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Book World
BIOGRAPHY
LYNDON B. JOHNSON
By Charles Peters Times. 199 pp. $23
Tired of waiting for Robert Caro to wrap up his mammoth, multivolume bi- ography of Lyndon Johnson? If so, Charles Peters’s sleek little number on the 36th president may ease your rest- lessness. Peters knows this material both as an insider (he worked on the 1960 presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy, who picked Johnson as his running mate) and as a longtime ob- server (he went on to found and edit the Washington Monthly). Peters considers Johnson a trag- ic figure, daz- zlingly effective as a legislator but nonetheless profoundly inse- cure, especially around the fam- ily whose for- tunes were in- tertwined with his: the Ken- nedys, whom he resented for
their glamour and Ivy League polish. Then, as president, the ultimate ma- neuverer found himself unable to work his way out of the quagmire in Vietnam. Johnson’s near-obsession with the
Kennedys surfaces early in the book. On Page 2, Peters quotes his subject claiming, “My ancestors were teachers and lawyers and college presidents and governors when the Kennedys in this country were still tending bar.” The ten- sion was exacerbated when Kennedy and Johnson debated each other at the 1960 Democratic National Convention, while Johnson was still hoping to win the presidential nomination. Johnson snidely compared his own sterling at- tendance record with the absenteeism of “some” senators. “Kennedy replied that he assumed Johnson was talking about some other senators,” Peters re- ports, “and proceeded to praise John- son’s record of ‘answering those quo- rum calls.’ ” Johnson, Peters concludes, had been “outclassed.” As for the burden of Vietnam, which poisoned a presidency that had started off with a series of remarkable legisla- tive triumphs, Peters rightly points out that for several years virtually the whole country was united behind the effort to halt the advance of communism in Asia — and that for a president to have sim- ply called off a war once we were in the thick of it would have been unprec- edented.
— Dennis Drabelle
drabelled@washpost.com
ESPIONAGE REVIEW BY JOSEPH KANON
SUNDAY,MAY 30, 2010
How a dead man won WWII
With the help of Ian Fleming, gullible fascists and a cross-dressing spy
BIGSTOCKPHOTO
O
f the many plots cooked up by British In- telligence during World War II, Operation Mincemeat is probably the best known and by now the most legendary. The story again, briefly: In 1943 a corpse disguised as
aMaj. William Martin of the Royal Marines and car- rying fake classified papers concerning Allied strategy in the Mediterranean is made to wash up on a beach in Spain, presumably the victim of a plane crash. The hope is that Spanish officials, osten- sibly neutral but really pro-Axis, will pass the documents on to the Germans (they did), who will think they have stumbled on an intelligence gold mine (they did) and alter their Mediterra- nean defenses accordingly, thus easing the way for the Allied invasion of Sicily. It was an implausible ruse that worked, with all the now-classic elements of that era’s spy fic- tion: dapper and ingenious British officers, dull- witted and credulous Germans, and shifty double
WILLIAM J. SMITH/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Vice presidential candidate Lyndon Johnson campaigns in 1960.
agents, both real and imagined. The original germ of the plan, in fact, had been proposed to Naval Intelli- gence four years earlier by none other than Lt. Comm. Ian Fleming (the models for both “M” and “Q” make appearances here), who in turn got the idea from a 1937 thriller by Basil Thomson, once head of Scotland Yard’s Criminal Investigations De- partment. The real Operation Mincemeat, not surprisingly, proved irresistible material. Despite secrecy regula- tions, Duff Cooper used it as the basis for a 1950 novel, “Operation Heartbreak,” and, after much pleading, the operation’s chief organizer, Ewen Montagu, was given permission to tell the official (censored) version in “The Man Who Never Was” in 1953 — an instant hit that sold more than 3 million copies, became a popu- lar 1956 movie, with Clifton Webb as Montagu, and is still in print. The story has appeared in accounts of World War II intelligence operations ever since. What, then, is there left to say?
