REVEREND IKE: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obituary of the Reverend Ike is in today's Independent, you can find it here. Just a couple of small facts got cut: it was the small size of the marquee on his first converted movie theatre church in Harlem that was the reason his billing was shortened to Rev. Ike, and the 'Blessing Plan' might well have been the inspiration for the kind of holy investmens that scheme Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker ran, and which landed Jim in jail. And the headline, of course, wasn't mine; 'worshipped wealth' is tooo blunt an exaggeration, Ike's mission, while never far removed from the dollar signs, was more nuanced than that.

I remember watching Ike in the early 1970s, when I worked on the road teaching speed reading and saw a lot of motel TV. He was certainly the most entertaining of TV evangelists, and because his pitch was so blatant you never felt yourself submersed in the ooze of hypocricy. And of course what I called the 'Superfly' era was not kind, satorially speaking, to most of us, not just Ike.

His interview with Clayton Riley is amazing, at least the bits of it I encountered: Ike basically concedes that his whole faith-healing mission was a scam, except, of course that it worked because people believed it would. His career in a nut-shell, except, of course, very few of his followers got as rich as he did.

LAWMEN & ALIASES: 'PATRICK CULHANE'S' BLACK HATS

I'm always puzzled by the use of the public pseudonym, by which I mean one the author makes no intent to hide behind, as opposed to the more common use of pseudonyms to hide identities from the public eye for any number of reasons. Richard Stark and Tucker Coe became public pseduonyms, but not until after the 'secret' of their being Donald Westlake had already become common knowledge, which is a different thing.

It's interesting to speculate on why writers choose the nominal cover of an acknowledged alias. Some are producing work they see as substantially different from their previous, established image: Ruth Rendell writing as Barbara Vine, for example. It's as much a branding tool as anything else. Sometimes a writer with a 'mainstream' literary reputation wants to keep what he or she feels are genre books separate from their recognised oeuvre; though I'd argue that it's much harder to draw a clear line separating John Banville as Benjamin Black or Joyce Carol Oates as Rosamund Smith than either writer might want to accept. Then there are starnger cases. The apotheosis of the false dichotomy came when Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland published his first novel, an unthrilling 'thriller', using a deliberately public pseudonym, Sam Bourne, presumably chosen carefully for its Ludlum associations. Because of his media stature under his own name, this ensured maximum publicity, favourable reviews, and yet no slur upon his previously existing journalistic brand.

But Max Allan Collins, as a brand, covers so much and such varied ground I wondered why he needed to use the Patrick Culhane pseudonym for Black Hats, in which he brings Wyatt Earp (and Bat Masterson) face to face with Al Capone in the New York City of the prohibition era. Max is so prolific, and selling so well under his own name, that I suspect he did it so the Culhane books would not be subsumed in his Collins work. Because, to me, Max's best novels are the Nathan Heller historical crime books (I've lamented their relative lack of publication in this country many times before), and I also have a fondness for his Elliott Ness novels, a sort of spin-off of Heller. Black Hats has been followed by another Culhane historical novel, Red Sky In Morning, and I suspect that, in an ideal world, these books and the Heller and Ness ones would fall neatly under one name. Of course, I could be completely wrong too: often there turn out to be perfectly practical and simple reasons for such things, and my speculation may be unwarranted.

It is, however, affectionate speculation, because it's one thing to write, as Collins does in the Heller books, about crimes that remain unsolved, or less than satisfactorily solved, where Heller can come up with his own solution, and quite another thing indeed to write a book where the audience is aware (or should be) not only that both Earp and Capone will survive their showdown, but that Capone will also move to Chicago, and achieve his notoriety. In fact, Collins solves this problem quite cleverly, though it becomes pretty obvious what is going on, and the scenario is, in the end a familiar one, not least from other period pieces from the same era, like The Sting. Nor is using the aging Earp that much of an innovation; for example Matt Braun wrote about Bill Tilghman, who was still a lawman in Oklahoma in his 70s. But what makes Collins' book a success is its set-up, the way he contrives the conflict, and especially the conceit of giving Doc Holliday a son, and putting him on one side of the battle, and making him Earp's primary motivation.

