Like my fellow Brainstorm bloggers, I write in a wide range of genres: articles for disciplinary journals and popular magazines, books for university presses and college undergraduates, dispassionate analyses and calls to arms. My range of subjects is also wide: the American presidency, the politics of gambling, the music of Frank Sinatra, the life and works of C.S. Lewis, the literature of college sports, and so on.
What I can’t write is fiction. I probably read more fiction than anything else, and I am in awe of people who write it well. Richard Russo, Richard Price, P.D. James, and Tom Wolfe: you are my heroes.
And so I offer up two stories — both of them political, both of them true — that I wish I had the talent to recast as short stories, with all the nuance and insight that good fiction affords. (Calling Ward Just, who, starting with his 1973 story collection The Congressman Who Loved Flaubert, has proved time and again that he does this sort of thing better than anyone else — see the Virginia Quarterly Review article Ward Just’s Washington.)
The first story is about a group of students in a Washington-semester program whose instructor had secured an audience for them with former Supreme Court Justice Abraham Fortas. Fortas spent about a half-hour confidently telling the students about the current state of the legal profession, then called for questions. A young man, glancing for the first time at the fact sheet that the instructor had distributed to the class well in advance, said, “It says here that you were on the Supreme Court until 1969. How come you quit?” The color drained from Fortas’s face; his mouth strained unsuccessfully to form words. The instructor called the session to a halt. Later it occurred to him that in the insular, fortified environment Fortas inhabited, no one had ever asked him that question before.
I can name the date and location of the second story: Saturday, August 6, 1972, on the sidewalk outside the Music Box Theatre, on West 45th Street, during the intermission of the play Sleuth. The first act had ended with a jolt, so my friend and I were buzzing about what we thought would happen next. I didn’t notice a man approaching from the right until he was actually shaking my hand. It was Sen. Thomas Eagleton, who was also at the play. Eagleton had been dropped from the Democratic ticket four days before; I’d even read, without thinking much about it, that he and his wife had decided to spend the weekend in New York to get away from politics, which must have seemed the cruelest of professions at the time. But getting away from politics was apparently more than he was willing, or even able, able to do.
We watched Eagleton as he continued to work the crowd. A newsboy came by with the early edition of the Sunday New York Times and showed it to him. The banner headline announced that George McGovern had replaced Eagleton on the ticket with Sargent Shriver. Eagleton took the paper and started reading — it seemed from his posture that this was news to him. I couldn’t see his face.
