Results tagged “History” from One Hour to Read

How exactly did this country elect Richard Nixon president twice? It's a difficult question to answer, but this book written after the 1968 election shows in some way how it was done. His handlers that year packaged him as if he were some household product, and it pretty much worked. (I'm glad I was able to purchase this book used at The Strand in New York, so that I got the original cover with Nixon's face on a cigarette box.)

Those running the Nixon campaign (including Roger Ailes, very young then and now the head of Fox News) were convinced that television could help Nixon. After the Kennedy-Nixon campaign, that was an unbelievable claim to many, but the Nixon team were able to show carefully edited pieces on television that showed only the best of Nixon. Their commercials were also rather groundbreaking -- often just a series of powerful still images with a Nixon speech in the background. One of the most powerful depicted scenes of violence and chaos, all while Nixon spoke about the need for greater law and order in America. 

The Nixon team was also obsessed with how much the media were against them. They were convinced that the television networks would pick only the worst shot of Nixon each day, so they purposefully had Nixon make just one televised event a day. That way, the networks would have only one shot to choose from and couldn't screw over Nixon, as was their alleged wont.

Nixon speechwriter Ray Price said this about Nixon's "spontaneity" in November 1967:

We have to capture and capsule this spontaneity -- and this means shooting RN (Richard Nixon) in situations in which it's likely to emerge, then having a chance to edit the film so that the parts shown are the parts we want shown.

Ah, yes, that spontaneous Nixon!

This quote comes from the last quarter of the book, which just contains a series of memos written by the Nixon staff. I'm not sure why they would allow these memos to get into the hands of McGinniss, but in many ways this is the most fascinating parts of the book. Here, for example, is what Nixon aide Harry Treleaven said in one memo about magazine advertising:

Rich, warm advertising in a woman's own medium, the service magazine, next to her cake mixes and her lipstick advertisements will go a long way, I believe, toward making Mr. Nixon acceptable to female viewers.

The Nixon people seemed to be good at what they did, but they didn't exactly have the best candidate to work with. Nixon aide Harry Treleaven explains one issue:

Then we had the basic problem of Nixon's personality. There were certain things people just would not buy about the guy. For instance, he loves to walk on the beach, but we couldn't send a camera out to film him picking up seashells. That would not have been credible.

I'm not entirely sure about this book. It's an awesome read, but I do have some questions about its authenticity.  I mean, all these Nixon people wouldn't have wanted to be quoted by him. How could they have been that naive when everything else in the book shows them so professional?  

I used to be more of Kennedy guy than a Nixon guy. I would read all sorts of stuff about JFK, but now I've come to be more fascinated with Nixon. He's such an incredibly odd and unlikely politician. He should have been the power behind the throne, and yet somehow with the most awkward personality he was elected twice.

One final note: The author is in the news this week. That's because McGinniss moved from Alaska this week. This is the same Joe McGinniss, who is writing a book about Sarah Palin and rented the house next to her. Sarah Palin, of course, reacted by building a large fence, and you get the feeling the Nixon people should have done that as well.

I haven't been around these parts lately because, like last summer, I decided to tackle a several hundred page book for the summer. This time, it was a 700-page book about the rise of the modern media. Like "War and Peace," this wasn't such a great beach read either, but it was enjoyable. I'm a sucker for any book about people like Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Woodward and Bernstein, and John Kennedy.

This book is especially interesting because it was written in 1979 about the rise of modern media, and coincidentally that's about the time the fall of modern media began. Halberstam charts the course of four major media companies from the 1950s through the 1970s -- CBS, The Washington Post, Time, and the Los Angeles Times. Among other things, the book seems to be about the consolidation of modern media and its massive influence on the country, which in some ways has become deconsolidated since then. Sure, we have much larger media monopolies now, but with all the online platforms the power any one of these news outlets wields seems to have diminished. 

