I thought I’d wrapped up my Southern Discomfort bibliography but I remembered one more book, Birth of the Chess Queen by Marilyn Yalom.
A major plot point in Southern Discomfort is when Gwalchmai and Olwen agree to settle their blood feud with a chess game; whoever wins, they strike the other’s head off. Maria, hearing this, thinks Olwen’s nuts but the elf replies that she’s been playing for centuries, both the classic game and the new “queen’s chess.”
That throwaway bit was inspired by Yalom’s book. As she details, the king’s companion in the earliest chess sets was the vizier, a piece that moved one square diagonally. When chess reached Europe, the vizier became the queen but still had only one diagonal square per move. Many variant forms of chess sprang up, however, and the one that one out had the queen as the powerful piece she is today; Yalom sees that as tying in to the medieval presence of strong queens such as Eleanor of Aquitane. It’s a good book and added a nice little detail to my novel, showing that Olwen is, from the human POV, really, really old.
JEKYLL (2007) stars Middleman‘s Matt Keeslar as a scientist on the brink of marriage, struggling to balance his research time with his fiancee and her father’s insistent demands he move into more lucrative private practice. Jekyll is obsessed with the idea that if we could tap into our minds, we could unleash an inner healing power (reminiscent of the same “woo” in Jekyll and Hyde … Together Again). After an encounter with a sexy stripper at his bachelor party, what he unleashes with his computer mind-adjuster is, of course, Hyde (due to the videogame being played on the same computer, he dons the requisite Victorian look).
This didn’t quite work for me though I’m not sure why. It may be something as simple as having OD’ed on the story by this point, or that I watched it on the weekend (I’d normally be watching movies for fun). It’s well cast and the character bits are interesting. Jekyll’s fiancee is close to the kind of woman I thought Bess Armstrong would be in Together Again and it’s clear the Carew family dysfunction will mess Jekyll up if he marries her. Utterson is a woman, Jekyll’s BFF, and has some romantic interest in him too. Jekyll and Hyde bleed into each other more than usual: Hyde’s moved when he learns his mistress really cares about him and the feelings Jekyll normally represses start to bubble out even when he’s not Hyde. I’ll see what I think of it when I give it another look. “I think he went home. Normal people do that.”
Image from Through the Looking Glass by John Tenniel
Continuing my look at books that I used as research for Southern Discomfort, or that shed an informative light on the 1970s. Illustrations are randomly selected 1970s images.
NO DIRECTION HOME: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline, 1968-1980 by Natasha Zaretsky argues that 1970s America saw the seismic shocks of the oil crisis, defeat in Vietnam and the loss of millions of good-playing blue-collar jobs as blows to the American family, not just the nation. Vietnam holding American prisoners of war, for example, deprived military families of husbands and fathers; the Arabs (or the oil companies) jacking up prices left families financially strapped, and so on. Even the Bicentennial devoted a lot of time to families as stressing roots and heritage played to minorities and activists who didn’t feel much like celebrating America.
Interpreting all this was another matter. Did losing the Vietnam War mean America had lost its military prowess or that we’d simply over-reached? Had OPEC made us the Arab nations’ play-toy or was the problem that Americans had become too greedy, consuming too much? A lot of the debate blamed women for whatever the problem was: women who didn’t want to give up family leadership when their husband came home, permissive moms whose spoiled kids became radical protesters, cold mothers who drove kids crazy, etc. Zaretsky concludes, however, that the sense of the decade as dysfunctional and despairing (as in Invisible Bridge) didn’t take hold until Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign portrayed the 1970s as the decade of The Family Besieged with himself as the solution. An interesting job.
THE SKIES BELONG TO US: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking by Brendan I. Koerner focuses on the 1972 skyjacking by party girl Cathy Kernow and unstable veteran Roger Holder hoped to arrange a pardon for radical black activist Angela Davis. Instead, they wound up traveling to Algeria and hanging with Eldridge Cleaver, relocating to Paris and then parting (Holder came home, Kernow vanished, possibly into a new identity). Mixed in with this is the overall history of the Age of Skyjacking from the comical (one guy hijacked a plane to get to Smackover Arkansas) to the horrifying (a hijacker contemplated crashing the plane into a nuclear power plant) and the airlines’ reluctance at the to deal with it (protesting not only the cost of metal detectors, but the prospect of delaying passengers by using them). Koerner argues that just as headlines about skyjackers prompted more skyjacking, so the gradual slowdown in the early 1970s (the result of better security and foreign nations refusing to provide safe haven) choked the trend of oxygen (of course, the drop then led to everyone relaxing their security until 9/11). A good job covering one of those things that would have been universally familiar in 1973, when Southern Discomfort takes place, but no longer.
