In Review: May 19, 1999
A tale of promise, prison, and
politics
The life of Edward Prichard '35
Short of the Glory: The Fall and Redemption of Edward F. Prichard
Jr. '35
Tracy Campbell
University Press of Kentucky, $27.50
So fascinating is the story of Edward F. Prichard, Jr. '35 -- a cross
between Greek tragedy and All the King's Men -- that it's remarkable
how long it's taken to tell it in full, as Tracy Campbell, a Mars Hill College
historian, has done with great color and aplomb in Short of the Glory.
Prichard (1915-1984) was the son of a corrupt politician in one of the most
corrupt counties in Kentucky -- a state where, as Prichard later put it,
"you could have taken $100,000 and repealed the Ten Commandments."
A rotund, socially awkward prodigy with a photographic memory and a knack
for oratory, young Prichard thrived on learning the state's byzantine politics
from the "courthouse gangs" who controlled local political life.
It soon became evident that Prichard was destined for political stardom
-- as governor of Kentucky, or possibly even President.
At Princeton, Prichard gained celebrity as a vociferous left-wing voice
on The Daily Princetonian, and as a leading member of Whig-Clio and
the Woodrow Wilson Democratic Club. But he also gained notice as a volatile
grandstander; he was simultaneously voted "best politician" and
"talks the most and says the least" in his class. He went on to
conquer the rigors of Harvard Law School and was befriended by then-professor
Felix Frankfurter, whom Prichard followed to Washington as a Supreme Court
clerk.
In Washington, Prichard -- first as a clerk and then as a New Deal administrator
-- was the toast of a tight-knit intelligentsia that lived and dined together.
It included future Washington Post publisher Philip Graham and his
wife-to-be, Katharine; New York Times editor John Oakes '34; labor
leader Walter Reuther; future Secretary of State Dean Acheson; politician
Adlai Stevenson '22; physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer; philospher Isaiah
Berlin; columnist Drew Pearson; and lobbyist Tommy "The Cork"
Corcoran.
But Prichard's hubris and propensity for making enemies led to his downfall.
First, Prichard's left-wing politics got him into trouble with FBI director
J. Edgar Hoover, who wiretapped him and sent the results to President Harry
Truman. Not liking what he heard, Truman nudged Prichard out of the federal
government. Prichard returned to Kentucky to enter state politics, whereupon
came the most pivotal incident of his life.
He was convicted in 1949 of stuffing 254 meaningless ballots in a Senate
election -- a common occurrence in Kentucky, probably done in part to prove
himself to the courthouse gangs. Hoover ensured that the federal government
prosecuted Prichard zealously for a crime typically ignored. Prevented from
appealing to the Supreme Court because too many justices had to recuse themselves,
Prichard was eventually sentenced to two years in jail; he served eight
months, thanks to a commuted sentence and later a pardon from Truman, and
spent the rest of his life trying to rebuild his shattered reputation.
For years Prichard became a virtual nonperson; his health suffered from
complications of diabetes, including kidney failure and blindness. Yet many
of his old friends stood by him: Then-President Lyndon Johnson characteristically
said, "I'd rather have my pecker cut off than deny Ed Prichard."
By the 1960s, Prichard managed to claw his way back into quasi-official
advisory roles to governors. He provided crucial lobbying clout to pass
legislation on civil rights, mine safety, and education reform. But Prichard's
reckless addiction to politics also had its price: It led him to virtually
abandon his family, whom he was never able to support financially.
Author Campbell has used declassified FBI files, collections of papers,
and extensive oral histories to write an intelligent biography; he is critical
yet fairminded, and offers vivid anecdotes that lend his text considerable
panache.
-- Louis Jacobson '92
Louis Jacobson is a contributing editor to The Almanac of American
Politics 2000.
The String
Night the black bead
a string running through it
with the sound of a breath
lights are still there from
long ago when
they were not seen
in the morning
it was explained
to me that the one
we call the morning star
and the evening
star are the same
From The River Sound, a collection of poems by W.S. Merwin
'48, published by Knopf ($23). Merwin is a chancellor of the Academy of
American Poets.
Italian birth objects
One of the chapters in The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance
Italy, by Jacqueline Marie Musacchio *95, details the importance of
birth trays in Italy from 1370 through the 1560s. Often painted, these wood
trays were used to carry food and gifts to the confinement room and later
were hung on the wall as decoration. The tray shown here depicts a winged
boy holding two cornucopias and wearing coral, which was thought to ward
off evil. Musacchio, an assistant professor of art history at Trinity University,
writes that her interest in the objects associated with pregnancy and childbirth
in the Renaissance grew out of work she began at Princeton, where she earned
her Ph.D. and where she helped research the Art Museum's majolica collection.