Halbserstam alternates between the four organizations. I found I really loved the parts about CBS and the Washington Post, while I didn't always care about the Los Angeles Times and Time.That's probably just because of my personal tastes though.  I have to admit that I didn't know the latter two were such conservative beacons. Back in the 1950s, Time seemed to be far more Republian than Fox News is today, while the Los Angeles Times practically invented Richard Nixon. It's interesting that 1960 was really the first challenging election Nixon ever had since the Times made his California elections so easy.

While it was interesting, I think that 700 words was a bit more than I needed to know about all this. I just didn't always need to know about all the obscure editors of these newspapers. I was also a little disappointed in the book when I did some research online afterwards. For example, are news anchors in Sweden really called Cronkiters? Um, no, though Halberstam seems to think so. This came up again when Cronkite died recently and that little tidbit made it into all the obituaries, even if it was news to the people of Sweden. Halberstam was apparently the first source for this misinformation.  

Also, the "Cronkite Moment" is a bit disputed. Lyndon Johnson allegedly said that if he lost Cronkite he lost America right after watching Cronkite's unfavorable documentary about the Vietnam War. Others have shown that Johnson could not have seen it because he was in Texas giving a speech at the time of the broadcast. It's a good story though, and personally I like to think that LBJ would have Tivoed the program.

Finally, I always enjoy a bit of synergy in my reading, such as when Halberstam writes about Teddy White's career at Time. Earlier this year, I read White's "The Making of the President." Also, while at Harvard in the 1930s, Teddy White received a Sheldon Traveling Fellowship, "highly prized among his peers," to go to China. One of our students actually won this fellowship last year to study in Belgium with his advisor, though I had no idea at all that it was highly prized. I thought it was mainly just convenient, since it meant that we wouldn't have to cover his stipend.

I seem to have a thing lately for history books that were written at the time. This study of the 1960 election was published in 1961, and I love how I can read about Kennedy and Nixon without having to think about Kennedy's assassination, Watergate, Vietnam, or anything else that was to happen later. This book is so firmly in the moment, and that's what great about it.

It's something of a classic. Whereas now it seems that just about every reporter came out with an instant book about the 2008 election, this was really the first behind the scenes account of a political campaign. It helps that 1960's race was one of the most interesting in history. White had access to all the major players, well, except Nixon himself, but that's understandable. Nixon didn't seem to be talking to anyone.

Speaking of Nixon, from reading this, it doesn't really seem that Kennedy won this election as much as Nixon lost it. Throughout the book, Nixon comes across almost as a sympathetic figure. He never recovered from an infected knee for which he spent part of the fall in the hospital. He forced himself to campaign in all fifty states in an insane schedule that practically destroyed him. That's part of the reason he looked so sick in the debates with Kennedy. He also refused to consult with his staff much of the time, insisting on making decisions without consulting anyone. Some of the odd decisions he made seem to have  doomed his campaign, and it feels surprising that he came so close to winning. 

White talks a lot about each candidate's all-purpose speech, the one each trotted out at every ordinary campaign stop. Every day, Kennedy would talk about how he wanted to get the country moving again and Nixon would talk about Peace and Prosperity. It made me realize how much tougher it is for candidates these days. With so many of their events on cable news, there must be an incredible pressure to come up with new material each time. 

I remember watching Obama and Clinton's primary speeches every week in 2008 and feeling bored because they were saying the same thing each week. Well, they're supposed to do that. Back then, the candidates seemed more like stand-up comedians, using the same trusted material each night and only gradually working in new material.

I'm not sure why, but I'm still on my Watergate kick. The cliché about Watergate is that "it's not the crime, it's the coverup." But you know, the crime was pretty bad. Or rather the crimes were. There were years of dirty tricks, and I wonder if even now it's all out there.

This classic by the reporters who broke the story was endlessly fascinating to me. The only problem was that for the life of me I couldn't keep track of who everyone was. There's Haldeman and Ehrlichman, John Dean and John Mitchell, Colson and Clawson, Liddy (wait I know him! He's the one with the mustache), Macgruder, McGregor, McCord, Nixon (name rings a bell, but I can't quite place him), and so many others.

