The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘To my father, Charles Lindbergh was a god’
David Simon tells Jane Mulkerrins why the time was ripe to bring Philip Roth’s vision of a fascist US president to television
David Simon’s father, Bernard, was seven years old when his own father took him on a rare trip across the Hudson River, from their home in New Jersey to witness Charles Lindbergh’s ticker-tape parade through the streets of Manhattan. It was 1927, and the 25 year-old aviator had just become a national hero after making the first non-stop solo transatlantic flight, from New York to Paris, in his single-engine Spirit of St Louis.
“It was one of my father’s earliest memories, sitting on his father’s shoulders as Lindbergh came down Broadway,” David Simon tells me. “Lindbergh was a god to him.” By the time Bernard Simon (“this Jewish kid from Jersey City”) turned 18,
Lindbergh was the darling of the German-American Bund, a pro-Nazi organisation established during the build-up to the Second World War. “For my father to see him veer off into anti-Semitism was powerful and debilitating,” Simon says.
We are talking on a humid summer’s day in East Orange, New Jersey in 2019. The 60-year-old journalist-turned-television writer – who made his name with the acclaimed Baltimore crime drama The Wire and has gone on to make such punchy, politically-charged series as Treme, Generation Kill and The Deuce – is on the set of his latest project, an adaptation of Philip Roth’s 2004 bestseller, The Plot Against America.
Published at the height of the George W Bush administration, the novel looked back six decades to imagine an alternative history in which Franklin D Roosevelt is defeated in the 1940 presidential election by Lindbergh, who, after moving from aviation into politics (something that Roosevelt reportedly considered a very real threat), runs on a platform of “America First”, a motto that would come back to haunt Roth.
Following Lindbergh’s victory, he signs a treaty with Hitler’s Germany, vowing to keep the US out of the Second World War, and unleashing a tide of fascism and anti-Semitism across America.
Despite the diversity of their setting, there is a common thread to Simon’s critically acclaimed dramas. Whether they unspool on the crime-ridden streets of Baltimore, in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, or in local government offices in 1980s New York, his stories commonly explore the capacity of the individual to survive within a brutal system that strips people of their humanity. The Plot Against America is no exception: a gnawing sense of dread builds throughout the early episodes of this nuanced six-part period piece as civil rights are steadily eroded, particularly for Jewish families.
Simon’s adaptation makes some subtle but significant changes to the original novel. The Roth family at the heart of the drama have become the Levins, and their story is no longer told solely from the perspective of the youngest son, Philip (Azhy Robertson), but also from that of his brother, Sandy (Caleb Malis), his parents, Bess (Zoe Kazan) and Alvin (Morgan Spector), his aunt, Evelyn (Winona Ryder), and his cousin, Alvin (Anthony Boyle). While Roth’s book ends with Lindbergh’s plane disappearing and a re-elected Roosevelt leading America into war – and on to victory – the series reaches a more ambiguous, unsettling climax, since, says Simon, against the current political backdrop, “there was something more interesting to be said”.
How times change. When he was first approached to adapt The Plot Against America in 2013, Simon now admits he was baffled. “I said, why would I do that? We’ve just elected an African-American president for the second time. Our political future is going the opposite way to this retrograde populism. I told them: ‘I loved the book when I read it – it was a lovely little artefact of imagined alternative history, but it’s not the history we have now. Thanks, but I just don’t see it.’” Four years later, as Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 45th president of the United States, while his supporters chanted “America First”, Roth’s novel looked newly, disturbingly relevant. Simon – whose dramas betray an uncommon gift for capturing both the overwhelming currents acting on any given community and the frailty of the human lives swept along on them – could no longer resist.
While working on the screenplay, he met Roth (who died in 2018) just once. The novelist warned Simon that, in seeking contemporary echoes for the story, “to be aware that the dynamic of Trump doesn’t exactly line up”, he recalls. “He said: ‘Lindbergh was a hero, a fundamentally brave man, who had done something extraordinary, and was beloved by America and to some extent, the world. While Trump’, he commented, ‘is the opposite of that’.”
Nevertheless, Simon says that while Roth “certainly didn’t imagine Donald Trump” he did “imagine a demagogue seizing power and creating an isolationist and xenophobic fear of the other”. No leap of imagination is required to detect signs of xenophobia at the
heart of the current US administration. It is, after all, overseen by a leader who publicly refers to coronavirus as “kung flu” and during whose presidency hate crime rates in America have soared. Simon sees this as the re-emergence of an ugly aspect of the American outlook that has always been latent.