Much of the novel tells another story in flashback, Collins' version of the OK Corral, and again, this works because he doesn't approach the material directly. That has been done very well already in Loren Estleman's Bloody Season, while Robert B Parker in Gunman's Rhapsody gave it his own fascinating spin, where the Earps echoed the private eye ethos of Spenser and his crew. In fact Parker approached it from the other side too, doing a Spenser novels as re-writes of westerns. But by making the big show backstory, Collins leaves himself leeway to follow his Earp deeper, and in what is otherwise a fast-paced straight-forward tale, the reminiscence and the interior portrait of Earp punctuate it with surprising and satisfying depth. In fact, Collins' Earp has many of the same qualities as his Ness: ramrod straight but not quite as pure or unyielding as TV mythology; it's interesting that both characters have been played on film by Kevin Costner, the epitome of the one-dimensional figure of tortured nobility. Costner is not one for ambiguity, but Collins wants his Earp to have just enough of it to make things, and him, interesting.

Collins' Heller books are always filtered through the detective's perceptions, here, Culhane is free to speculate, not about history, but about character, and motivation, and this is what Collins does very well indeed. The Earp story is one I've studied over the years, and what Collins has to say at no point jars what I understand from it, and adds some very subtle shading. It's also a story that has enjoyed, encouraged, and justified constant retelling, and this one is a first-rate addition to the canon—and as usual one with a useful bibliography if you wish to pursue the Earp story further. A diverting and enjoyable book.

Black Hats
Max Allan Collins writing as Patrick Culhane
Harper Collins (2008) £6.99 ISBN 9780060892548

THOMAS H COOK'S STREETS OF FIRE: A Forgotten Friday Entry

Streets Of Fire was published in 1989, in the middle of Thomas Cook’s series of police procedurals featuring the ever-more-depressive Frank Clemons, and it shares some of that tone. But it’s a very different sort of novel, because rather than being set in the New York of the present, it’s set in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, as the civil rights movement is gathering momentum and the streets of that city seethe with frustration and fear. When the body of a young black girl is dug up in a park in the Negro section of town, no one is too concerned, except for detective Ben Wellman--a loner on the force and soon to be even more alone as he works a case no one wants him to work.

Cook himself is dismissive of the book today (‘what do you want to look at that old thing for?’ he said) but it is interesting to look at it in light of where he’s gone since. Its weak point is the police procedural plot, which becomes far too involved and mechanical in its resolution. You can almost feel the same sort of frustration Cook says he felt with the Clemons books; at one point he felt he couldn’t 'write any worse' than he was doing in that series.

More interesting is the social setting of the civil rights movement itself, and the deeply engrained ethos of prejudice which determines life in Birmingham. It’s interesting because Cook is a transplanted southerner, and the easy thing to say is that he is writing from a ‘northern’ standpoint. But that wouldn’t be true, because what he is working at is a sense in which the oppressed and the oppressor collude, in some ways, in maintaining their status; it is that unpleasant reality against which Wellman winds up butting his head more than once. He is also particularly sensitive to the way in which Wellman’s own attitudes to the racial issue are opened up, and changed: subtly, gradually, somewhat reluctantly, as he investigates.

Cook’s later novels can be divided into those set in the north and those set in the south, but this one seems to come before the tones of those two kinds of books began to pull apart. If anything, the actual social conflict is used as background, visible more for the internal pressures it places on the police department, and on Wellman, than as an event in itself. At times it has the feel of fantasy, as if no one really believes their world will be changed by this protest. It’s not piece of reportage about the civil rights movement; in fact its best line may be when one cop complains about the tripartite menaces of ‘communists, socialists, and journalists’. But it is very good at evoking the internal pressure of justice, the increasing force of an idea whose time has come on those who realise that is the case.

But the real focus of the book is Wellman, and more than being a depressive cop in the Frank Clemons mode, he is also the prototype for any number of Cook’s lonely heroes. They are usually men who, for whatever reason, exist detached from the world. Cook at one point describes Wellman as he ‘curls into his aloneness like a bed‘, and when he says ‘But Ben had kept his distance in this, as in almost everything else,’ he conveys the sense that Wellman may indeed be a misnomer. What the book does is hold out hope for Ben’s wellness through his engagement with the changing world, and that, to me is interesting because it is precisely in engagement that Cook usually offers his characters redemption, or meaning, or whatever it is they are seeking. Streets Of Fire may not be one of Cooks’s best novels, and it lacks the slow-burning layering of his best writing, but it is a book that grips the reader, a good attempt at putting an early version of the classic Cook hero into a historically familiar situation, and if it is less than a total success it is a very interesting one, whether or not you’ve immersed yourself in his later oeuvre.

JOHN SHANNON: THE NEW AMERICAN EYE COLUMN AT SHOTS

My May (!?!) American Eye column (admittedly not filed until the first week of June!) is finally up at Shots--you can find it here. It marked my introduction to John Shannon, but since it's gone up I've learned that at least two of the Jack Liffey series, The Orange Curtain and Streets On Fire were in fact published in Britain, by Orion, so how they slipped under my radar I've no idea. It does mean he should be slightly easier for you to find in this country. But uncovering such work is what the American Eye column was intended to do! My thanks to Michele Slung for pointing me in Shannon's direction.