(Yale University Press, $50)
Cold war espionage
Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage
Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew
Public Affairs, $25
Despite six and a half years of research and hundreds of interviews,
when Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage
was published last fall, more and more information started surfacing. Sources
that authors Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew didn't know of or had been
unable to reach started coming forward to share their own experiences and
memories about a part of U.S. military history that, due to official secrecy
bordering on paranoia, had never been documented.
For Annette Lawrence Drew '80 *84, the flood of new information about
Cold War espionage is both gratifying and troubling. It validated her belief
that there was a vast, untold part of American history bursting to be told,
but it also showed her that in all likelihood, much information had already
been, or would soon be, lost.
The wife of one of the authors, Drew was the primary researcher for the
book, which grew out of a series her husband wrote for the Chicago Tribune
in the early 1990s.
"One of the important things about this book, from a scholarly perspective,
is that so much of this information was never written down, or if it was
written down, it was destroyed," Drew says. With many of their sources,
particularly from the post-World War II era of submarine operations, in
their late 70s or 80s, the best research materials were literally dying
off. "So much of this submarine history is an oral history, and so
much of it is being lost. An important benefit of the book is that it is
preserving this period of the Cold War, and what the contributions of these
men were."
With Drew providing much of the historical information from the U.S.
side of the Cold War, the authors enlisted another Princetonian to work
on obtaining information from the Soviet side. Joshua Handler, currently
a doctoral student at the Woodrow Wilson School, was working for Greenpeace
in the former Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early '90s, compiling information
about nuclear waste generated by the Russian submarine fleet.
Handler was occasionally tailed by Russian authorities, and was once
arrested by maritime police. But the most unsettling threats, he says, were
not the human ones. Currently studying in St. Petersburg, he writes, "The
most uncomfortable times tended to come when we were investigating cases
of radioactive contamination from submarine reactor accidents. It always
gets a bit exciting when your Geiger counter starts to click like mad as
you walk over a contaminated site."
Handler also helped put the authors in touch with a Russian journalist,
who interviewed former Soviet submariners for the book. Handler's wife,
Sada Aksartova, a graduate student in Princeton's sociology department,
translated his reports for the authors.
The book reads as much like a spy novel as a piece of history, and the
book-buying public has responded to it with enthusiasm. Positive reviews
in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The
Washington Post, and other high-profile sources helped propel it
into the national consciousness. Ceaseless endorsements by Don Imus (who
shares a literary agent with the authors) on his daily "Imus in the
Morning" radio program helped propel it to No. 4 on the Times's
bestseller list.
Handler is awaiting the book's translation into Russian, for he believes
it will also be a success in the former Soviet Union. "I don't think
many people are aware of it yet, but as word gets out I think there will
be more interest."
-- Rob Garver
Jazzy pop from McKenna
Real World Refugee
Will McKenna '88
songs.com, $14.95
Will McKenna '88 was still a teenager when he got his first forbidden
taste of rock music by sneaking into Leon Russell shows at the Night Flight
nightclub in his hometown of Savannah, Georgia. Shaken and stirred by what
he heard, McKenna moved to New York City soon after graduating from Princeton.
There he wrote songs and played bass in a band called Weightless, which
performed at downtown clubs like the Bitter End and Wetlands, sometimes
sharing the bill with neo-hippy jam bands such as Blues Traveler and The
Spin Doctors.
In 1996, McKenna moved to Los Angeles, where he has continued to perform,
both with a band and solo, and to collect awards for his witty, intricate
pop songs. The following year he won Best New Artist awards at both the
Wildflower and Tucson folk festivals, while the Austin [Texas] Songwriters
Group chose McKenna's "World Made of Glass" as Best Contemporary
Folk Song. Performing Songwriter magazine has praised his music as
"an earthy blend of pop, rock and R&B," but that's misleading.
The material on McKenna's second album, Real World Refugee, is neither
rock nor R&B, nor is it particularly earthy. In fact, it's rather sophisticated,
more jazzy pop than anything else. Think Joe Jackson in his "Steppin'
Out" phase or Jimmy Buffett or even James Taylor. Buoyed by McKenna's
crystalline piano and collaborator Matt Baxter's assortment of guitars,
music and lyrics sparkle with a wry, self-deprecating wit: "all the
fun in the sun didn't save me/I was low as a limbo line/I put another stamp
in my passport/But I can't put you out of my mind," he sings in the
calypso-flavored "Feels Like Home."