I read THE 70s HOUSE by David Heathcote to add a little visual detail to the scenes in people’s homes. Unfortunately this was less about typical houses and more a view of broad trends (modernism; efforts to blend modernism with traditional local styles; rehabbing older houses rather than building new) with various high-end homes offered as examples. Still it did give me some ideas and it’s a good book in its own right.
I read OUR KIND OF PEOPLE: Inside America’s Black Upper Class by Lawrence Otis Graham when it came out in the 1990s, but it holds up well as it examines the various groups, cliques, sororities and schools popular with generations of well-to-do blacks (though some of those institutions were losing ground as integration and entry into the white world became more acceptable); whether they’re bastions of snobbery or simply like calling to like (“We’re selective because we associate with people we have something in common with.”); the movers and shakers in different cities around the country; and passing (confirming my view that Lovecraft Country botched that aspect). I reread it because one character, Liz Mitchell, comes from the Atlanta black upper class, and it forced me to revise my concept of her: women in the circles Graham writes about were expected to be more than just housewives so Liz having career ambitions wouldn’t be at all a shock to her family.
REMEMBERING JIM CROW: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South by editors William Henry Chafe and Raymond Gavins collects dozens of stories from back in the days of segregation, courtesy of a Duke University project. These include little humiliations (walking miles past a neighborhood school because it was whites-only), terrifying threats and the institutional road blocks against improving things. What surprised me the most was the number of accounts where the tale-teller fought back against the system despite the risks. Refusing to enter the house by the back door. Saying no. Threatening violence if whites didn’t back off. Or simply negotiating for a brief pass across the color lines, like eating in a restaurant during a trip. This plays into my setting, Pharisee, under the influence of Aubric and Olwen McAlister, being a better place for African Americans — though as some of them point out in the novel, being better than Jim Crow is not the same as being good.
SOUTHERN STORM: Sherman’s March to the Sea by Noah Andre Trudeau wasn’t as relevant as I’d thought as Pharisee County’s history in the Civil War faded into a footnote by the final draft. In its own right a good look at the battles Sherman’s troops faced, the angry reactions of the Georgia residents faced with scavenging “bummers” (back then a name for soldiers who went out to scrounge) and the bummers efforts — if I was writing a story about an army living off the land, this would be an excellent resource for that.
All rights to images remain with current holders. Covers top to bottom by Ernie Chan, Chan again, and John Romita.
My Southern Discomfort protagonist, Maria Esposito, served as an Army nurse in ‘nam. That lead me to include HOME BEFORE MORNING: The True Story of an Army Nurse in Vietnam by Lynda Van Devanter in my research.
Van Devanter’s autobiography tells how she and her best friend went from nurse to Army nurse in a burst of idealism (if our boys were fighting for freedom, shouldn’t they help?), only to enter a harrowing world of desperate surgeries and triage, random enemy attacks and sudden death, which they survive with the help of love affairs, booze and pot (when the book came out in the early 1980s the portrayakl of medical staff working under the influence outraged some people). When “Van” returns after a year in ‘nam, she’s stuck with PTSD, an intensely anti-war stance (joining Vietnam Veterans Against the War), a vanished best friend (she never learns what happened to her) and a country that doesn’t quite grasp women can be veterans too. Very good in its own right, this was a major inspiration for the China Beach TV series.
AMERICAN DAUGHTER GONE TO WAR: On the Front Lines With an Army Nurse in Vietnam by Winnie Smith is also a well-executed memoir. It’s interesting to compare the personal lives of the two women which shows Vietnam nurses, like almost any group, aren’t a monolith. Smith has a much tidier life, with fewer affairs and no drugs stronger than booze and tobacco until after she returned home. She’s also much angrier than van Devanter, resenting rear-echelon officers and pampered USO stars while in the service, then the trivial problems of the patients she was dealing with in the states. Smith initially resented Van Devanter’s book too — all that whining, why couldn’t she suck it up like Smith had? — but came to realize the war had scarred her too.
