bio of Henry Luce, a long book I decided I’d rather read in book form).
Halpern considers the whole idea of using electronic readers, and gives a fair assessment to the iPad. My advice: wait for the next generation or two.
*Apparently I'm counting. The actual total is 2,924 books in the house and the office behind the house.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/jun/10/ipad-revolution/

An Oil Spill—And A Legendary Private Eye

In January of 1969, a Union Oil derrick five miles off the Santa Barbara coast blew out, spewing thousands of barrels of oil and gas into the Pacific, blanketing and blackening miles of beaches and killing wildlife.
Among the many outraged locals was a middle-aged writer named Kenneth Millar (1915-1983), better known among admirers of brilliant crime fiction as Ross Macdonald, creator of private-eye Lew Archer, the narrator of what William Goldman would shortly call “the finest detective novels ever written by an American.”
More than forty years after that review ran on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, Goldman’s declaration remains truer than ever. If you’ve never read Macdonald, run to your library or local bookstore or go to Amazon and get a copy of one of his great novels, beautifully written and peopled by characters with dimension—and many, many secrets. My favorite is “The Chill,” and while all the Archer books are excellent, I’d look for ones written after1958, when in “The Doomsters” Macdonald began wedding his complex plots with strong Freudian overtones.
An aside here: the late John Leonard, then at the Book Review, lobbied for that prominent 1969 review, and he knew Goldman was the right critic; Goldman had written the screenplay for 1966’s “Harper,” based on Macdonald’s novel, “The Moving Target.” Lew Archer, whose last name was inspired by Sam Spade’s unlucky partner, Miles Archer, was renamed Lew Harper and played wonderfully by Paul Newman. For more about Macdonald’s fascinating life and work, read Tom Nolan’s superb biography.
Macdonald never forgave the oil companies or lax government officials for what happened to Santa Barbara, and in 1973’s “Sleeping Beauty” he used an oil spill as the dark symbol running through one of his best books. Here’s how Macdonald described the oil catastrophe (quotes lifted from Nolan’s book): The derrick’s pipe looked like “the metal handle of a dagger that had stabbed the world and made it spill black blood.” The slick looks “like premature night.” People watch the approaching oil “as if they were waiting for the end of the world, or as if the end had come and they would never move again.”
As for that real Santa Barbara spill, Nolan writes “as the weeks wore on, the oil kept oozing, despite the oil’s people’s assurances that everything was okay.”
Doesn’t seem like we’ve learned a hell of a lot in the last forty-one years, does it?