Quite a lot, it turns out, all of it entertaining. Ben Macintyre, an associate editor for the Times of Lon-
OPERATION MINCEMEAT How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory
By Ben Macintyre Harmony.
400 pp. $25.99
don, is a first-rate journalist who seems to have talked to everyone connected with the operation (or their descendants) and worked his way through re- cently declassified documents in the National Ar- chives. But — true to the spirit of the operation — his most important source turned out to be the de- ceased Montagu himself, or more specifically, a dusty trunk he left behind with bundles of files from MI5, MI6 and Naval Intelli- gence; letters, memos, pho- tographs; original, uncen- sored drafts; and so on, an intelligence bonanza more genuine than the one foist- ed on the Germans. Macin- tyre has made the most of it. Here, finally, is the com- plete story with its full cast of characters (not a dull one among them), pure catnip to fans of World War II thrillers and a lot of fun for everyone else. We now learn that the dead man was Glyndwr Mi- chael, a homeless Welshman who committed suicide by swallowing rat poison in an abandoned warehouse near Kings Cross; that the coroner (the wonderfully named Bentley Purchase) bent the law to snatch the body for Montagu; that Montagu had
a flirtation (if not more) with the secretary who posed as Maj. Martin’s fiancée; that there were the usual per- sonality clashes and interdepartmental rivalries. But Macintyre does more than fill in the pieces Mon-
tagu left out. By extending the action from Whitehall to Spain and Berlin, he gives the story a sweep it’s nev- er had before (the Madrid section alone is worth this retelling). He throws in surprises: Montagu’s brother
Ivor, the communist filmmaker and Ping-Pong expert, was a Soviet agent, as neither Montagu nor MI5 knew at the time. Macintyre has a novelist’s flair for detail, not only the relevant (the entire operation cost about £200), but a few of the gee-whiz variety (American in- vasion forces were issued 144,000 condoms, fewer than two each), and even those that can make a scene leap to the eye, e.g., the American “who drove with one leg permanently hanging out of his Jeep.” But most of all, he gives us characters. There is a dashing submarine commander (his photo confirms the adjective) who once hunted treasure in the Bo- livian jungles. There are gentlemanly rogues (Mon- tagu said Fleming was “charming to be with, but would sell his own grandmother. I like him a lot.”). And there is an intelligence officer, the also wonder- fully named Dudley Wrangel Clarke, who is arrested in Madrid dressed as a woman, brassiere and all, but not as part of any operation. Nothing here is hum- drum. What might have been a routine trip — deliv- ering the body to the submarine — becomes an ac- tion scene when the driver, a racecar driver in civil- ian life (“Jock” Horsfall), goes so fast in the blackout that he fails to see a roundabout and sails over the grass circle in the middle. “Operation Mincemeat” has been No. 1 on the
Sunday Times list in London, and no wonder. Part of the great charm of this book is that Macintyre recog- nizes that the ruse, in all its colorful eccentricity, plays into Britain’s mythology of World War II. He takes pains to remind us of its serious purpose — and indeed many lives were saved in Sicily — but at its heart the story is the war in Technicolor. Could it really have been like this? Full of daring and self- effacing heroism and romantic conquests in Al- giers? “Operation Mincemeat” suggests that it really was — at least some of the time.
bookworld@washpost.com
Joseph Kanon is the author of the novels “The Good German” and, most recently, “Stardust.”