After reading them I made a deliberate decision not to have Maria PTSDed from the war. Not everyone does and I don’t think I could write it well if I tried. As I’ve not written anything disrespectful of the people who do deal with PTSD, I think that should be okay.
Mixed-race relationships played a smaller role in Southern Discomfort than I’d planned (Maria was mixed-race at one point; for various reasons I decided I couldn’t make that work), otherwise I might not have read WHAT COMES NATURALLY: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America by Peggy Pascoe as research. The book takes its subtitle from Pascoe showing how “black” was a legal definition more than biological: to determine which marriages crossed the color line required laws identifying whether the cutoff was one-eighth, one-quarter or a single drop of black blood.
Pascoe looks at how miscegenation was coined in the 19th century as a more scientific sounding replacement for “amalgamation,” and the various court cases, laws and rationales for banning intermarriage (a longstanding and eerily familiar argument being that there was no discrimination as the laws applies to blacks and whites alike). All of which took various forms around the country, expanding to anti-Asian bans on the west coast while Oklahoma exempted white men who married native women (it was one way for native land to pass into white hands). The rise of organized resistance was extremely gradual: the NAACP didn’t want to jeopardize other civil-rights goals, other black leaders, such as Marcus Garvey, didn’t support intermarriage. The final victory in Loving was far from inevitable, given that a similar case had greenlit the marriage without changing the law. Very good. Very good.
I’m not sure now if I read VAGRANT NATION: Police Power, Constitutional Change and the Making of the 1960s by Risa Goluboff because Maria was a vagrant or if I read it because I’m a dork, then used some of the information. Goluboff looks at how cops routinely used vagrancy laws to coerce drifters, vagabonds and the unemployed into taking jobs for shit wages because the laws made it a crime for someone who was unemployed and with no fixed abode to refuse a job offer.
In theory, this let the authorities maintain order by corralling suspicious strangers, wanderers and people hanging around (for example) jewelry stores with no particular purpose. In practice it was an incredibly flexible concept that allowed cops to bust anyone they didn’t approve of — labor organizers, hippies, interracial couples, civil rights activists, homosexuals and buskers. Goluboff traces the challenges to vagrancy laww from 1949 (the first major challenge) through the Papachristou case that finally got them declared unconstitutional. This is a very dense, slow-going book, but it’s worth it if this kind of legal history interests you.
As Maria, my protagonist, is Italian-American, I read AN OFFER WE CAN’T REFUSE: The Mafia in the Mind of America by George de Stefano. It looks at the history of Italian-Americans and bias against them, particularly the stereotype that they’re all mobbed up (as opposed to a reality in which lots of ethnicities have been involved in organized crime). That in turn leads to a look at The Godfather and The Sopranos, which was ongoing at the time the book came out.
While de Stefano dislikes the stereotype, he actually loves the Godfather films for how awash they are in Italian culture, and The Sopranos for updating the stereotypes (suburban gangsters who are conscious they’re not playing at the Corleone level). While sympathetic to the anti-defamation groups that condemn Mafia fiction, de Stefano dismisses the arguments that Italian Americans get it worse than anyone else (“We’re not pulled over for driving while Italian.”) and accuses some of the critics of rejecting their roots (i.e., they’re upscale enough to be embarrassed at the Corleone’s Old World ways). Interesting
ARE ITALIANS WHITE?: How Race Is Made in America is a collection of essays edited by Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno that concludes the answer is yes. While Italians were often considered an inferior race to Real Americans there were no serious attempts to class them as colored, so they could gain citizenship, voting rights and other benefits black Americans were denied. The essays discuss the broad and diverse approach of Italians to the race question (from radicals who opposed all forms of racism to people who cemented their claim to be white by dumping on blacks) to individual profiles such as Giancarlo Esposito and his roles in Spike Lee’s films (he argues that Lee actually does a better job capturing Italian-American life than he does black). Useful in developing some of Maria’s family backstory, also a reminder that yes, race in America does have a subjective element.