WIN A COPY OF 'THE BEST GAME EVER'

Through the courtesy of Atlantic Books, I have six copies of The Best Game Ever, a book about the 1958 NFL championship game between the NY Giants and Baltimore Colts that went to sudden death overtime and helped put the NFL on America's radar, written by Mark Bowden, author of. among other things, Black Hawk Down. To win one, you'll have to be on facebook, and join the Mike Carlson Appreciation Society (no I didn't start it, as you'll see from the mispellings in its mission statement) and answer a trivia question about that game...

I'll probably write about the book later on for this site, if not somewhere else...

HAROLD NORSE: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obituary of the Beat poet Harold Norse appears in today's Independent, you can find it here. I probably should have found a better way to describe Naked Lunch, which is one of the great American novels, but I've written an essay on its 50th anniversary, and that will appear here soon.

It's difficult to trace Norse's life without making him sound like a literary Zelig, but if you look at haroldnorse.com you'll find a series of photos which suggest that he was an object of desire for generations of poets. My experience of Norse's writing was less intimate, but I recall that Penguin poets volume, which I picked up when I first visited England in 1972, and it was one of my favourites; I carried it around with me while hitching through the Highlands in a very cold January 1973--Norse indeed.

MARK MILLS' WHALEBOAT HOUSE: A Forgotten Friday Entry

I'm not sure if, strictly speaking, The Whaleboat House qualifies as a forgotten book--after all it won the CWA Silver Dagger for best debut, and his second novel, The Savage Garden, was a Richard & Judy finalist, but as he had managed to slip under my crime-reviewing radar, I thought I'd revisit it, to see if it deserved its award. And I'm pleased I to say, it probably did, though it's also fair to ask how many award winning books have since been retitled by their publishers? Maybe they assumed a British audience wouldn't figure out it was a place name, and certainly wouldn't know how to pronounce Amagansett (it would come out Uh-MAG-an-set). But the original title was Amagansett (see below left) when it was published in 2004 (and it's a place name, pronounced AM-a-gan-set, just like it looks) but perhaps that name looked too serious for a Dagger winner. Even under its new title (which I confess actually works better) it's had two different paperback editions, the first pitching it more as a crime story, as befits a Dagger winner, the second positing it as a sort of historical piece of serious fiction, dirty realism set in the immediate post war, with a romantic twinge, as befits a Richard & Judy nominee (see below right). The problem with the latter approach is that although Mills writes well, and his period setting is drawn well and intriguingly, the story is, at heart, a mystery, and a tale of revenge.

It's notable too for its setting, the immediate postwar fishing community of Amagansett, before the huge boom in the Hamptons, when fishermen still plied their trade in New York's waters (see Joseph Mitchell's exquisite collection, The Bottom Of The Harbor, for a brilliantly realised picture of that industry from the same era). Conrad Labarde is the descendant of Basque fishermen, and works the waters from his shack on the ocean side of Long Island, along with his friend Rollo, the somewhat dimwitted scion of the area's oldest fishing family. It's Rollo who's brought the whalehouse to Conrad's property: and the second title is a far better one for this book; along Amagansett is the setting, it is the whalehouse that sees the story.

Conrad and Rollo bring up the body of Lillian Wallace, one of the wealthy population who visit the area on summer weekends. But Conrad has his own history with Lillian, and knowing the presumed suicide is a murder, he investigates alongside Tom Hollis, a disgraced former New York cop now deputy chief in the small town. The investigation, of course, visits the areas where cultures clash, while Hollis, whose own investigation is directed, as it were, by a few dropped words from Conrad, also discovers ways around his own problems. As well as Lillian's death, Conrad is also haunted by his experiences in the war, where he was an assassin, and somehow blessed with luck while those around him died.

This is a lot to pack into a relatively small package, but Mills does it well. You might say it's too much, that the Hollis and Labrade backstories are slightly too melodramatic, but I think that what is also going on here is a bit of homage from a British novelist to the great novels of the early twentieth century: not just Joseph Conrad, which is signaled pretty obviously, or Fitzgerald's Gatsby, which of course is the classic novel of a Hamptons hit and run leading to more serious crimes. There are echoes of Hemingway, and Steinbeck too, and maybe even a little John O'Hara. It's as if Mills is simply touching those familiar soft spots, and it wouldn't work if he hadn't made his own characters so real, real enough to carry the story through. Its denouement is, like the backstories, somewhat melodramatic, and certainly we see it coming because we've seen it before, but it is handled well, and resolved honestly. As I said, Mills writes very well, and writes his American scenes and characters as well as any Anglo-Irish writer since John Connolly. The fact that he can make his period story resonate with echoes of great novels while still keeping the suspense compelling suggests the Daggers, and maybe even Richard & Judy, were right.