MEDIA REVIEW BY JACK SHAFER
Rupert Murdoch conquers the Wall Street Journal
WAR AT THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Inside the Struggle to Control an American Business Empire
By Sarah Ellison Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 274 pp. $27
claims that the saddest years of the media mogul’s adult life probably came between 1988 and 1993 — the only time that he lived in a city where he didn’t own a news- paper. Reportorial nuggets such as this abound in Sarah Ellison’s exhaustive book on Murdoch’s acquisition of the Wall Street Journal (and its corporate parent, Dow Jones and Company), helping to ex- plain why he spent $5.6 billion on a trans- action that (1) ended up reducing his per- sonal net worth by $5 billion and (2) re- quired his company, News Corp., to write off $3 billion of the investment by 2009. According to his children, Murdoch had stalked the Journal for decades out of a de- sire to own a newspaper in the United
S
o central are newspapers to Rupert Murdoch’s psychological well-being that one of his business intimates
States that had more influence than his New York Post tabloid. The quest seemed impossible because the Bancroft family that controlled the Wall Street Journal didn’t want to sell, and if they did, they we- ren’t about to soil their precious property by selling it to a person with Murdoch’s politics or tabloid ways. Even if Murdoch had been the perfect
suitor, the 35 adult members of the Ban- croft family had made themselves hard to approach. For several generations, they had quietly cashed their handsome Dow Jones dividends and given company man- agers near-complete autonomy to run the firm, a process that Ellison aptly describes as paying the family elders to stay out of company affairs. So subservient was the family to their hirelings that most of them subscribed to the company’s romantic vi- sion of itself as a “quasi-public trust.” What shattered everybody’s dreamy notions was an April 2007 offer by the Murdoch-family- controlled News Corp. to pay $60 per share for Dow Jones. A 67 percent premi- um over the company’s trading price, the offer steadily eroded family resistance and
even that of Dow Jones executives, many of whom owned stock and stock options and would end up benefiting from the sale. Outside of a few pockets of resistance among the Bancrofts, the most sustained criticism of the bid during the 31
⁄2 months
it took to consummate the deal came from some corners of the Wall Street Journal newsroom and from Murdoch-watchers who predicted that he would defile the much-respected paper. (Disclosure: I was one of those Murdoch-watchers who fre- quently and quite vociferously predicted that he would ruin the Journal.) Ellison, who covered the takeover of
Dow Jones as a Wall Street Journal re- porter, uses her access to “all of the sig- nificant players in the narrative,” as she puts it in her source notes, to chronicle the deal with precision. Inside the news business such detailed narratives are called “tick-tocks,” and hers beats like a metronome. That’s not to say that the reader won’t need the dramatis personae at the front of the book to keep the cast of characters straight or that Ellison doesn’t occasionally overdo the specifics
by listing what was served at a meal or the dog breeds that a Bancroft family mem- ber owned. But these are mere book- reviewer quibbles. Besides fracturing the Bancroft family’s
unity, Murdoch’s offer and acquisition dis- rupted succession plans just completed or pending at the Journal. A new publisher, Gordon Crovitz, had just been appointed and before him, a new Dow Jones chief ex- ecutive, Richard F. Zannino. Just days before the Murdoch offer be- came public, the Journal appointed a new top editor, Marcus W. Brauchli, who now serves as the executive editor of The Wash- ington Post. Ellison paints Brauchli as an operator who “became known to most re- porters in the Journal newsroom as a mas- ter manipulator of newsroom politics.” Although the Bancrofts insisted on an oversight committee that would protect the Journal’s editorial integrity from Mur- doch’s meddling, Murdoch and his new publisher, Robert Thomson, surprised no- body by repeatedly undercutting Brauchli after they took over, forcing his resigna- tion in April 2008. “Not for a day had
Brauchli appeared truly in charge,” Ellison writes. As usual, Murdoch got what he wanted. He’s also had his way with the pa- per itself. But he hasn’t tabloidized it or used it to advance his personal interests, as many of us warned. He may have de- emphasized the paper’s traditions of story- telling and investigative reporting in favor of producing a compact, daily news atlas. Yet he’s unlike so many other publishers, who are cutting budgets. He’s expanding the Wall Street Journal from a newspaper about business into a newspaper about the world. As a 79-year-old, he may not have enough time left to see his design bear fruit. When he dies, the “War at the Wall Street Journal” saga is likely to be re- played as the Murdoch children squabble over whether it would be wiser to preserve Dad’s empire or sell it to the highest bid- der. I’d want Sarah Ellison on that story.
bookworld@washpost.com
Jack Shafer writes about the press for Slate, which is owned by The Washington Post Co.
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