STOP THE PRESSES

IF YOU REALLY WANT TO UNDERSTAND POLITICS, PUT DOWN THE NEWSPAPER AND PICK UP A NOVEL

Essay by Donald Sevener

As a reporter and editor for more than 20 years, I'm more than familiar with the journalist's abiding frustration and essential dilemma: such a pity when facts get in the way of a good story.

Perhaps that is why I am drawn to fiction, to political novels as an indispensable source for making sense of the political world. Political novels — the good ones, the literary ones, not the mystery story that just happens to be set in Foggy Bottom or the action thriller that involves the CIA — provide understanding missing from the morning newspaper or evening newscast. Fiction generally picks up where journalism leaves off, thus giving us insights, context and honesty about our political life that we rarely find in journalism — never on television and scarcely in conventional political reporting.

It may be so, as they say, that truth is stranger than fiction, but it is seldom as edifying. Novels like All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren's classic account of Huey Long; or Jack Gance, Ward Just's 1988 book about Chicago, the Machine and what makes the political world go round; or Primary Colors, the roman a clef that borrows significantly from Warren in its portrayal of a southern governor running for president; or Echo House, Just's latest Washington novel recently nominated for a National Book Award — these are more than just good stories.

Liberated from facts, these stories are free to deliver truth.

About politicians, for example. Journalists tend to regard politicians as one-dimensional: a role with a title. And they talk in a shorthand of labels that does more to obscure than illuminate: pro-choice moderate, fiscal conservative from the burbs beholden to the teachers' union or medical association or business lobby. We find that Candidate X is for schools, against taxes, pro-environment, anti-crime, for jobs, against governmental waste, a platform indistinguishable from that of Candidate Y.

Rarely do journalists show us the layers that make up the complex and nuanced characters drawn by our most skillful novelists because voters are less demanding than readers, and more easily fooled. Novelists work hard to get readers to suspend their disbelief at the fictional world, to believe what they manifestly know to be false; politicians work just as hard to get voters to suspend their belief in the real world, to get them to disbelieve what they manifestly know to be true: that trust and politics are implausible neighbors in the same sentence. Journalists tend to print what politicians tell them.

Novelists, in contrast, given the greater array of literary tools and the more demanding expectations of their audience, carve characters who seem more human, people with complexity and depth, whose motives and ambiguities and roots help us see behind the public veneer into the needs and desires, ambitions and flaws, dreams and schemes that explain human behavior, including our own.

What's more important to know: that a candidate for president promises a middle-class tax cut, or that he finds truth a stretchable fabric? In Primary Colors, Gov. Jack Stanton is on a campaign visit to a Harlem literacy program and tells his audience a gripping story about his Uncle Charlie, a tale he says came down from his momma "but I know it's true." Uncle Charlie was a wounded war hero — given the Medal of Honor by President Harry Truman himself — and honored with a parade and offers of a full scholarship to the university, or a management job at the bank, or a supervisory position at the sawmill. And Charlie turned them all down flat. "It was just that, well... He couldn't read," Stanton explains, going on to an inspirational riff about courage and strength and commitment.

A few pages later, Henry Burton, the narrator and eventual key Stanton aide, encounters Uncle Charlie on the campaign plane.

"You're the Medal of Honor winner?"

"He say that?"

Henry nods.

"Whatever he says," Charlie laughed.

"He's the master."

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Jack Stanton is shallow, calculating and ambitious, thus seemingly well cast as a candidate for president. For example, when the campaign's consultant complains about all the Friends of Jack hanging around, Henry avers this is "a basic Stanton problem. He has been collecting friends since kindergarten, with the intention of bringing them on board when it was showtime."

One of the novel's most telling scenes is Gov. Stanton's response to news he's been accused of impregnating the daughter of his friend Fat Willie, the Barbecue Man.

"Who else knows?" the governor demands, and, "What does he want?" Finally: "The governor wheeled and slammed the wall, open-handed on the tile. The sound was something between a slam and a splat. 'I just can't catch a break, can I?'" His self-absorbed reaction, his immediate political calculation, his assumption that even his friend must be out to get something says more about the character of this two-bit southern governor than all the investigations of a dozen special counsels.

So Jack Stanton is sleazy enough to be an alderman. Yet if that's all there were to him, we'd close the book — too much like real life, we'd say, might as well read the Trib.