The Buffett comparison seems particularly apt given how many of McKenna's
songs use sun and vacations as counterpoint to the writer's melancholy:
"all the accidents that bring us together/unpredictable as weather,"
he sings in "Singing in the Sun," while in "January Rain"
he echoes The Temptations, confessing "I wish it would rain today/we
could use a little drama in the sky." McKenna's melodies are unfailingly
ambitious, which is a virtue but also a challenge his voice isn't always
quite up to. Here and there, his pleasant low tenor disappears into the
mix, which is a shame since the songs are catchy and smart. For more information,
check out McKenna's homepage at songs.com or call May River Music at 323-466-1599.
-- Merrell Noden '78
E-commerce
Julio Gomez '82 formed Gomez Advisors "to be the single best source
of insight for consumers when selecting e-commerce services." Based
on his Website, www.gomez.com, he's well on his way.
His is a very ambitious site, with a tremendous amount of information
packed into a compact format. The heart of the site is four scorecards,
evaluating Internet stock-brokers, bankers, travel agents, and booksellers
on the basis of performance as rated by Gomez Advisors.
The Internet merchants are rated via interview and questionnaire according
to six criteria, including ease of use, customer confidence, and overall
cost. Gomez Advisors then rates the firms from the standpoint of different
types of customers: bankers are rated for the Internet transacters, savers,
borrowers, and consolidators. Ratings and quotes by individual shoppers
are also included. And a wealth of other data is available, including online
stock quotes, subscription e-mail alerts, and "GomezWire," comments
by Gomez Advisors on market issues.
The site is at its best rating the top 20 performing Internet brokers
each quarter. There are more than 100 now operating, and that could be the
subject of a separate story, because the potential impact of these firms
on stock trading could be massive in just a year or two. Gomez is onto something
big here.
The site is still a work in progress: ratings of the travel agents and
booksellers are less complete than those of brokers or bankers, and the
number of customers rating the firms is sometimes low.
Gomez.com stands as an informative aid to those capable of plunging into
the emerging world of e-commerce.
-- Tony Carroll '66
Books received
Shifting the Blame: Literature, Law, and the Theory of Accidents in
Nineteenth-Century America, by Nan Goodman '79 (Princeton
$39.50) -- Through literary and legal accounts of accidents, the author
explores what Americans thought about blame, injury, and individual responsibility
during the 19th century. Goodman is an assistant professor of English at
the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Freedom of Association, edited by Amy Gutmann (Princeton,
$19.95) -- These essays explore the individual and civic values
of freedom of association in a liberal democracy, as well as the moral and
constitutional limits of claims to associational freedom. Gutmann is Laurance
S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics.
Lake Placid Club, 1895-1980: An Illustrated History, by David
H. Ackerman '47 (Lake Placid Education Foundation, 518/523-1312,
$60) -- With more than 350 photographs, this book traces the
history of the Lake Placid Club. Ackerman is on the board of the lake's
Shore Owners' Association.
Space and Time on the Magic Mountain, by Hugo G. Walter '81
(Peter Lang, $42.95) -- Explores the theme of the magic mountain
in selected works of William Wordsworth, Matthew Arnold, James Hilton, and
Thomas Mann. Walter is an assistant professor of literature at Kettering
University.
Anselm Kiefer and Art After Auschwitz, by Lisa Saltzman '88
(Cambridge, $40) -- The author contends that Kiefer is unique
among postwar German artists for his persistent exploration of the legacy
of fascism. Saltzman is an assistant professor of art history at Bryn Mawr.
A Fatal Friendship: Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, by Arnold
A. Rogow *53 (Hill & Wang, $27.50) -- Demonstrates that the
roots of the duel between Hamilton and Burr lay within the former's conflicted
history and character. The author has taught at Stanford, the University
of Iowa, and CUNY.
Herodotus, by James Romm *88 (Yale, $15) --
In this book for general readers and students, Romm argues that Herodotus
was both a historian and a master storyteller. The author is a visiting
associate professor at Fordham.
Father India: How Encounters with an Ancient Culture Transformed the
Modern West, by Jeffrey Paine *71 (HarperCollins, $25)
-- Examines the diverse Indian experiences of noted 20th-century intellectuals,
politicians, and spiritualists. Paine is a contributing editor of the Wilson
Quarterly.
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