I almost feel as if I need to read the original Washington Post articles in order to figure it all out, but that probably wouldn't work either. The amazing thing about the Nixon Administration is that Vice President Spiro Agnew had to resign for crimes that had nothing to do with Watergate. In any other administration, Agnew would be all that we remembered, and here he's barely mentioned.

It turns out that not only do I love gossip about today's journalists, but I also love it about the journalists of yesterday. Timothy Crouse's "The Boys on the Bus" is full of it, as this is a book in which he followed around the media on the 1972 presidential campaign. For example, for some reason, I delighted in learning that CBS reporters felt Walter Cronkite was such an air hog that they used to say CBS had "Walter-to-Walter coverage."

1972 seems to be a pivotal year, because this book is full of people who would go onto more fame later. And some of the sections are particularly telling. After Memo-gate, this passage about Dan Rather shouldn't be too surprising:

He was famous in the trade for the times when he by-passed these formulas and "winged it" on a story. Rather would go with an item even if didn't have it completely nailed down with verifiable facts. If a rumor sounded solid to him, if he believed it in his gut or had gotten it from a man who struck him as honest, he would let it rip.

I also like this quote from Brit Hume because it seems to sum up much of what Fox News claims to stand for. The Fox News anchor was then an assistant to columnist Jack Anderson:

"Those [reporters] on the plane ... claim that they're trying to be objective. They shouldn't try to be objective, they should try to be honest. And they're not being honest.... They report what one candidate said, then they go and report what the other candidate said with equal credibility. They never get around to finding out if the guy is telling the truth.... What they pass off as objectivity is just a mindless kind of neutrality."

The print journalists are well represented here as well with long sections on legendary journalists like David Broder, Woodward and Bernstein, Jack Germond, Robert Novak, and others.

In short, this is just a great book, and some of the issues from 1972 are still relevant today. You'll see a lot of Barack Obama's campaign in McGovern's campaign. Unlike Obama, McGovern never did figure out how to transform an outsider primary campaign into a successful general election campaign.

And journalism seemed a lot more, um, entertaining back then. Here's Crouse's description of the "Zoo Plane," the overflow plane for the press who weren't quite important enough to travel on George McGovern's plane:

The excitement of riding the Zoo Plane sprang from the fact that all rules had been totally suspended. As the plane took off on the first flight of the morning, half the reporters crowded into the galleys, mixing themselves Bloody Marys from the endless supplies of free booze.... As the FASTEN SEAT BELT signs still flashed their warning, other reporters worked their way up the aisle to fetch their own breakfasts and make more drinks....

There were drugs on the plane too, pot, hash, MDA, cocaine. And those who indulged in such stimulants swore that there was no greater thrill than standing in the cockpit as the plane came in for a landing, listening to the crackle of the radio, surrounded by green and orange dials, watching the bright blue lights of the runway rush up at the window as the powerful engines cut back.... Every night, the pilots played to an overflow crowd in the cockpit.

Ah, yes, the golden days of journalism.

A True Tale of Hollywood, Golf, and Armed Robbery

It says a lot about Leigh Montville that I read a book about golf just because he wrote it. I have no interest in golf at all, but luckily this is more than a book about golf. It's also a book about 1930s crime and Hollywood stars. John Montague was thought by some to be the best amateur golfer in the world, yet no one could figure out why he never played professionally. That had something to do with the fact that he was wanted for armed robbery and didn't want his pictures in the paper. Despite that, he was a friend of Bing Crosby, Humphrey Bogart, Oliver Hardy, and other famous Hollywood stars, all because he could play golf like nobody else.

Montville's previous books were bestsellers about Ted Williams and Babe Ruth. Now, he's decided to write about an obscure golfer from the 1930s that few remember. I hate it when authors pander to the public like that to make a quick buck.

