Listening to authors’ panels at
the festival added some books to my want-to-read list. Books like The Most Dangerous Man in
America: Timothy Leary, Richard Nixon and the Hunt for the Fugitive King of LSD, by Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis.
Opening long ago in a galaxy not
so very far from our own, President Richard Nixon feels surrounded by enemies.
The bombings, fires, explosions, and calls for his execution might try the soul
of a lesser being, but "even worse, as far as Nixon is concerned, are the
attacks from the Democrats and the media that threaten to undermine his
reelection campaign. He has decided to
strike back, to wage war and do it hard."
I must pause for a moment to note
that although Minutaglio and Davis's description of Nixon's paranoid search for
something – better, someone – to distract the country from his Watergate
troubles sounded presciently topical, Minutaglio and Davis insisted that since
their book was completed in 2016 (although not published until 2018) they had
no contemporary parallels of political paranoia in mind.
The problem, Treasury Secretary
John Connally tells Nixon, is that “You are not identified vis-à-vis an
identifiable character or an identifiable incident, something that stays in the
minds of people.” (Seriously? Yes, this strangely-worded statement was indeed
captured on Nixon’s secret recordings.)
But who to choose as this poster
child anti-Nixon? Should it be a Mafia warlord? No, they need someone still
worse. And so, began a 28-month manhunt for a psychologist, a Harvard don of
the effete elite, a person as violently nonviolent as -- Timothy Leary.
Having finished a follow-up of
the John F. Kennedy assassination (Dallas 1963), Minutaglio and Davis
were ready for another take on the 1960s.
“We decided Timothy was a really
wonderful prism to look at this time period,” Minutaglio said, of the “pope of
dope’s” odyssey from Harvard to the Black Panthers’ embassy in Algeria to
Folsom (as well as numerous other prisons), like “Mr. Magoo on acid,” Davis
said.
Not to mention that the authors
had the interest of Minutaglio’s personal connection to Leary.
“I had met Timothy Leary in
Houston in the early ’80,” said Minutaglio, and the pair stayed in touch. When
Minutaglio, then a Dallas Morning News reporter, found himself assigned
to a story about the Dallas Cowboys during one of the team’s low points looked
for offbeat comments, he contacted Leary. Things would have been better for the
football team, the godfather of the counterculture said, if the Cowboys’
longtime coach Tom Landry “was still alive.”
Landry was in fact, still alive
at the time, and the DMN was flooded with outraged letters from fans.
The Most Dangerous Man in America (be sure to get the Leary version, not all those
books about other characters foolishly deemed “most dangerous”) is available
(of course) at the Dallas Public Library, as well as in bookstores near you.
*
While Minutaglio and Davis
revisit the mid-20th century, another Texas writer, Melissa Lenhardt both revisits and revises the mid-19th in her latest book,
the female outlaw Western, Heresy.
Make that the women-oriented,
gender-bending outlaw Western.
“How hard is it to discover what
women really did in this time?” Lenhardt said in her interview during the
Festival of Books & Ideas. The answer is, very, but she took the liberty to
assume that if there’s no official record of events, there’s no reason women
couldn’t have been involved in them.
After all, she noted, to an
appreciative audience, “Women can be just as murderous and conniving as
men.”
And her characters are based at
least loosely on historical figures. Her favorite is Hattie, a freed slave
based on real-life Buffalo Soldier Cathay Williams. The first enlisted female
U.S. soldier, Williams is also the only woman known to have served in the Army
while posing as a man.
And about the gender-bending
sexuality? How hard was it to write about that while staying true to the
post-Civil War period?
“Writing about people in love –
that’s universal,” Lenhardt said. As for the rest, “They didn’t think of
themselves in the way people think today. . . It is hard,” (she admitted) not
to put a 21st-century take on it."
Again, for those who want to add Heresy
to their summer reading list, it’s available at the Dallas Public Library,
among other locales.
