Last night it was my pleasure to attend a book party at the swanky TAO New York for Maneet Ahuja, the CNBC tyro on whose wonderful new book, The Alpha Masters: Unlocking the Genius of the World’s Top Hedge Funds, I was delighted to contribute my editorial voodoo. What a party! Alan Greenspan! Gillian Tett! David McCormick! Some casually dressed top one percent of the top one percenters! Many financial journalists, all waiting in vain for somebody from the now $2 billion lighter JPMorgan to show up! It was swell. The justly famous Wall Street Maneet kindly mentioned me in her acknowledgements, saying “Your polish on prose is truly a thing of beauty.” Thanks, Maneet; I enjoyed it.

There’s a very nice article about me and the Disunion blog in the Spring issue of LaSalle magazine, the alumni publication of my alma mater. Thanks to Jeremy Rosen for a very complimentary piece.

Here’s a new piece done for my new friends at The American Interest:

The incidences of writers taking ownership of words are few and far between. Moses or whoever wrote Genesis certainly owns begat; the authors of the Declaration own inalienable; and Maurice Sendak owns rumpus. I cannot hear the word without thinking of reading Where the Wild Things Are to my children. When we reached the moment when Max declares the wild rumpus begin., we would begin the bouncing and tossing and squealing and tickling that constituted a rumpus in our house. One author, one word, striking memories in a house miles and years removed.

Like so many revolutionaries, it is difficult to see the influence of Sendak in the world that he remade in his image, only because that influence has become so pervasive. When I began reading to my children, there was no shortage of complicated stories and characters, Alexanders with the their terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days and others even sadder and more unsettling. But long before that, before Sendak began writing, the books I had as child were simpler and sweeter, Golden Books filled with apple-cheeked girls and boys whose hair must have been parted with a plough. Starting in the fifties, Dr. Seuss came along with his anarchists and iconolclasts, Brandos and James Deans of the children’s book world, upsetting every apple cart and embellishing everything with their own jazzy, snazzy inflections. Then, starting in 1963, Sendak, who had for a decade been illustrating books, began publishing his own books. Lo and behold, they featured era-appropriate anti-heroes: the obstreperous Max of Wild Things, the jubilantly disruptive Mickey of In the Night Kitchen, preening Rosie of Really Rosie, “I don’t care’’ Pierre. Encountering scenes and people who alarmed them, or dismissed them, or tried to regulate them, these characters reacted the way characters played by Hoffman or Nicholson or Pacino or Dunaway did. Hoffman shouts “Elaine!’’ Pacino shouts “Attica!’’ Max shouts “Let the wild rumpus begin!’’

Sendak, of course, was a double-threat man; his illustrations were intrinsic to the experience. Not only do Sendak’s characters break form; so do his very drawings. Like his contemporary, the peerless comic book illustrator Jack Kirby, Sendak literally cannot contain his thoughts within the box. Mickey breaks out of the panel, and skips and clambers from frame to frame like Spiderman scampering up the face of a high-rise. And when Sendak isn’t exploding panels, he is packing them with information, filling rooms with objects, filling shelves with products, creating labels for all the boxes. Even the drawings he did for the books of other writers are crowded with information: look, for example, at his illustrations for Dear Mili, written by Wilhelm Grimm in 1816 and illustrated by Sendak in 1983. Dark and deep are these woods, but not even Frost could look at the thickets of barren branches and gnarled roots and layer upon layer of concealing foliage and call them lovely. They see impenetrable. They look scary.

But it’s an important part of Sendak’s message to realize that scary looks aren’t everything. Early on he disclosed that the monstrous wild things he drew were in fact based on impressions of his own relatives . Knowing that, one could no longer look at the bug-eyed, pointy-toothed, scaly-skilled, cucumber-nosed monsters without seeing my own beery-breathed uncles and fat aunts with their heavily lilaced bosoms, all squeezing and hugging to the point of repulsion. It was an act of great generosity, after having exaggerated their sad human imperfections into forbidding fangs and claws, to have redeemed them, and turned the wild things into Max’s merry playmates.

Appearances aren’t everything, Sendak tells us. The world is a scary place, but half of what we fear lies in our own perceptions, and most of that will yield, if not to courage, than to our own rambunctiousness.

With the fortieth anniversary of the Watergate break-in arriving this June, we should prepare ourselves for a deluge of Watergate- and Nixon-related material. This may well be the last good anniversary opportunity to revive and relive this massively frightening, entertaining scandal before the vast majority of those who cared about these matters as they were happening have gone off to join the Great Unindicted Coconspirator in the Sky.

After that, it will be interesting to see how much we hear about Richard Nixon again. Will he be studied, like Theodore Roosevelt? Mentioned, like William McKinley? Ignored, like Benjamin Harrison? Nixon was one of the largest figures of the third quarter of the twentieth century. But as his era recedes, he is overwhelmed by Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan—the liberal icon who preceded him, and the conservative giant who came in his wake, two leaders of consequence whose ideas persist decades after their deaths. With no enduring legacy to call his own—detente was at best a mixed bag; wage and price controls were an embarrassment; he may have opened China, but Deng Xiaoping was the more significant figure—Nixon now seems destined to be best known for the Watergate scandal and for being the un-Kennedy, dark to Jack’s light, ambitious and striving in comparison to Jack’s grace and ease, sweaty to Kennedy’s infinite cool.

