Subject: (urth) AEG - White House visit

From: Stephen Hoy <stephenhoy at yahoo.com>
Date: Tue, 07 Apr 2009 15:22:29 +0000

In the opening chapter of An Evil Guest, Wolfe takes us inside
the White House for a few moments where we get a brief look at
the inside game of a cowboy president and his wily assistant. I
wondered for a bit whether these two figures might have
historical analogs. Not that everything on a printed page will
have its cunning duplicate in the natural world, but it does seem
likely that Wolfe's imagination might draw on something he lived
through or something that in some way connected to his personal
history. Hypothetically, this scene draws on Wolfe's memory of
Texas in the early 50s, when a certain senator was politicking
his way to national prominence.

To be sure, there's a dash of a several administrations seasoning
this presidential chili, but the conversation reminded me most of
the way LBJ might handle an interview, which would make the aide
"John" into an analog of Johnson's close associate, Jack Valenti.
Recent bios of LBJ by Dallek and Caro show Johnson as a man
driven by a conviction that 'knowledge is power', and the flip
side of that conviction is a touch of paranoia about a man like
Reyes who similarly wields knowledge to build power--all of which
would fit in with a scene of the cowboy president attempting to
manipulate an academic wizard like Gideon Chase so the president
can eliminate a competitor.

The scene reminded me of something we might find in a
transcription of the Johnson tapes. Caro's bios haven't caught up
with Johnson's presidency yet, but maybe Dallek's 'Flawed Giant'
has a similar scene. No matter. The cognitive link to what
follows in AEG is not through the president but through the
Valenti analog. The 'real-life' figure was intimately entwined
with the world of actors and acting, one of the larger threads
from which AEG is woven.
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