The Whaleboat House by Mark Mills
Harper Perennial 2005 £6.99 ISBN 0007161921

PYNCHON'S INHERENT VICE: THE SPECTATOR REVIEW

My review of Thomas Pynchon's latest novel, Inherent Vice, appears in today's Spectator, you can link to it here. It is a very funny book, and one that I think looks back on how 'we', who grew up in the post-war baby-boom era, got to where we are. Pynchon's style is less popular now that it was in those heady days, when I would have easily dumped V or Gravity's Rainbow into my list of the best American novels. There has been a backlash against the pursuit of the great American novel and against 'metafictions'--and yes, the former can be overblown and the latter disappear up their own asses, but when it works it works, and there's something conservatively British about the preference for minute examination of polite society. You never have to worry about that with Pynchon, but underneath the invention and the authorial playfulness, the examination, if not minute, is far more telling than, say, all of 'dirty realism' wrapped up in one.

HENNING MANKELL'S PYRAMID

Reading Henning Mankell's Wallander in shorter stories provides an interesting perspective into what makes the detective work—and more importantly into how Manning himself approaches writing about him. Two of the stories in this collection are long: the opener, here titled 'Wallander's First Case', is a good-sized novella, and the title story, 'The Pyramid', which ends the book, could have easily been published alone as a short novel. Mankell wrote all these stories to answer questions about what happened to Wallander before he debuted in 1990's Faceless Killers, and they were originally collected in Swedish in 1998. He explains in an introduction that is typically precise but somewhat less reticent than his interviews, that it wasn't until after those eight years had passed that he came up with the phrase which he would have used retrospectively to subtitle the Wallander series: 'Novels About The Swedish Anxiety'.

Without using the A word, this confirms what many of us have thought, and the link which Mankell has also explained between his books and the Sjowall/Wahloo Martin Beck series.
At times in these stories he tries to make the sense of collective angst rather too clear: at one point commenting on the fractured walls of society, and in another at the way, a generation before, Ystad would have been free of the effects of crime from the cities. There's a reflection of the novels too, since Mankell has always had fun with the sense of Ystad as a crime capital: remember the cash machine in the town square that was about to cue world wide armageddon? 'The Pyramid' is a classic case in point: an international drug cartel run by two spinster sisters who otherwise sell buttons and thread? But Mankell balances the unreal nature of that situation with the tale of Wallander having to rush to Egypt to get his father out of jail: the cantankerous old Swede has tried to fulfill his dream of climbing a pyramid, and been arrested. It's as surreal a scene as I can recall in any crime novel, and it helps put this Christmas tale into perspective.

'Wallander's First Case' is the best of the lot, in part because knowing much of the story to follow, one can see the seeds planted carefully. His new romance with Mona is already suffering from his devotion to his job, a devotion which will pay off in his promotion to detective. And it will also stoke her fears; because he is seriously wounded—the original title of the story was 'The Stab'-- and that personal anxiety will later be magnified as their relationship flounders on its lack of communication.

In his shorter stories, Mankell is often making a character point. This is signalled particularly strongly by the original title of 'The Man With The Mask', which was called 'The Divide' and emphases not only the relationship between Wallander and the man who holds him hostage in a convenience store robbery, but also between Mona and him, she being the outsider who can never understand what he has gone through. A couple of stories end in suicides, which is a particularly Swedish way of dealing with things (Americans tend to prefer taking people with them) and a couple require epilogues to explain the complications of plots that are creaky, but which Mankell is not taking too seriously; less police procedural than Swedish psychological. It's a riveting book, that to anyone familiar with Wallander hangs together like an episodic novel, doing exactly what Mankell planned.

The Pyramid by Henning Mankell
Vintage 2009 £7.99 ISBN 978009951297
This review also appears at www.crimetime.co.uk

ARNALDUR INDRIDASON'S DRAINING LAKE

In many ways, The Draining Lake is my favorite of Arnaldur Indridason's Erlendur novels, and the most ambitious. The discovery of a corpse found buried in the eponymous lake, with an outdated Soviet radio transmitter weighing it down, starts an investigation whose roots go back to the heyday of the cold war, when Iceland was (before the Fischer-Spassky chess match put it firmly on the map) a backward island important to both sides only because of the American airbase at Keflavik.

