MICHAEL SIMKINS
As a young student with journalistic ambitions, the broadcaster and former
BBC radio presenter James Naughtie spent the summer of 1970 in America, funding his trip by working as an assistant salad chef in the kitchens of a kosher holiday resort in the Catskills.
Since then he has returned countless times to witness up close and personal each twist and turn in the story of the nation he evidently adores, from Nixon’s re-election, through Watergate, Chappaquiddick, the end of the Cold War, Reagan and Clinton, 9/11, and on to the emergence of the two political figures who symbolise the increasing polarity in American politics: Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Naughtie has been there, done that and got the bumper sticker.
Now 50 years of adventuring is distilled into a revealing and at times spellbinding tapestry of a nation in all its glories and complexities.
His encounters switch back from the profound to the bizarre; a personal tour of JFK’s house with 91-year-old Rose Kennedy; a chat with legendary poker player Doyle Brunson about his time round the green baize table with Lyndon B Johnson; a latenight drink in a hotel suite with the 1984 Democratic candidate Walter Mondale (‘I have a lingering memory of the man who would be president in his shirt and boxer shorts with a glass in his hand and a gloomy look on his face’); or the time when Naughtie finds himself on set during filming of the TV series Kojak, where he’s mistaken by the director for the stills photographer and has to keep snapping away in between takes to preserve the conceit.
But it’s his myriad encounters with ordinary folk along the way – on long-distance trains (he really loves travelling by rail), in roadside diners or small-town communities – that linger in the memory.
This is the rarest of reads, a book that makes you ache to hop on a plane and sample this extraordinary country for yourself. This is a thoughtprovoking, constantly surprising and hugely entertaining book.
Sublime stuff.