Finding Parallels in Two Biographies

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I read Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff recently, and followed immediately by reading Kingfish, a biography of Huey P. Long, written by Richard D. White, Jr. This was intentional. I bought the former on Amazon as soon as it was released and recently picked up a lightly used copy of the latter at Gladewater Books, my new favorite used bookstore.

My first impression of Fire and Fury is that the copy editors at publisher Henry Holt and Company clearly were on holiday. The book is riddled with typos that made me cringe: “pubic” instead of “public,” “differed” instead of “deferred,” to name a couple. This might be akin to living in a glass house and chunking rocks, since typos creep into my writing. The difference is that Holt is a national publisher, presumably with people employed to catch the gremlins. I am a one-person show when it comes to these columns. The only saving grace is that I can always fix mistakes later, since the work appears online. That wasn’t the case when my columns appeared in a newspaper, the mistakes recorded for posterity — as they are in Wolff’s book, at least in the initial printing.

Worse than the typos are the errors in fact. PolitiFact is a highly respected fact-checking site and a Pulitzer Prize winner. As PolitiFact reports, Fire and Fury “portrays an infighting senior team at each other’s throats, and a president too narcissistic and distracted to be capable of governing.” OK, that rings true, based on myriad stories during the past year. This is a presidency governing by chaos, with no end in sight. Well, there’s always 2020.

The factual errors, as they always do, diminish the credibility of Wolff’s reporting. For example, as PolitiFact notes, Wolff inaccurately writes that then-Speaker John Boehner resigned in 2011 when actually it was 2015. One can Google that. Wolff claims Trump didn’t know who Boehner was in 2016, when Trump tweeted derisively about Boehner the previous year. Wolff writes that Wilbur Ross was Trump’s pick for labor secretary, when actually it was commerce secretary. He misidentifies a couple of folks, and his sourcing at times is thin at best.

Forthcoming accounts of the Trump presidency, and there will be many, especially as administration officials resign and look to rake in loot with tell-all accounts of their time inside the White House, should provide a more fully sourced picture. Former Washington Post publisher Phil Graham is credited with saying, “Journalism is the first rough draft of history.” In Wolff’s case, it is a mighty rough draft.

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Then, there is Kingfish. Huey P. Long was governor and U.S. senator in Louisiana from 1928 until his assassination in 1935, in the lobby of the new capitol in Baton Rouge — a 34-story monument to the despot who ruled Louisiana with an iron fist until his demise. The author of Kingfish, a highly respected professor at Louisiana State University, has written the definitive biography of Long. He clearly demonstrates that the Kingfish, as he loved to be called, proved Lord Acton’s dictum that, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

The breadth of Long’s corruption, even for Louisiana, is stunning. One aspect that especially interested me concerned his attempts to control the state’s large newspapers, all of which were aligned against him. Long was quick to spew insults and attack his enemies in the most personal way (sound familiar?), but he was awfully thin-skinned when newspapers criticized him. To that end, he declared, “lying newspapers should have to pay for their lying. I’m going to help these newspapers by hitting them in the pocketbooks. Maybe they’ll try to clean up.” After several attempts, the Kingfish succeeded in getting the Legislature — a puppet body by 1934 — to pass a 2-percent tax on the gross revenues of the largest newspapers. It was ruled unconstitutional several months later.

The Kingfish, while drunk, once ordered the National Guard to march to downtown New Orleans, take over the Times-Picayune and wreck its presses. Fortunately, his aide told the commanding general to wait until he could get Long sobered up, after which the raid was called off. The Kingfish even started his own newspaper, The Progress, which once proclaimed, “Watch out for the lying newspapers!”

Sound familiar? I thought so. The current occupant of the Oval Office is waging his own war against the mainstream media, handing out “Fake News” awards to CNN, the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, and ABC. He has called the media the “enemy of the American people,” prompting a cottage industry in T-shirts with line drawings of old newspaper presses and the slogan, “Enemy of the American People Since 1791.” That’s the year the Bill of Rights was ratified.

I have the T-shirt.

Trump has called for loosening of libel laws, presumably so he could more easily go after media organizations. Luckily, that is going nowhere, but the Kingfish doubtless would approve.

We live in uneasy times

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