But Jack Stanton has another side, one that even makes us root for him, and finally to give us pause when we are just about ready to conclude (with Henry) that he is unworthy of our favor. Stanton plays the photo-op at the literacy program like a symphony, but he also listens to the music. He has actually thought about literacy programs, and even playfully debates with his wife, herself a commanding figure, whether it takes inspirational teachers (as he says) or an effective curriculum (as she says) to make such programs work. And on the eve of the New Hampshire primary, with his campaign blown to bits by a hurricane of scandals, Stanton goes virtually voter to voter to salvage his dream and gets into a policy discussion about Head Start with a preschool teacher in a restaurant. Do real politicians do that? Probably. Do we ever read about them doing it? Hardly.

Willie Stark is no angel either. He's duplicitous, vindictive and ruthless, a demagogue who would "rather bust a man than buy him," though I suppose something could be said for his frugality. When Willie tells Jack Burden, the narrator of All the King's Men and Stark's aide, that there is no need to frame a political opponent "because the truth is always sufficient," Jack wonders where the governor came by his "high view of human nature."

"Boy," Willie says, "I went to a Presbyterian Sunday school back in the days when they still had some theology, and that much of it stuck."

Opponents of the Stark Administration cried graft, but. Jack muses, Willie would be philosophical: "'Sure,' the Boss said: 'Sure, there's some graft, but there's just enough to make the wheels turn without squeaking. Sure, I got a bunch of crooks around here, but they're too lily-livered to get very crooked. I got my eye on 'em. And do I deliver the state something? I damned well do.'"

He damned well does. He's built roads and schools and he wants to build a hospital — the biggest and best in the world — so "anybody, no matter he hasn't got a dime, can go there."

"And vote for you," Jack says.

"I'll be dead," he says, "and you'll be dead, and I don't care whether he votes for me or not, he can go there."

Willie doesn't care about money, Jack tells his mother.

What's he care about? she asks.

Willie Stark, he answers.

Unlike most journalism, novels give a sense of rootedness, of people shaped by where they are, by the values, curiosities, idiosyncrasies, even the geography of place. Coverage of campaigns lacks this dimension; candidates are covered as if they were franchises, their ideas as bland, as safe and as predictable as the menu of McDonald's anywhere in America.

According to his biographer, Warren claimed that had he not gone to Louisiana to teach, All the King's Men would not have been written. It's not that Willie Stark belongs only to Louisiana, or in it; there is nothing parochial about the book. Rather, it is that place (and time) informs the novel's sensibilities in a way that roots the characters and their conflicts in something real, something larger, relevant and important. The Louisiana Warren knew, writes Joseph Blotner, "produced a way of thinking and feeling [Warren] said that helped create the fiction."

It isn't much of a stretch from The Boss of All the King's Men to Pat Bayley's lament to Jack Gance, Ward Just's eponymous narrator, about how Chicago has changed: "So, you'd know what the situation here is, not anything like it used to be. We had a hell of a nice town then, everybody liked Boss City, a good workingman's town. But it's not the same."

Certainly not the same as when, decades earlier, Gance had sat in a Chicago courtroom with eyes on him as his father was led away after being convicted of tax evasion. "The faces were mostly sympathetic," the young Gance observes, "for the Midwest is a sentimental place. Behind its Teutonic facade, Chicago has a forgiving nature, and fraud was a civic sport."

Just, a former journalist whose father and grandfather published The News Sun in Waukegan, is a master of endowing his characters with a sense of place. (Even at the expense of his native Illinois. Alee Behl, who will inherit his father's considerable gifts as a political operative in Echo House, is summoned cross-country to spend Election Night, 1952, at the Executive Mansion in Springfield, a trip he finds dispiriting:
"Illinois was the end of the earth; and then you reached the Mississippi.")

Just's characters grasp the meaning of place, the sense of how it belongs to them and they to it. Jack Gance, for instance, grew up in Chicago and got to know it more intimately walking its streets as a pollster for "Downtown," showing the Machine's doubtful ward committeemen that his numbers were more .knowing than their precinct captains.

Gance is of the city and eventually drawn back to it after a sojourn in Washington as a White House aide, an affection planted deep in his genes and nurtured in his family's North Side

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apartment, where his father could look down from the den and watch the cardinal come and go.