I first read Montville when he wrote for The Boston Globe in the 1980s. My father would pick me up an hour late from school, so that I could spend the time in the school library doing my homework -- or, as the case may be, read The Boston Globe sports page instead of doing my homework. The Globe back then featured an all-star cast including Gammons, Ryan, McDonough, Collins, and Montville. Montville was not as heralded as the others, but he may have been the best. He wasn't strictly a humor writer, but he nevertheless taught me how to write a humor column. Alas, he didn't help quite so much with algebra.

He now writes biographies, though they always have funny moments. And the man clearly loves to tell a good yarn. His books are full of little nuggets that often have nothing to do with the book as a whole, except that they are entertaining. He'll even occasionally include stories that are probably not true -- with proper warning, of course -- just because they are good stories. And that's just the kind of biography I like.

I picked this book up because someone recommended a book by somebody else. That's how it works sometimes. I was planning to read Tim Crouse's "The Boys on the Bus" about the reporters who covered the 1972 presidential campaign when I came across this one instead. Both Crouse and Thompson covered the 1972 campaign for Rolling Stone, and so it made sense to read this when Crouse's book was checked out of the library.

This is where I confess that I have never really liked Hunter S. Thompson. A long time ago, I tried reading "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and just couldn't get through more than about 20 pages. I didn't really expect to read more than 20 pages of this book either. I figured I would give it a try and then -- since it's a library book -- just cut my losses when it got too weird. And yet while it did get too weird at times, it still hooked me. I loved reading about McGovern, Muskie, Humphrey, Wallace, and all these other political figures of whom I was only vaguely aware.

I was occasionally on the campaign trail myself this year for the New Hampshire primary, so that's part of the reason the book appealed to me. At one point, Thompson writes about driving from Cambridge to New Hampshire to go to some campaign events. Hey, that's just like what I was doing, I thought. Key difference: He was writing for Rolling Stone, while I was writing for my web site. Also, I didn't have an open bottle of Wild Turkey on my lap while making the drive.

There is even someone in here that I have met. That would be Missouri Senator Thomas Eagleton, who was McGovern's vice-presidential pick, until it was revealed that Eagleton had been previously treated for nervous exhaustion with electro-shock treatment. Eagleton was later dropped from the ticket and replaced by Sargent Shriver.

I met Eagleton, because after he retired from the Senate in 1987, he went on to be a political science professor at Washington University where I took a course he offered. And, wow, would this ever be a more fascinating entry, if I could remember anything about the course. I think it had something to do with the New Deal, but I'm not quite sure. I do remember one session in which a student actually asked him about the shock therapy and how he thought it affected his career, but I may not have heard his response because I was too busy cringing.

Sadly, from our perspective, the course might as well have been called Political Science 345: Advanced Study of Crazy Ex-Senators Who Might Have Been Vice-President if not for the Electro-Shock Therapy.

At any rate, I seem to have gone off on a tangent, but that's fitting because this whole book is full of tangents. In some ways, Dr.Thompson is blogging here years before blogging even existed, though I'm sure many others have already made that same observation.

Finally, on the long list of things only Hunter S. Thompson could get away with, we can add doing a Q&A with the editor for the end of a book because you were too stoned, drunk, sick, or whatever to finish writing the damn thing. It's an interesting literary technique, having your editor come in to interview you because you can't finish your book. And so most of the last 50 pages read like so:

Ed: Do you have any more to say about this book before we wrap up this entry?

JDL: Not really, though I did like the part about the venerable NBC newsman of my youth John Chancellor being addicted to LSD.

Ed: Is that really true?

JDL: No, I'm pretty sure Thompson made it all up, but I still enjoyed the image of Chancellor on LSD while delivering the news. I was slightly disappointed not to read about Walter Cronkite being addicted to cocaine or something.

Ed: This technique tends to work a lot better when Hunter S. Thompson is doing it, don't you think?

JDL: I would have to say yes.

There are many things I learned in this book, including:

In addition to being a football coach, Knute Rockne also taught chemistry at Notre Dame. No one could motivate someone to study a molecule quite like Knute Rockne.

