Preface to The Presidential Papers
The Presidential Papers (Berkley softcover, October 1976), v-vi (76.13)
It is possible The Presidential Papers has the most cloying mannerisms of any of my books. That is laying a claim. Should I have a vice in writing, it is to be over-mannered when uncertain, and I was not close to large portions of this book. It was conceived out of economic necessity at a time when I was broke, and a paperback publisher succumbed to the cogent conversational skills of my agent Scott Meredith and gave me $10,000 for a collection of short pieces already written, if I would only do some connecting material in the vein of Advertisements For Myself. I confess I did not feel any pain as the wrist was twisted.
That would come later when I had a month to put The Presidential Papers in shape, and came to recognize that I was lumping together some of the best and worst pieces of a four-year period from 1959 to 1963. They did not have much common denominator, not as much as I was hoping would justify the title and the premise that a new concept in politics which might be called existential was on its way.
I brooded over that idea. Of course, a month of fast writing is not a fecund season for entering the best levels of brooding. Once again I was in depression as I wrote, once again I had not let my ideas develop at their own rate. I was guilty of the same crime the premature ecologist in me was ready to condemn in others: over-stimulation of ground not ready for another crop. Of course, that could be the story of a writing life—is there any of my books over the last twelve years which was not written too quickly? It is just that one’s own flaws are never so apparent as in those intercalations called First Presidential Paper, Second Presidential Paper, etc.
Nonetheless, this book has its value. It can be seen as a paradigm of the prodigious anxiety which attached to politics in the early sixties. In the fifties, every subliminal political sense was ready to tell us that the country was being run by the corporations, the FBI, the CIA and the Mafia, and they were working in an overt and covert association so well joined together that nobody could begin to point an accusation without wondering if he were irremediably paranoid. In the sixties, that cancer seal began to crack—Kennedy’s election was the hairline split in the American totalitarianism of the fifties. Some of us may have sensed that through the split would come the submerged wrath of some good American minds.
Such a perception hardly reduced the anxiety. The battles were still ahead, and no one alive had a glimmer of what was actually to come: assassinations, Vietnam, civil rights, and student revolutions. There was only the nightmarish sensation that a lot was going to happen, and much of it would be dreadful.
In that state, therefore, of unfocussed paranoia, trying to throttle one’s own near-suffocated wrath into a reasonable, even an agreeable tone, the style came out in the only way it could. It was arch and it was phony, about as arch and just about as phony as the icing of a Gothic arch on a racketeer’s wedding cake.
Still, I would not steer readers further away from this book. Its anxiety is its anxiety, and its half-satisfied ambition is very much its throttled ambition, but for anyone who would like a clue to the mood of the country in the summer of 1963 just before that autumn of assassination which would change the psychic history of America forever, the book is a document. Besides—I whisper it—The Presidential Papers does have a couple of the better pieces I’ve written. They seemed to emerge out of bad pieces. It is a thought with which to juggle. For America is the most dialectical of nations (or will be until the superhighway paves us over) and the best of our history is coupled as in no other nation with much of our worst. May there be a few lines to that clue in this book.