Though their friends joined the immigration to the suburbs, Gance's parents were not tempted. Jack's mother asks if he's heard of a people, primitive people, resettled by the Red Cross after an earthquake, who soon began to die. "The Red Cross thinks they're dying of broken hearts, leaving their ancestral places. Their souls rebel and they die. And that's what would have happened to me, probably; died of a broken heart in Lake Forest. Know- ing that Chicago was just over the hori- zon and I couldn't go back to it to live." Suburbanites, she says, are "like White Russians who moved to Paris after the Revolution, living now as emigres, feeding on rumors of the occupied capital city. And such rumors! Noise, dirt, crime, corruption, taxes. The jigs, the Machine, the Syndicate." The difference is, she says, "there's no urge for a counterrevolution. They're happy where they are, well out of it. They love the North Shore and their cook- outs and Sunday foursomes. And their money." They're welcome to it, Jack says.

Still, he moves to Washington and a job with the government, his reward for helping with Kennedy's close-call victory in Illinois. By the time he returns, much has changed, including the demise of the Machine, which had "creaked and groaned and, leaderless, failed to deliver. People laughed at it." He returns, realizing "with a rush of gratitude, how much affection I had for the city, how well I understood it, and how much I owed it."

He comes back to Chicago to run for the Senate, and the old senator asks why he — him an inside guy, of all people — wants to be in the public arena (and challenge the party's anointed candidate). Gance points out the window of the restaurant, once fashionable, now in a dangerous neighborhood, where a drunk has fallen to his knees, "like a fighter taking the count." Gance knows the neighborhood well, having used it as a laboratory while a student at the University of Chicago. "Thirty years ago it seemed as secure and stable as Switzerland, but now it resembled Beirut, chaotic and violent, without industry, and still a way to go before it hit bottom." He watches the drunk, wondering whether he is "one of the refugees from downstate, a busted farmer come to try his luck in the Emerald City. I hated it, what had happened to the region; in the old days, there had been money to burn." That, Jack says, gesturing toward the window, is why he's running.

The journalist views the world from an awkward vantage point; being an insider would violate the canon of objectivity, yet the crush of deadlines impedes a more distant perspective that could yield a more comprehensive view, or a deeper one.

Why are you running? Really —
why are you running?

It's a question rarely asked, and never answered, in the morning newspaper or the nightly news, captivated as they are with who's ahead, who's slinging mud and whether any of the mud sticks. Although All the King's Men was quickly labeled a political novel when it first appeared in 1946, its author, Blotner writes in a forward to the 50th anniversary edition, intended that politics serve only as the framework "for the action carrying the story's deeper concerns, primarily the theme of power embodied in a man who confuses ends with means and ultimately dies in his capitol as both Huey Long and Julius Caesar had done."

In journalism, politics is the action. A campaign is a discrete thing that begins when the first candidate, usually some obscure legislator or restless state officeholder, makes the first rumblings for higher office, like a stomach growling from hunger and for the same reason. On election night, it ends.

Motive, ambition, need, desire, the forces of history, the sweep of events, the serendipity of fate — these have no part in the journalist's report.

It is the conventions of journalism, and of fiction, that principally account for the inability of the former to tell us the truth, and the richness of the latter in revealing the nature of political life.

Much has been written in recent months about the prevalence of money in politics, and much has been implied about the role that money plays in government. Compare those millions of words to the reflections of Axel Behl, "who operated quietly as a fixer without portfolio" in Ward Just's Echo House, as he sits in the Senate gallery, viewing the lobbyists whose "laughter recalled the crinkle of money."

"Axel always sat in the rear row of the gallery, where he could watch the lawyers for the sugar producers, the man from the corn belt, the vice president of the railroad union, and the airplane manufacturer cup their hands to their ears when they heard something familiar — the quota, the price support, the tax break, the subsidy — and watch as the votes were tallied, ticking off the yeas and nays on their own scorecards and rising wearily at the conclusion, smiling or not, according to the vote, relinquishing their seats to the lobbyists whose legislation was still being marked up for the decisive vote. The moment had aspects of the bazaar and the auction block and the trading floor and the burlesque house, all business conducted in an arcane tongue with its special rules of grammar and syntax, assisted by a lifted eyebrow or a pointed finger."