And yet we remain interested in Nixon, welcoming him as a character the way the Brits always seem happy to see a new Henry VIII or Elizabeth I. Just three years ago we got Frost/Nixon, where we saw Nixon tortured by guilt and defeat; later this year we’ll see Elvis & Nixon, the third film about that weird, marvelous, and ultimately meaningless encounter. We have had Oliver Stone’s tragic Nixon, the Nixon of All the President’s Men, unseen and malignant, The Watchmen’s Nixon as the despot of the new dystopia. It is perhaps the unique accomplishment of Watergate, the excellent new novel by Thomas Mallon, to depict Nixon not as a moral to a story, a symptom of a political pathology, or a walking character flaw, but as a man.

(To read the rest of my review of Watergate in The Washington Monthly, click here.)

In the Times yesterday, Joe Nocera wrote a column that groused, if I read it correctly, about a man attaining excellence in his life’s work, and gently chided the man, it seems to me, for being great.

Nocera, whom I generally admire for his lucid writing about the turgid field of business and economics, took as his subject today Robert Caro, who, Nocera aside, is enjoying generally excellent reviews for The Passage of Power, the fourth volume of his biography of Lyndon Johnson. Reviewing the book, Bill Clinton not only called it “fascinating and meticulous,” but then awarded it a sort of special ex-presidential medal by saying that with this book, “Robert Caro has once again done America a great service.” (Writers get credited with many things, but providing a service to the nation is not frequently cited.) Last night I finished The Passage of Power, I’ll just say that it is a brilliant piece of work, reported by a master historian, told by a master story teller, comprehended by a shrewd and insightful student of power and politics. If I had a presidential medal to give, it would be Caro’s.

Nocera, however, thinks it’s long; and worse, it took a long time to write. “He would spend years — nay, decades — in the field, finding stray facts no one else had ever known existed. And then, when he started writing, he couldn’t stop. Other, lesser authors had deadlines, but not Caro. He turned in each volume only when he was ready, and sometimes a decade passed between volumes — so much time, in fact, that he began quoting his previous books in his newer books. Originally intended to be three volumes, written over maybe a half-dozen years, his L.B.J. biography eventually stretched to four, and then five.”

To which one might reply: So? Caro isn’t responsible for designing an emergency response system. He’s not charged with getting a liver to Pittsburgh to save the life of a 10 year old violin prodigy. And it’s not like Caro is in his room striving mightily in order to produce dreck; he’s using the time to produce quality stuff. The man has won two Pulitzer Prizes in Biography, the National Book Award, and, among other pieces of hardware, a Gold Medal in Biography from the American Academy of Art and Letters. This is if you can take Wikipedia’s word for it, which we know Caro wouldn’t: he’d have delved into ancient archives and interviewed 150 people to vet those stats, but you can certainly see the effort on the page. If it takes a decade to produce such work, who is Joe Nocera to snark about it?

Nocera also complains about what he sees as Caro’s inconsistent portrayal of LBJ across the four volumes. “Johnson has almost no redeeming qualities in the first two books. Yet how could this same man, at the end of Volume 4, push through the landmark Civil Rights Act as president? How does Caro square this great achievement — as well as all the other liberal achievements to come — with his portrayal of the power-mad Johnson in the earlier volumes? In truth, he never really does.”

This is a ridiculous accusation. In each of the volumes, Caro has recognized the complexity of LBJ, while at the same understanding that a man is not a glass of chocolate milk, in which all the ingredients are smoothly blended. Men not only have not how conflicting and competing impulses, but at different points in time, different ideas, and different passions hold sway. Nocera’s reading doesn’t just lack insight, it’s just not correct. First, Caro does show that during this period of success and accomplishment, he nonetheless played politics with troops levels in Vietnam, and also took steps to insure that he could still manage his personal business interests on the sly. But more fundamentally, Caro shows that “the bad Johnson” was not much in evidence during the crucial two month period that is the focus of the book. Caro quotes Johnson aide George Reedy, who wrote “Almost at once, the whining, self-pitying caricature of Throttlebottom [a bumbling vice president from the musical Of Thee I Sing] vanished. During this whole period, there was no trace of the ugly arrogance which had made him so disliked in many quarters. . . The situation brought out the finest that was in him.” In fact, Caro closes the book with the comment that “this period stands out as different from all the rest, as perhaps that life’s finest moment.”

To sum up: one man spends decades researching a life, observes that the subject was different during one period than in others, and finds the subject’s different dimensions fascinating. Another man spends some days reading the books, observes that the subject seems different on one volume than in the others, and concludes that the biographer has failed to reconcile the subject’s different dimensions.

I’m looking forward to Volume V, however long it is, whenever it gets here.