Maury Povich's father, Shirley Povich, was a famous sportswriter in Washington who wrote for over 60 years. Because of his first name, he was also the only man listed in the 1962 edition of Who's Who in American Women.

Not only did most teams pay for the travel of reporters, often the reporters shared hotel rooms with the ballplayers themselves. Imagine Dan Shaughnessy rooming with Curt Schilling or Manny Ramirez!

In the 1920s, when he was covering the St. Louis Cardinals and Browns, Ray Gillespie says he had a half-dozen roommates who were players:

Some of them would watch me while I was writing. Once a player said, "That's not correct. That's not what the argument was about." So I changed my story.

This is a great book, if you like sports history. Like Lawrence Ritter's "The Glory of Our Times," it is an oral history of the golden age of sports, but the people interviewed here are the reporters rather than the players. In the 1970s, Holtzman interviewed 24 sportswriters who wrote between the two world wars. It's fascinating to read about the life reporters led back then.
 

Sure, there was as much alcohol as you would expect. New York sportswriter Richards Vidmer starts his interview by saying, "Hell, I should have been dead twenty years ago," and, well, he should have been. He talks about one night when he wanted to see a guy in the hotel room next to him:

I'd been drinking. Instead of going around the corner and walking in through the door, I climbed out my window and crawled from one ledge to the other.

This was on the 12th floor! Obviously, "I'd been drinking" may be the biggest understatement in the entire book.

Reporters then were much closer to the players. Even if they weren't sharing hotel rooms with players like Gillespie did, they did take long train trips with the players, and often spent time socially with them. If a reporter wanted to rip a player -- and many still did -- they couldn't hide from the players quite like they can today. More than one of these newpapermen have stories of a ballplayer threatening to beat him up because of a story.

In some ways, it was also a more genteel life. The games were played during the day. Reporters could crank out their stories in the early evening and then have the rest of the night to themselves. A few in here even said that night baseball ruined the job of the baseball reporter.

While there are many different opinions offered in here, a few themes do emerge. There is too much of a focus on statistics today, rather than the game itself. Reporters also spend way too much time writing about the personal lives of athletes today.  (In the words of Al Abrams: "What they did on their time didn't have anything to do with their baseball careers.") And, finally, reporters rely too much on "wooden quotes" from the participants, rather than just writing about what they saw at the game. (Al Laney had a good quote about how quotes can clutter up a story, but in deference to him, I'm not going to use it.)

Interestingly, I recognized stories in here from other sports books I've read that obviously used this as source material -- most notably Leigh Montville's "The Big Bam" about Babe Ruth and Brad Snyder's "A Well Paid Slave" about Curt Flood and the fight against baseball's reserve clause.

Those are just two examples I noticed, but with all the great stories in here, I'm sure there are dozens of others that also used this as source material.

My Mother, Nancy Dickerson TV News' First Woman Star

John Dickerson is one of my favorite political reporters, meaning that I read all of his articles in Slate, listen to him on their weekly podcast, and am actually excited when he appears on "Washington Week in Review." Lest I seem too nerdy, I don't actually watch "Washington Week in Review." No, I listen to the podcast version. Okay, never mind, that makes me more nerdy.

This book is about his mother Nancy Dickerson, one of the first woman correspondents in TV news. After a few years as a producer, she became a correspondent for CBS News in 1960 and then worked for NBC News for most of the 1960's. I confess that I hadn't heard of her before. Admittedly, I wasn't alive when she was a star correspondent, though she was enough of a star that I'm surprised that I didn't know about her.

Her specialty was politics, and she was close to members of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, sometimes a little too close. She was often criticized for having too close a relationship to Johnson especially, though this was mostly because Lyndon Baines Johnson seemed to have a crush on her. It doesn't seem that there was any romantic relationship between them, though not for lack of trying on LBJ's part. At one point, during the 1960 campaign, Johnson had a few drinks and wandered into her hotel room in his pajamas to proposition her. She politely turned him down, and so he stayed in her room and talked about politics instead. Somehow, the pajamas make this story slightly classier than otherwise.