As my setting of Pharisee, Georgia is predominantly Irish-ancestry, I looked at their history too. According to HOW THE IRISH BECAME WHITE by Noel Ignatiev, the early Irish immigrants were seen the lowest of the low, little better than blacks, and considered by Protestant America the ones most likely to “amalgamate” with blacks. This attitude had its roots in England, which began looking down its nose at the Irish after conquering it, plus many Irish supported abolishing slaver. Others saw supporting abolition as too risky: they wanted American support for Irish independence and didn’t want to alienate slaveholders. Many Irish embraced the bullshit that the life of a slave, with guaranteed shelter and food, was easy compared to that of the real slaves, the white working men (Frederick Douglass pointed out that if they really believed that, his running away had left a slave position vacant). Beyond that, racism against free blacks became common, both before and after the Civil War. Free blacks doing the same job as whites was seen as lowering white workers to their level. The Irish, like most whites, wanted to establish they were well above that level, which meant as much segregation as possible.
WHITE FLIGHT: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism by Kevin M. Kruse looks at how Atlanta, known as “the city too busy to hate” for its moderate desegregation efforts (in contrast to other parts of the South that defended the color line at all costs), actually did quite a bit of hating from the post-WW II years through the 1970s. While the civic and business leaders were willing to work with black Atlanta — allowing blacks to buy homes in white neighborhoods, desegregating some public parks, minimally desegregating schools — the working-class saw this as a sell-out by rich people whose private schools and private parks wouldn’t be affected.
For some the solution was neo-Nazi groups or the KKK, but over time they adopted more euphemistic approaches, such as their right to “freedom of association” — which in their eyes meant a)they should be free not to associate with blacks; b)therefore segregation so blacks were kept away from them, even in public spaces; c)if segregation fell, then whites simply abandoned facilities to Those People and over time fled to segregated suburbs. Kruse argues that the roots of modern conservative attitudes were born here: a conviction white taxes went to support black moochers, enthusiasm for privatizing public facilities (in the hopes they could then deny blacks the right to use them), opposition to spending on public projects or infrastructure (when Those People would use it) and so on. While Kruse didn’t tell me anything about racism I didn’t already know, it’s gut-wrenching to read 250 pages about so much hate.
This book definitely got me thinking about how I handle racism in Pharisee, and how desegregation came to the town. And also about the makeup of the white newcomers from Atlanta; obviously if they’re moving to a town that isn’t all-white, they probably aren’t the die-hard segregationists. Not necessarily liberal on racial issues, but more moderate than other parts of Georgia. It also gives me some insight into the generational divide for Pharisee’s blacks (the older go-slow generation and younger more aggressive activists).
None of this reading guarantees I got race and race relations in my book right; any errors are my fault, not those of my sources. White Flight cover image from the Calvin Fred Craig papers at Emory University. All rights to images reside with current holders.
As Southern Discomfort involves sidhe living in 1973 Georgia, it draws heavily on British folklore and fairylore. The book that helped me the most was one I’ve had for years, folklorist Katharine Briggs’ AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FAIRIES: Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies andOther Supernatural Creatures.
This 1970s book is exactly what it sounds like, an alphabetical list of British fairy creatures: kelpies, barguests, grims, elves, cluricanes, nuckelavees, redcaps, black annis, etc. Frequently with quotes from relevant folktales. It also includes common themes and tropes such as how to deal with fairies, fairy weaknesses, fairy magic such as the stray sod, and so on. Without it I doubt I’d have been able to write Southern Discomfort.
The other major source for this stuff was a book I read a decade ago, THE LORE OF THE LAND: A Guide to England’s Legends from Spring-Heeled Jack to the Witches of Warboys by Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson. The book is a geographical tour of England looking at ghost stories, stone circles, witch tales, black dogs, dragon slayings, bad baronets, buried treasure and stories of the knight who slew the last wolf in England (a whole bunch of different legends have credited a local chap as the guy who pulled it off).
For example, I incorporated folklore about a prominent nobleman who was too godless and blasphemous to be buried in holy ground, but too important to bury outside it. The solution: a crypt half in and half out of the church wall. I incorporated that into the story of how Aubric and Olwen fabricated a family history in Pharisee County to keep newcomers from learning they’re two immortal elves. Part of the fakery was having a place to bury their non-existent ancestors. The Pharisee Irish-Americans wanted them buried in St. Bridget’s, the dominant church; the McAlisters, not being Christian,
In one chapter I explain when my elves, Aubric and Olwen, began fabricating a family history (so newcomers to Pharisee County wouldn’t wonder where all their non-existent ancestors were). That include figuring out where they were buried. The old Pharisee families who knew the secret couldn’t accept the McAlisters being buried anywhere but holy ground; Aubric and Olwen, being non-Christian and (so they believe) soulless, objected to being buried in a churchyard. One John Blake came up with the crypt as a solution.
