Joan Didion - Political Fictions

It is Didions cool perspective on hot issues that has made her work some of the most powerful writing of our time.

Interview

Perceptive. Didion has written one of the best outsider works on the insider game of politics.

Business Week

Powerful. Consistently intriguing and provocative.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Didion is saying that staying informed is like being a good English student, a never-ending assignment to spot unreliable narrators, practice close reading and intuit what lurks between the lines.

Salon

The insistent, inexorable rhythms of Didions prose are like a surgeons strokes. No one else practices quite so precise dissection on the page.

The Boston Globe

Blindingly brilliant.

Kirkus Reviews

Didions prose is as beautifully terse as ever; her observations as precise and deadly.

W magazine

Joan Didion was born in California and lives in New York. She is the author of five novels and five previous books of nonfiction: After Henry, Miami, Salvador, The White Album, and Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

The Year of Magical Thinking
Where I Was From
The Last Thing He Wanted
After Henry
Miami
Democracy
Salvador
The White Album
A Book of Common Prayer
Play It As It Lays
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Run River

FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, SEPTEMBER 2002

Copyright 2001 by Joan Didion

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.,
New York, in 2001.

Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The following essays, some retitled and in somewhat different form, first appeared in The New York Review of Books and are reprinted here by kind permission:

Eye on the Prize (retitled Eyes on the Prize), Something Horrible in El Salvador and The Lion King (portions of the essay titled The West Wing of Oz), The Teachings of Speaker Newt Gingrich (retitled Newt Gingrich, Superstar), The Deferential Spirit (retitled Political Pornography), Clinton Agonistes, Uncovered Washington (retitled Vichy Washington), Gods Country; copyright 1992, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000 by NYREV, Inc. Reprinted by permission of The New York Review of Books. Insider Baseball and Shooters Inc. (a portion of the essay titled The West Wing of Oz) were first published in the The New York Review of Books in 1988, and are adapted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc., from After Henry by Joan Didion, copyright 1992 by Joan Didion.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Didion, Joan.
Political fictions / Joan Didion.
New York : A. A. Knopf, 2001.
p. cm.
1. Political cultureUnited StatesHistory20th century. 2. PresidentsUnited StatesElectionHistory20th century. 3. Presidents United StatesElection2000. 4. Political campaignsUnited StatesHistory20th century. 5. United StatesPolitics and government1989.
E839.5 . D52 2001
973.929dc21
2001093172

eISBN: 978-0-375-41426-8

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1_r1

This book is for Robert Silvers.
It is also for John Gregory Dunne, who lived through
my discovering what he already knew.

E arly in 1988, Robert Silvers of The New York Review of Books asked me if I would do some pieces or a piece about the presidential campaign just then getting underway in New Hampshire. He would arrange credentials. All I had to do was show up, see what there was to see, and write something. I was flattered (a presidential election was a serious story, and no one had before solicited my opinions on one), and yet I kept putting off the only essential moment, which was showing up, giving the thing the required focus. In January and February I was selling a house in California, an easy excuse. In March and April I was buying an apartment in New York, another easy excuse. I had packing to do, then unpacking, painting to arrange, many household negotiations and renegotiations. Clippings and books and campaign schedules kept arriving, and I would stack them on shelves unread. I kept getting new deadlines from The New York Review, but there remained about domestic politics something resistant, recondite, some occult irreconcilability that kept all news of it just below my attention level. The events of the campaign as reported seemed to have taken place in a language I did not recognize. The stakes of the election as presented seemed not to compute. At the very point when I had in my mind successfully abandoned this project to which I could clearly bring no access, no knowledge, no understanding, I got another, more urgent call from The New York Review. The California primary was only days away. The Democratic and Republican national conventions were only weeks away. The office could put me on a campaign charter the next day, Jesse Jackson was flying out of Newark to California, the office could connect me in Los Angeles with the other campaigns. It so happened that my husband was leaving that day to do some research in Ireland. It so happened that our daughter was leaving that day to spend the summer in Guatemala and Nicaragua. There seemed, finally, no real excuse for me not to watch the California primary (and even to vote in it, since I was still registered in Los Angeles County), and so I went to Newark, and got on the plane. From the notes I typed at three the next morning in a room at the Hyatt Wilshire in Los Angeles, after a rally in South Central and a fundraiser at the Hollywood Palace and a meet-and-greet at the housing project where the candidate was to spend what remained of the night (Would you call this Watts, the reporters kept saying, and Who knows about guns? Who makes an AK?), my introduction to American politics:

I was told the campaign would be leaving Newark at 11:30 and to be at the Butler Aviation terminal no later than 10:30. Delmarie Cobb was to be the contact. At Butler Aviation the man on the gate knew nothing about the Jackson campaign but agreed to make a phone call, and was told to send me to Hangar 14. Hangar 14, a United hangar, was locked up except for a corrugated fire door open about two feet off the ground. Some men who approached knew nothing about any Jackson plane, they were just telephone, but they limboed under the fire door and I followed them.

The empty hangar. I walked around Malcolm Forbess green 727, Capitalist Tool, looked around the tarmac, and found no one. Finally a mechanic walked through and told me to try the office upstairs. I did. The metal door to the stairs was locked. I ran after the mechanic. He said he would pick the lock for me, and did. Upstairs, I found someone who told me to go to Post J.