The journalist cannot write this — or thinks she cannot — because the customs of her craft forbid her intrusion into the story. Convention demands the journalist be a dispassionate, objective observer, a chronicler of events, a mere reporter of facts. Even if she observed the Senate as an auction block, she'd be obliged to get the requisite quotes from the airplane manufacturer, the committee chair, the majority leader and Common Cause. Lost in that swirl of voices is truth.

The journalist views the world from an awkward vantage point; being an

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insider would violate the canon of objectivity, yet the crush of deadlines impedes a more distant perspective that could yield a more comprehensive view, or a deeper one, or one informed, say, by Axel Behl's conviction that we are all swept along in the same current: "The current came from the past and flowed into the future." Tethered to facts, ignorant of history, propped too close and yet not close enough to his subject, the journalist settles for dispensing information, some of it reliable, occasionally even useful.

For understanding, we turn to the novelist because we expect more from fiction than from journalism. We're content for the journalist to inform or, increasingly, to entertain. The entertainment function of serious literature is secondary to its ability to educate. Fiction helps us know who we are.

Unburdened by facts, able to stand at a distance, curious about the forces of history and psychology and morality, the novelist is both equipped and inclined to level with us. His is not an unbiased view (neither is the journalist's); it is, however, an honest one.

In the end, though, fiction is valuable not for what it gives us, but for what it demands of us.

When Axel Behl insists his son come to Springfield to "watch Election Night at ground zero," he does so because he realizes that "one day this would be his son's world, too, and it was necessary that he know the moral architecture of things, Washington and Springfield along with Pompeii and Phoenicia. This was knowledge that did not come from books."

The "moral architecture of things" is a common undercurrent in political fiction, however foreign it is to political action. "You have to write off the costs against the gain," Jack Burden reflects toward the end of All the King's Men while the Boss lies in the hospital mortally wounded by an assassin's bullet. "The theory of the moral neutrality of history, you might call it. Maybe a man has to sell his soul to get the power to do good."

Maybe.

Jack Stanton believes that. Toward the end of Primary Colors, the governor sends Henry and Libby, the campaign's "dust-buster," to dig up dirt on his chief opponent, a mission that, she says, places them in a moral limbo.

Harcourt Brace & Co. has issued a 50th anniversary edition of the classic political novel by Robert Penn Warren. The book was first published in 1946, and became the model for Primary Colors, the 1996 novel about a presidential campaign. This cover illustration on the Harvest Book paperback edition of All the King's Men was done in 1996 by Wendell Minor.

"Remember that stupid song, 'Limbo Rock'? You remember the words? 'How loooooowwwww can you gooooooo?' That's us, Henri. We are moral submariners." Not so low, it turns out, as the Stantons, who immediately plot the best way to use the dirt. Henry's had enough, and decides to quit. Stanton tries to talk him out of it: "I thought you got it, Henry. I thought you understood. This is about the ability to lead. It's not about perfection. The question you've got to ask is, what are the options. Only certain kinds of people are cut out for this work — and, yeah, we're not princes, by and large. Two- thirds of what we do is reprehensible. We tell them what they want to hear — and when we tell them something they don't want to hear, it's usually because we've calculated that's what they really want. We live an eternity of false smiles — and why? Because it's the price you pay to lead. You don't think Abraham Lincoln was a whore before he was president? He had to tell his little stories and smile his shit-eating, backcountry grin. He did it all just so he'd get the opportunity, one day, to stand in front of the nation and appeal to 'the better angels of our nature.' That's when the bullshit stops. And that's what this is all about. The opportunity to do that, to make the most of it, to do it the right way — because you know as well as I do there are plenty of people in this game who never think about the folks, much less their 'better angels.' They just want to win." A powerful moment, and Henry wavers. "He could talk all he wanted about an eternity of 'false' smiles," Henry ponders, "his power came from the exact opposite direction, from the authenticity of his appeal, from the stark ferocity of his hunger. There was very little artifice to him. He was truly needy. And now he truly needed me." A tough call, for Henry and for us.

But, alas, we're not a nation of readers anymore, our attention spans have shrunk to a USA Today news nugget or a TV soundbite where there is no room for us to confront the moral architecture of our politics or our lives.

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