Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Books

The revolution that wasn't
Stephen King's e-book success proves that the new boss will be the same as the old.
By Steven M. Zeitchik
[03/28/00]

Reviews
"Passionate Minds" by Claudia Roth Pierpont
A writer to reckon with takes on a dozen women who were writers to reckon with.
By Polly Morrice
[03/28/00]

Dear Mr. Blue
Score!
I'm having sex with my daughter's basketball coach and I'm terrified she'll find out. Should I bail out now or go for it?
By Garrison Keillor
[03/28/00]

Book Bag
Tell-tale hearts
The author of "A Prayer for the Dying" picks five tales of creeping madness.
By Stewart O'Nan
[03/27/00]

Reviews
"Le Mariage" by Diane Johnson
Yanks abroad and French nationals still bewildering one another in a funny follow-up to the bestselling "Le Divorce."
By Elizabeth Judd
[03/27/00]

Complete archives for Books

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

The book, as yet untitled, will focus on Blow's five-year tenure at the Hachette publication. The proposal promises that Blow will reveal what it was like to work alongside Kennedy, who died in a plane crash last July. That Blow signed a mid-six-figure deal with Little, Brown appeared to confirm his publisher's faith in that promise.

Little, Brown publisher Sarah Crichton placed Blow's future book in an unimpeachable line of Kennedy memoirs. "Ted Sorenson wrote about his friendship with John Fitzgerald Kennedy. So did Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Ben Bradlee," she said.

Crichton is almost certainly the only person who found herself reminded of Schlesinger while reading the 33-page proposal, which has been making the rounds in New York publishing circles. Blow himself seems to be decidedly under the shadow of Stephanopoulos, whose "disloyalty" to President Clinton and "hunger for fame" he claims irritated Kennedy. Unlike the disillusioned Stephanopoulos, however, Blow intends to write a book about his former boss that's admiring to a fault. The proposal is written in the form of a letter to agent Joni Evans because, as Blow puts it, "It's just that [the] story I have to tell is so personal." (When reached, Blow refused comment and said to direct queries to Evans. Evans, who on other occasions has commented to the press about the book proposal and its contents, did not return a phone call from Salon.)

"No one else has the experience with and perspective on John that I do," Blow writes. "I hope that doesn't sound like boasting, Joni, because I don't mean it that way -- and there were times I wished for someone else to be in that position." But despite several heavily dropped hints about being "the last person to share a meal with John," knowing "exactly why John failed the bar exam twice," possessing an "unedited" version of the editor's letter Kennedy wrote for George about his misbehaving relatives and witnessing a Kennedy confession of "something personal" that had been distracting him "just hours before his death," Blow's proposal offers surprisingly little dish.

Instead, it positively quivers with the ecstasy of being so close to "the face of modern power, the awesome power conveyed by politics, wealth, sex appeals [sic], and, above all, celebrity." Whether or not Blow was as blown away by his exposure to Kennedy as he claims in his proposal, it certainly made good business sense for him to emphasize it: Who wants to read a book about a Kennedy who doesn't make you go weak in the knees?

Blow, who describes himself as Kennedy's closest colleague and standard-bearer, claims that his boss's "awesome" power was so overwhelming that George staffers were in constant danger of losing their very identities. He compares the magazine to a royal court in which self-conscious courtiers seek to endear themselves to the king. "We had no defenses, no preparation, against someone so charismatic, so charming," he maintains. John, aware of his fatal charm, was noble enough to intentionally keep people at a distance, Blow says: "He knew how damaged they could be by their exposure to him." And indeed life after John, according to Blow, was a mere shadow: "Normalcy would ever after seem so unsatisfying."

Next page | The intoxicating, talismanic power of hand-me-down ties