“As a nation of immigrants we’ve been savaging whatever the current wave of immigration is for as long as the country’s been alive,” he says. “It’s what we do. We normally believe that whoever is coming to our shores and attempting to become Americans will not be sufficiently American enough; that their capacities to assimilate will be inferior to our own, that they will not become the same Americans we are, that they will not be the kind of Americans we want.
“We’ve been saying this since it was the Irish and the Germans and we’ve been saying it for the Jews and the Italians and through African-Americans and then the migration north. We’ve been saying it now with the Latinos and now with Muslims, and we keep saying it and it’s always a lie.”
For all that The Plot Against America grapples with big ideas, it is also Simon’s most personal series to date. Displayed on set, there are old photographs of his own parents – who, like the Levins, were the children of Jewish immigrants from Russia, Hungary and Poland. Some of his father’s stock phrases have even made their way into the script. “My Dad passed away several years ago, and when I was writing Herman Levin, I’d find myself sticking Bernie Simon in,” he says, fondly. “I don’t think a dinner went by when my Dad would taste my mother’s soup and wouldn’t say: ‘You know how much you’d pay for this soup if you were at Katz’s Deli? A dollar a spoonful.’ So Herman says that now. I pulled my family through the keyhole in this.”
Simon grew up in what he describes as a “secular family, with some basic Jewish ritual”, in Washington DC, where his father was public relations director for the Jewish service organisation B’nai B’rith. While studying journalism at the University of Maryland, he edited the college newspaper and landed his first scoop – a MeToostyle scandal involving the
THE WIRE
(2002-08)
From teenage gangs to City Hall, Simon’s Baltimore-set breakthrough had epic scope.
GENERATION KILL
(2008) Next stop, Iraq, as a reporter is embedded with a platoon of US Marines. Ranks among the best TV war dramas.
TREME
(2010-13) Post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans dusts itself down in this ode to the power of music.
SHOW ME A HERO
(2015) Who but Simon could turn a drama about a public housing crisis into must-see TV?
THE DEUCE
(2017-19)
The birth of the porn industry gets the Simon treatment as sex, money and politics collide. basketball coach. “He should have been fired, but instead, they did a bullshit investigation for six months, slapped him on the wrist and gave him a new contract for more money,” he recalls, still sounding aggrieved. “At that exact moment, I knew what my job was – to get the story right. What they do after it, I cannot control.”
That piece landed him his first job, on the Baltimore Sun, where he spent 13 years as a police reporter. In 1988, he took a leave of absence to write a book about the city’s homicide unit. The book became the basis for the award-winning TV series Homicide: Life on the Streets, which launched Simon’s screenwriting career, and supplied many of the incidents and unforgettable characters he would draw on for The Wire.
Almost a year after our first meeting, in late May 2020, I spoke to Simon again, this time by phone from his home in Baltimore, where he lives with his wife, the novelist Laura Lippman, and their 10 year-old daughter, Georgia. At that point, The Plot Against America was already showing in the United States, the coronavirus pandemic had claimed 115,000 American lives (a figure that has, at time of writing, reached 128,000) and triggered the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression, and the next presidential election was less than six months away.
“I’m very worried,” Simon tells me. “We’re coming up to what may be the most important election of my life and it feels like we’re about to pivot. Either we’re about to say no to something and start walking it back, or we’re about to go in deeper into something very ugly.” While garrulous and outspoken, Simon is also careful and precise; a far remove from his irascible Twitter persona, which he says he sees as a sort of “performance art”. But, he makes no bones about it, he is angry. “If you write politically, and you’re living in this moment, and you’re not angry, then there’s something wrong with you,” he says. “This is the time to get angry; there’s not going to be a tomorrow if enough people don’t get angry.”
While he’s aware that, as a maker of television drama, he has limited influence, he hopes The Plot Against America will at least provoke “a conversation about the American capacity for totalitarianism”, he says. “But we were just really proud to get it made and on screen the election year. When they ask us what we were doing when the country turned in such an ugly way towards fascism, what we were writing about, we can look at ourselves in the mirror.
“I don’t think democracy will ever get to a point where we go, oh, we’ve perfected it,” he adds. “Every day, you have to get up and kill snakes – and we’ve got to a point where we’re not killing snakes fast enough.” Even down the line I can hear the note of pessimism in his voice. “The snakes are getting to be very good at what they do,” he says. “And it’s scary.”
‘This may be the most important election of my life. Will we say no – or go deeper?’
The Plot Against America is on Sky Atlantic and Now TV from July 14