A third source: THE MABINOGION, a 19th century collection of Celtic tales (though rewritten and Christianized over the centuries). I borrowed one or two ideas from the Arthurian romance Culhwch and Olwen, such as someone running over grass so fast and lightly the blades don’t even bend from their weight.
While I’ve incorporated genuine folklore, I haven’t required absolute fidelity to folk belief. As I mentioned last year, I gave Olwen a healing touch, even though that’s not a part of sidhe powers in folklore. There are other changes. Hopefully the book is good enough nobody will object. If you do, Wisp will disapprove.
All rights to cover (I don’t know the artist) remain with current holder.
(As I’m rushed for time I’m simply reposting this piece from 2019)
As I was a teenager during the 1970s, I have a fondness for the decade irrelevant of its actual merits. After finishing Southern Discomfort back in January, I reread one book on the decade and read a new one. They present such different perspectives they make a useful reminder that decades are not easily summed up. Black, white, rich, poor, gay, straight, right-wing, left-wing, they all shape our perspective. Richard Linklatter’s acclaimed Dazed and Confused was set in 1976 when I was in high school, but its Texas students might as well have been Martians for all I connected with them.
The reread was Thomas Hine’s THE GREAT FUNK: Falling Apart and Coming Together (On a Shag Rug) In the Seventies. Hine’s view of the decade is that the repeated blows of stagflation (stagnant wages + inflation), Vietnam, Watergate and the oil crisis left America uncertain about where it was going. But for a lot of people that was an opening: if the old ways weren’t working, why not try something new instead? New styles (“The seventies weren’t about bad taste, they were about rejecting taste as yet another form of authority.”), women’s liberation, sex manuals, mysticism and interest in the paranormal (one of the decade elements I playewith in Southern Discomfort), consciousness raising, fashion revolution (when the big names in fashion declared the miniskirt was dead, nobody listened), Our Bodies, Ourselves (“The book’s message is that the system has failed us, so we must come together to fix things, and our feelings while doing this are as important as the hard facts.”) and being open to people whose new direction wasn’t the same as yours. Even allowing for nostalgic bias, Hine captures a lot of what I like about the decade.
By contrast, Ron Perlstein’s THE INVISIBLE BRIDGE: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (one of a trilogy looking at conservatives from Goldwater to Reagan) points out that faced with a chance to try new ways of doing things, a big chunk of America insisted they weren’t going to, and the hippies couldn’t make them. They wanted to believe America could and should be like the 1950s and hated being reminded otherwise, and they didn’t want to deal with the implications of Vietnam, Watergate or the Congressional investigations that showed the CIA and FBI had spied on American citizens in defiance of the law.
Enter Ronald Reagan.
As Perlstein sees it, Reagan’s genius was that he divined what voters wanted to hear and gave it to them (while Perlstein was writing pre-2016, it’s hard not to see a parallel with Trump). Yes, America was the greatest country on Earth. Yes, we could be proud of what we’d done in Vietnam. No, Nixon was not a bad man (Reagan compared impeachment to “lynching,” the first of many right-wingers to compare Republican suffering to the violence done to minorities). No, the FBI and CIA were great American institutions, it’s the people questioning them who are bad. Never mind that his stories were often lies and also made no sense (if unelected goverment bureaucrats are bad, why are the unelected bureaucrats running the FBI and the CIA so wonderful?), they reassured people they were right not to doubt, right to think there was no need to change and try new things.
Reagan got a considerable boost from a new political funding mechanism called PACs, and from more sophisticated operations for polling and staying in touch with voters (it seems Sen. Jesse Helms was cutting edge with this back in the day). As a result, when Reagan challenged President Gerald Ford for the nomination in 1976, it came right down to the wire before Ford won, only to lose to Jimmy Carter (whom Perlstein sees as offering feel-good snake oil much like Reagan, though with a Southern flavor).