Later, during his Vice-Presidency, he was in Sweden, and knew that Nancy Dickerson was in Vienna on vacation. He then had the White House operators track her down, so that he could invite her to dinner in Paris. Again, she politely turned him down, but it's an amazing story. Ah, those were the days. Now, I don't think the Vice-President could be flown from Sweden to Paris in order to meet an attractive reporter for dinner in Paris. I think there has to be another reason for an Official State Visit.

Of course, I'm making the same mistake that others did at the time, by focusing on only the gossip. She was a remarkably hard-working reporter, as her son makes clear. As you can imagine, she didn't always get much respect from her colleagues in the press, though she did have important backers like Edward R. Murrow and Eric Servareid. She was a solid reporter, though she also tended to rely a little too much on her social connections to aid her reporting.

Dickerson is a great writer and writes a book that is also about himself, in addition to being about his mother. Some might complain about this, but I think it's interesting when he explores their relationship. He wasn't at all close to his mother during his teen years and tended to think she was a bit of a phony at the time, though he grew closer to her in her later years. In all, he handles some occasionally difficult material with ease. You try writing about the fact that your mother dated JFK. (They only went on a few dates in the early 1950s before Jackie.)

I've been meaning to read this book for a long time, and I'm not sure what took me so long. It's by a writer whose work I enjoy. It's about TV news, and I'm always a sucker for books about TV news. And it contains all sorts of behind-the-scenes material about JFK. Throw in some baseball and a little time travel, and it would have been just perfect.

Blue Bloods and Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age

So my one hour of reading a day didn't fare so well with this selection. Way back when, as a Masters student in British History, I did a thesis on the first Conservative Women in the House of Commons (1919-1939), of which Nancy Astor was the very first. I wasn't a good historian, and it wasn't a particularly good thesis. (The core of my argument was such: There were these women, you know, and they were conservative, and they happened to be in the House of Commons.)



Nevertheless, Lady Astor was a dynamic character. I chose this book because while I knew all about Lady Astor, I never really have known very much about the famous Astor family, and I thought I should rectify that. Also, it was in the remainders section for $4.99.

So now I know way too much about the Astors, and even more about their New York hotels. There are entire chapters in here devoted to their luxury hotels. This isn't at all a bad book. It's just that I didn't really care. I like biographies, but biographies of families tend to lose me. There were five John Jacob Astors, several Williams, and a couple of Waldorfs on the side. I confess I started to mix them all up. Besides, my Lady Astor, who married into the family, is only mentioned on five pages.

I'm also not surprised that I fell off the reading wagon the moment I started reading a book related to what I was studying during my year in graduate school. After that year, I was so tired of history that for a few years I couldn't even watch the History Channel, never mind read history.

The portrait of Lady Astor is by John Singer Sargent, via Wikipedia.

Curt Flood's Fight for Free Agency in Professional Sports

In some ways, reading this was penance for reading the Jose Canseco book. I meant to start the baseball season with a good baseball book, you know something substantial. But I was stuck reading Vindicated instead. A Well-Paid Slave, of course, is a much better selection. In here, Snyder does a great job of explaining the battle over baseball's reserve clause.

Admittedly, it's not your typical baseball book. Let's just say that I don't usually come across quite so many Supreme Court Justices in my normal baseball reading. This one is chock full of them. Thurgood Marshall, Whizzer White, Arthur Goldberg, Chief Justice Warren Burger, and all your favorite justices are here.

The other reason I read this is that I didn't know much about Curt Flood, and for that I felt a little ashamed. While Flood ended up losing his case at the Supreme Court, his challenge to baseball's reserve clause led to the creation of free agency in the 1970s. In terms of impact on the game, he is one of the most important players of all time, and yet most fans probably don't know who he even is. His attempt to fight for free agency led him to give up over $100,000 of salary, lose several years of his career, and flee the country in despair.

