When politics goes berserk

and Other States of Mind,” first published by M Evans & Company in 1977.

It’s a moody, patriotic, paranoid (“When politics goes berserk,” Mee writes, “we all go mad”), unbuttoned and deeply literate book about one man’s search for what went wrong with the American experiment, and what still might be worth upholding and defending in our politics. It’s never felt more relevant.

Mee was and is — now in his late 70s, he’s a professor of theatre at Columbia University — a complicated cat. He was in his 30s when he wrote “A Visit to Haldeman.” He’d already composed plays, books of history (“Meeting at Potsdam,” published in 1975, was a main selection of the Literary Guild) and had been the editor of magazines including Horizon and Playbill, the theatre guide.

He was a twice-divorced Harvard graduate, a proto-hippie, a polio survivor and the co-founder and chairman of the National Committee on the Presidency, which worked for Nixon’s impeachment. He racked up big bar tabs at Elaine’s.

H R Haldeman, Nixon’s former chief of staff, his Reince Priebus, reached out to Mee and suggested they work on a book together. Mee turned this odd idea over in his mind. He began to think that if he could stare “the old malefactor” in the eye, he might find some clues about what happened to America.

In part, “A Visit to Haldeman” is a cranky jeremiad. The American Republic is all but dead, Mee suggests.

He notes “the citizens who do not vote, the businessmen whose corrupted and corrupting loyalties transcend the borders of their native land, the presidents and others who lurk about hiding their acts from the people and employing sneaks to spy upon their fellow citizens, public servants who presume to play at being masters, the foreign policy makers who try to distract our gaze by crying wolf here and there.”

He adds: “Machiavelli could not do justice to this theme. Shakespeare’s Richard II could not weep copiously enough. We watched it play itself out, with the nerves of dead men in a dead Republic.”

This sort of thing, stirring though it may be, can take you only so far. It’s a visit to the op-ed page. “A Visit to Haldeman” works because Mee has such a wily mind, febrile imagination and casually intense confessional voice.

He seems to know everyone, and he begins to seek advice about confronting Haldeman. He lunches with a shadowy friend (“He was my rotten self”) who may or may not be a spy, because “Richard was one of the people I liked to be around just then to shore up my cynicism in case I felt myself slipping.”

Dropping Zevon’s name into the mix above was intentional. One of this muchmissed songwriter’s era-defining songs was called “Mohammed’s Radio.” Its meanings are impossible to reduce to a paragraph, much less a sentence, but the radio in question seems to have nothing to do with religion. The version that matters is on Zevon’s formidable 1980 live album, “Stand in the Fire.”

In this version, Zevon tweaks his lyrics to include a description of his own trip to see Jerry Brown, to try to better understand where California, and by extension America, lost its way. “I went and asked the governor because I thought that he would know,” Zevon sings. He adds, “You see, he’s been up all night listening to Mohammed’s radio.”

Like Zevon’s narrator, Mee is on a quest. (He does eventually meet Haldeman; the details aren’t worth spoiling here.) It’s one that takes him back to his own Midwestern childhood. He lingers especially on the polio that nearly killed him.

“A boy stricken with polio thinks a great deal about power and impotence, strength and weakness, justice and injustice,” Mee writes. “He wonders in what way all men are created equal, in what their equality resides, and whether or not this equality can be lost.” He comes to sense that “only democratic politics creates people equal.”

“A Visit to Haldeman” has other champions, notably the critic Greil Marcus. But I’ve yet to meet anyone who’s read it. It’s a pessimistic book that nonetheless bends toward optimism, and it is a tonic for sore hearts and minds. Charles L Mee Jr. M Evans 226 pages; $15.95