Murder Your Darlings
Murder Your Darlings
“This too shall pass,” Ronald Reagan, then Governor of California can be heard assuring President Richard Nixon in a 1973 taped phone call to the Oval Office. “This” was Watergate. It did not “pass.”
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Murder Your Darlings
“This too shall pass,” Ronald Reagan, then Governor of California can be heard assuring President Richard Nixon in a 1973 taped phone call to the Oval Office. “This” was Watergate. It did not “pass.” In the aftermath, Reagan didn’t think Nixon or the “Watergate Seven” were “criminals at heart.” He couldn’t. His future depended on it.
In 1973, Reagan’s star was fading in California, and that was just fine by Nixon. He recognized that Reagan was a flag-waving, dog-whistle racist who appealed to the base, and to Nixon. He envied easy bigotry. “To see those, those monkeys from those African countries,” Reagan seethed after a disappointing United Nations vote. “Damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!” According to the historian Tim Naftali, the former Director of the Nixon Presidential Library, “Reagan unlocked a trope that he, Nixon, wanted to use and felt he could by quoting Reagan.” And he did, in conversations with his cabinet and beyond.
I wrote those paragraphs for Slate. Good stuff, right? I wanted it to be the first thing readers saw, but it was cut. Twice. Still, I’m quite happy with “What Being Unpopular Does to a First-Term President: Some lessons for Joe Biden from the ‘70s presidents who lived it,” and here’s why: I love being edited (by really good editors). I know a few writers who share this perspective, but many more view track changes through blood-colored lenses. And yet, we all end up in the same place: A writer must kill her darlings.
William Faulkner, right? Nope. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch should get credit, but his 1916 book, On the Art of Writing, doesn’t come up often in conversation. “Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it — wholeheartedly — and delete it before sending your manuscript to press…Murder your darlings.” MURDER. Not kill. Murder. Faulkner misremembered the quote so often misattributed to him.
I prefer Quiller-Couch’s word choice. It leaves more of an impression. Am I willing to defend a paragraph comparing Democrats to a pod of dolphins (sadly not a joke) from a murderer? A darling I invented yesterday(ish), specific to a short(ish) piece? No thanks, or at least, not in this medium. Different rules apply to features and op-eds at different publications, and I’m just passing through. I doubt the editor, who likely solicited my work, is a bloodthirsty monster out to minimize my voice. They know my deal. They like it. When I introduce my darlings in a google doc to someone like Rebecca Onion, who has been on my team for a decade, it’s like introducing old friends who happened to move to the same city. Sure, they’ll say “moving you to bcc to save your inbox” and make a few earnest attempts to get together for coffee, but after that, they’ll never, ever speak again. The editor is pleasant in the first draft, deeming an inevitable cut “fun,” “a fascinating aside,” or “an insane move.” But a word like “distracting” is never far behind. They wanted to make my darling work, but it just didn’t.
That doesn’t mean I stop trying. The following paragraph came to me in my last (or next to last) draft. It met with no resistance from my editor and, as is often the case, was most often quoted in interviews and emails.
Reagan and Kennedy didn’t help Ford and Carter win a second term, but they didn’t preclude it, either. If approval ratings are diagnostic tools for presidents looking at their chances at reelection, primary challengers are like second opinions. It’s up to the patient to settle upon a treatment, and both Ford and Carter misjudged their odds.
As for the rest of the edits? I accepted them and became an accomplice to murder. I buried the bodies in a doc called “Slate_Being Primaried_Cuts,” some of whom I have exhumed for readers who want to know more about the writing process. I pasted the opening here too, so you could see my faulty vision in all its glory, but otherwise, what follows is disjointed and often lacks context. Enjoy!
“This too shall pass,” Ronald Reagan, then Governor of California can be heard assuring President Richard Nixon in a 1973 taped phone call to the Oval Office. “This” was Watergate. It did not “pass.” In the aftermath, Reagan didn’t think Nixon or the “Watergate Seven” were “criminals at heart.” He couldn’t. His future depended on it.
In 1973, Reagan’s star was fading in California, and that was just fine by Nixon. He recognized that Reagan was a flag-waving, dog-whistle racist who appealed to the base, and to Nixon. He envied easy bigotry. “To see those, those monkeys from those African countries,” Reagan seethed after a disappointing United Nations vote. “Damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!” According to the historian Tim Naftali, the former Director of the Nixon Presidential Library, “Reagan unlocked a trope that he, Nixon, wanted to use and felt he could by quoting Reagan.” And he did, in conversations with his cabinet and beyond.
Reagan was “circumspect about criticizing the President of the United States,” Washington Post reporter Lou Cannon later explained, “unless Gerald Ford happened to be President and he was in the way.” That’s what made Ford fair game: He just happened to be president. (And vice president. He wasn’t elected to either office!)
Ford is one of thirteen presidents who served one term. For some dynasties, it was a family affair: John Adams, the second president of the United States, was its first one-term president, and decades later, his son, John Quincy Adams became the second one-term president, followed by thirteen men. George H.W. Bush served one term while his son, George H.W. Bush, served two.
In 1964, Martin Luther King said a Goldwater presidency–which Lyndon B. Johnson thwarted– “threatens the health, morality, and survival of our nation.”
[Ted and Carter pale in comparison to the late JFK.] He embodied the mythology Americans carried with them, put forth by Jackie Kennedy in Life magazine days after her husband was assassinated: There would never be another Camelot. At least, not when this guy was leading the party.
"I have great respect for Hillary [Clinton],” Biden said in 2016. “She would have made a hell of a president,” he said, but that’s not why he followed Obama into retirement and resisted running that year. "I had planned on running before Beau got sick," Biden told the Los Angeles Times. When Beau died of brain cancer ahead of the 2016 convention and seemed satisfied with his reputation as a respected statesman of 44 years who served under the first Black president and his new tax bracket; after leaving office, “Middle-Class Joe '' made 15 million dollars as a private citizen.
The iconography of the Democratic party is the donkey, but all this talk of elephants brings me back to a historical footnote from the 1976 Republican convention, one so minor, I’ve never seen an actual photograph of it. I’ve only read descriptions, no doubt amplifying it in my mind. Ford was likely greeted by a 55-foot-tall elephant when he entered the Kemper Convention Hall, but the mascot met a terrible fate while the incumbent was being primaried inside. The inflatable became unmoored. Wind pummeled it right into a wire fence, where it was gutted.
Head over to Slate to read the whole thing, and send me your favorite historic convention moment. None?! If you need me, I’ll be recovering on my fainting couch.
ON A RELATED NOTE:
ON AN UNRELATED NOTE:
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