While Flood deserves his status as a hero, it's painful to read about him. Sadly, the case practically ruined him. Mostly destitute after losing the case and blackballed from baseball, he ended up living in an alcoholic stupor for the next fifteen years. Finally, in the late 1980s, he was able to give up drinking. By then, also, more players began to recognize his sacrifices. Thankfully, he seemed to enjoy the last ten years of his life, but it's amazing he made it there.

Brad Snyder is a lawyer by trade, so there are long discussions about Supreme Court precedents, which at times were over my head. Still, the story is fascinating. The strangest part is to see how judges handled a trial about baseball. Justice Harry Blackmun, a fanatical baseball fan, wrote the majority opinion in favor of Major League Baseball. The opinion started with a "27-page ode to baseball history," including the entire text of the poem "Casey at the Bat" and a list of Blackmun's 79 favorite baseball players.

Here was a man who could clearly have used a blog in 1971. Having no outlet for his opinions on baseball, Blackmun was forced to include them in a Supreme Court opinion. The next year, he wrote the opinion for Roe v. Wade, which to the best of my knowledge does not include a list of Blackmun's favorite abortionists. I

t's tough to be a baseball fan and a judge deciding baseball's fate. Consider this exchange between the original judge of the case, Irving Cooper, and baseball star Joe Garagiola who was testifying as a witness for Major League Baseball:

"Do you always have a smile like that?" Cooper asked.

"Yes, always," [Garagiola said.]

"That is a blessing."

Garagiola returned the compliment: "I wish you were on a bubble gum card, Judge. I'd have you."

Mind you, this conversation actually took place on the witness stand. So much for impartiality. Apparently, back then if you were a star baseball player, you could use your bar pick-up lines on judges too. Who knew?

How the Brink's Robbers Stole Millions and the Hearts of Boston

I didn't really mean to read this. I planned to buy it as a gift for a friend, but then I noticed that the author was appearing at Porter Square Books. My plan was to go to the reading and then have Stephanie Schorow sign the book to my friend. I cared enough about the Brinks job to spend an hour hearing about it, but I wasn't so sure that I wanted to read a whole book about it.

By the end of the event -- not really a reading, more of an informal lecture on the robbery -- I had decided that I did indeed want to read it. Here was one of those compelling moments of Boston history that I didn't really know anything about. I had heard my parents refer to it, I had heard people wonder where all the Brinks money went, but I knew little about the crime itself. 

It wasn't just the money that helped capture the public's attention, although a One Million Dollar bounty in 1950 certainly helped. It was more the style of the heist that excited everyone. "And nobody got hurt" was a common refrain about the robbery, though Schorow does point out that this wasn't entirely true. In later years, there may have been some murders linked to it, and a hit was even put out on the life of Specs O'Keefe, the man who eventually testified against his partners. You get the feeling that their lack of violence was really more because of luck than anything else.

In some ways, the book is a bit depressing. Here is a book about the "fantastic" Brinks robbery, and all the thieves seem anything but fantastic. They all seem like bumbling criminals, who couldn't keep themselves out of jail. As for the money, Schorow believes that it was spent in small amounts by the criminals. No exciting purchases here. Each got about $100,000, and most squandered the winnings. Not content to squander his own money, Jazz Maffie even squandered O'Keefe's loot too. Note to self: When stealing large sums of money, never have one of your partners look after your share.

This is not to say that the mastermind, Tony Pino, wasn't a smart man. The robbery itself was skilled, and Pino is at times a sympathetic character. I found that I'm especially excited to see the movie too. "The Brinks Job" came out in 1978 and starred Peter Falk, Peter Boyle, and Paul Sorvino.

By the way, I'm still giving it as a gift, even though I read the whole thing. Luckily, the recipient doesn't know about this blog. I don't feel all that guilty either. It seems to me that books are one of the few gifts that the giver is allowed to use beforehand. As long as you treat the book well, I see no harm in this. Whenever people give me a book, I almost expect them to have read the thing first, if only to see if it's right for me.

Weirdest nugget from the book: Specs O'Keefe went into the witness protection program after testifying against his partners and for a short time actually worked for Cary Grant.