At 800 pages, the book is a densely detailed read. The blow-by-blow of Republican convention infighting was more detailed than I really needed to know, though as I’ve said before, “more than I want to know” is a matter of taste, not a flaw in the book. One detail that might be a flaw is that while Perlstein plays up right-wing opposition to Roe v. Wade, more recent articles show there was a lot of acceptance and support for legalized abortion on the right.
What is a flaw in both books is the effort to shape pop culture to their themes. Hine argues that Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist both reflect the baby boom’s ambivalence about settling down and having kids. Perlstein sees The Exorcist as putting the modern woman in her place (a single mom needs the help of traditional Catholic ritual to save her child from Satan!) and sees cynicism (The Parallax View) and nostalgia (American Graffiti) in the movies as a rejection of the 1970s; new therapeutic approaches such as EST, Scientology and Primal Scream Therapy supposedly likewise show a desperate search for a way to deal with what’s gone wrong in the country
I don’t buy it (even though I’ve also described Parallax View as a product of its time). There were child-centered horrors before the 1970s and cynicism wasn’t new either; the entire noir subgenre of the 1940s and 1950s shows a corrupt world that can’t be made honest. Scientology started in the 1950s and while EST and primal screams might be newer and look flakier than psychoanalysis, it’s not like going into analysis was a more sensible, realistic approach to self-healing (plenty of people questioned the miracle of therapy before the 1970s). Not everything fits neatly into a worldview or an interpretation.
Reading both books make me very glad I didn’t try to make Southern Discomfort any sort of statement about the era because that would be way beyond my abilities. Decades are big and complicated … but in a way, that’s liberating. All we have to do is carve off one small slice and make that real, not the entire thing; Dazed and Confused may not have worked for me, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true to its era. Hopefully my book (allowing for the elves and the magic) is too.
I’m almost done working on Southern Discomfort though I’m still waiting on the cover art (and once I run it through the Draft2Digital ebook processor I’ll probably have to make format changes). However I wanted to start a running feature talking about books I used for research or that provide added information about the 1973 setting, the British folklore and similar stuff. I’d planned to include a bibliography at the end of the novel but you know what? It’s already 94,000 words and I want to be done with it. Posting online is better. This week, two books about the 1970s. And some unrelated 1970s movie imagery.
I read SOMETHING HAPPENED: A Political and Cultural History of the Seventies by Edward D. Berkowitz and reread it recently, or more precisely re-skimmed it. Partly that’s because Berkowitz is writing for an audience for whom the decade is history (fair enough) but also because his style is so stiff, reading closely is like chewing through cotton wool.
That said, Berkowitz does a good job looking at how, contrary to lots of stereotypes about the decade and how everyone got selfish and shallow, wore leisure suits and went disco-dancing, there was a lot going on: Watergate, some amazing movies (curiously he doesn’t mention Star Wars or blacksploitation), feminism, the oil crisis, stagflation (stagnating wages coupled with inflation, something supposedly impossible), busing kids to integrate schools (one of the least popular tactics), Vietnam and anti-war protests and more. I will also give him points for acknowledging that while lots of stuff changed in the 1970s, that’s true of every decade. I do however disagree with some of his interpretations (Jaws as a metaphor for Scary Immigrants, the drop in the birth rate being a sign we were losing our optimism). And as with Halberstam’s The Fifties, I notice there’s plenty of stuff he doesn’t cover like the constant terrorist bombings early in the decade.
As Southern Discomfort takes place in the middle of the Watergate scandal, I picked up and reread WATERGATE: The Full Inside Story by Lewis Chester, Cat McCrystal, Stephen Aris and William Shawcross (all from the London Sunday Times) for the first time since the scandal was front-page news. This 1973 book does an excellent job showing the Watergate break-in was the tip of an iceberg of dirty tricks, illicit payments, lawbreaking and lies as Nixon worked to secure re-election and destroy or at least humiliate his enemies (his keeping an “enemies list” of people he wanted revenge on seems depressingly familiar now). Obviously it came out before the whole story was known—no reference to Deep Throat—but still a good job. However I’m surprised how positive a picture it paints of FBI Director J.Edgar Hoover whose own many misdeeds had been exposed a couple of years earlier.