In Psychology Today, Jonathan Gottschall offers an article that will come as a consolation to all writers: even the great one struggle. In proof, he offers some telling pages from some highly celebrated novels. In order: First, Remembrance of Things Past, by Marcel Proust; Couples, by John Updike; Crash, by J.G. Ballard; Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens; The Great Fire, by Shirley Hazzard.

The brilliant Harlan Ellison on the sad state of the American writer.

The Oak Room at the Algonquin Hotel, for more than a half century on the premier locations for cabaret in Manhattan, has closed. Prior to its musical incarnation, the Oak Room was famous for being the home of the celebrated Algonquin Round Table, where gathered the great witty writers of the 1920s and 1930s. Pictured in the famous Al Hirschfeld cartoon reprinted above, clockwise from lower left: Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Lynn Fontaine and Alfred Lunt, Frank Crowninshield, Alexander Woollcott, Heywood Broun, Marc Connelly, Frank Case, Franklin P. Adams, Edna Ferber, George S. Kaufman and Robert Sherwood.

Isn’t it kind of divine that in the same week that Tim Thomas, the goalie of the Boston Bruins, refused to attend a White House reception in honor of the team’s championship last spring, Buckingham Palace released the names of 277 people who between the years 1951 and 1999 declined to accept one of the Queen’s Honors, including, in some cases, knighthood, and with it the right to be be called Sir or Lady. Among the refusniks were Roald Dahl, Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, JB Priestley, Lucian Freud, Robert Graves, FR Leavis, LS Lowry, Henry Moore, Philip Larkin and CS Lewis.

In a statement he posted on Facebook, Thomas was plain about his decision. “I believe the Federal government has grown out of control, threatening the Rights, Liberties, and Property of the People.This is being done at the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial level. This is in direct opposition to the Constitution and the Founding Fathers vision for the Federal government. Because I believe this, today I exercised my right as a Free Citizen, and did not visit the White House. This was not about politics or party, as in my opinion both parties are responsible for the situation we are in as a country. This was about a choice I had to make as an INDIVIDUAL.” Thomas has been tut-tutted by such political philosophers like Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser, who on ESPN played establishmentarian court jesters, saying that when one has been invited by the President, one ought to go, out of respect for the office.

Nonsense. First, this has nothing to do with the country. President Obama is merely copying a move pioneered by John Lindsay, who in the midst of tight mayoral race in New York City in 1969, barged into the locker room of the World Series-winning Mets and inserted his head under waterfalls of champagne. (The ploy worked; he won a narrow plurality in a three-way race.) President Nixon soon began rewarding winning coaches with congratulatory phone calls. Now it’s receptions. Clearly these are held as publicity opportunities for the incumbent, and I have no problem with Tim Thomas or any of these other jocks exercising his right to absent himself. The White House is such a bubble, it’s good when this or any president hears some disagreement.

Indeed, I wish it was plainer why the 277 would-be honorees in Britain declined their invitations; no reasons were cited, and the Palace took care in its response to a BBC request to release only the names of people who are dead. Over the years, explanations have been provided by some people who are not on the list. According to the New York Times, the writer J. G. Ballard said he did not want to be named a Commander of the British Empire because the whole thing was a “preposterous charade.” The poet Benjamin Zephaniah (left) refused membership in the Order of the British Empire, saying “Stick it, Mr. Blair and Mrs. Queen.” David Bowie declined a C.B.E. in 2000, saying “I seriously don’t know what it’s for.” (Selling records, duh!) In 1992, Doris Lessing declined a knighthood, saying “Surely there is something unlikable about a person, when old, accepting honors from a institution she attacked when young?” But eight years later, she accepted another title, the Companion of Honor, saying she liked that “you’re not called anything” special.

And that’s the point–we don’t know if these folks were trying to raise an objection, or to avoid being used as a monarchical prop, or simply because they were holding out for a better honor. After all, Alfred Hitchcock turned down a C.B.E. in 1962, then later accepted being named a Knight Commander of the British Empire. But I like what Terence Blacker wrote in the Independent. Noting that the opt-outs “have little in common politically or personally beyond the fact that their work is the product of uncompromising individuality,” Blacker suggests that “Simply by accepting a bauble of thanks from the nation, they would be sacrificing what was best about them – their apartness. Once they became part of the national community, their voice, their eyes, their strength would be changed. They neither accepted the honour nor, in what has become a new form of boasting, told the world that they had rejected it.”

The first stop in my 2012 Speaking Tour took me out the door, over the bridge above busy Route 9A, and to the basement of the library for a lovely Sunday afternoon reception of the Briarcliff Manor Historical Society. I had been invited to speak about And the War Came, and it was a lot of fun to speak before an interested and attentive audience about one of my favorite subjects. Thanks to Jan Wagner and the rest of the Board for inviting me, and to Josh Parker, Howard and Susan Code, Chip Wagner, my dear wife and so many others for their support, encouragement, and enthusiasm. Next Stop: Ossining Historical Society on June 2nd.