There are distinct echoes in this novel of Halldor Laxness' The Atom Station, with the echoes of geopolitics rebounding on the narrow world-view of Icelanders, and Indridason, while not revealing who the corpse is, tells its back story convincingly, the tale of committed Icelandic communists studying in East Germany in the mid-fifties, of naiveté in both politics and love, and ultimate disillusionment. That story is portrayed convincingly, with young Tomas' idealism tinting the narrative, and we, the audience, knowing better.

Meanwhile, the investigation of the corpse shows Erlendur and his team at their most persistent, especially as they deal with the diplomats from the US and the 'new' Germany. There is a wonderful scene where the German ambassador explains that Iceland is seen as 'the back end of the world' in terms of diplomatic service, and when he proves less than forthcoming, an irritated Erlendur finally asks her 'what did you do wrong?' and when she doesn't understand, asks 'why were you sent to the arsehole of the world'. When his colleagues later chastise him, Erlendur lights up a smoke as says 'this arsehole-of-the-world stuff gets on my nerves'.

Of course that isn't all that gets on his nerves. The troubles with his drug-addicted daughter, and the distance of his relationship with his son, provide a counterpoint to the story told in flashback; meanwhile his platonic relationship with Valdegur, which began in Voices, is causing her husband to telephone him with threats. Erlendur is haunted by his lost brother, and there is in this novel a palpable sense of the isolation of Icelanders in the almost hermetically closed society of the small, cold island. This was part of the theme of Jar City, but here it is developed with the contrast of the enforced repression of the GDR, not that they are parallels, but each comments on the other: particularly when Oli, the young cop, reveals a strong conservative bent. If Hanning Mankell thought of Wallander as being about the anxiety of modern Swedish society, you could very much make the case that Indriason is following in his footsteps. But the wallander novels set outside Sweden are, to my mind, Mankell's least successful; Indridason's venture to East Germany works better, and makes Erlendur more compelling as a result.

The Draining Lake
Arnaldur Indridason, translated by Bernard Scudder
Vintage, 2008, £6.99 ISBN 9780099494140

IN THE SPIRIT OF THE SPIRIT

Will Eisner's Spirit remains the standard by which all comics should be judged, story-telling that defined the form for generations of writers and artists to come. Eisner's stories were humorous little moral tales, a cross between O. Henry and Issac Bashevis Singer, told in a cinematic style that emphasized the tongue in cheek nature of the masked detective while treating the story-telling very seriously indeed. It remains a difficult combination to imitate.

What is best about these of stories from DC Comics' revival of the Spirit is the playful tone, and the way they've updated him. Most telling is the way he's present in all circumstances, in his mask and costume, and no one seems to find it unusual, which is one of the character's best conceits. Interestingly, in the Frank Miller film, which I haven't seen, the trademark blue suit and mask are replaced by a literally darker black, signifying Miller's own vision of the character. The comics have updated the taxi-driving Ebony, now more Wire than minstrel show, naturally, but Ellen Dolan, always a bit of a feminist in her day, seems somehow more strident now, or maybe it's just that the Spirit is a little more beleaguered.

Originally, DC had Jeph Loeb writing, but this third collection of stories comes later in the series, written by the team of Sergio Aragones (creator of Spy v Spy in Mad, whose playfulness is very similiar to the Spirit) and Mark Evanier. Their first story, 'The Medical Murders' is probably the best. It's drawn by Mike Ploog, who comes closer in feel to the original Spirit, with darker backgrounds and more adventure in the layouts than the rest of the book. Of course, the tradmark of Eisner's design was the splash page, in which the tone of the story would be set, the credits given, and the Spirit title incorporated into the design; Eisner was years ahead of movie title sequences, as you can see in the example on the left. The plot is serious, and remarkably similar to Hakan Nesser's Woman With Birthmark (which I reviewed for Crime Time and which you can link to here).

Paul Smith is the artist on most of the tales, and 'Stand In For Murder' is probably the best of those. He's generally aiming at a more humorous presentation, subsituting dynamic movement for active layout design. This brings out the comedy element, but in 'Fish Tale', for example, there's almost a flatness to it that doesn't quite fit.

Aluir Amancio works in a similar style on his two stories, but also plays a bit more with the Spirit and women; in what is probably the best and most Eisner like of the splash pages, he's like a flirty private eye with the secretary of the insurance boss who hires him (see right) but back to his stunned haplessness when Ellen shows up, in bikini stretched across three panels, on the cruise ship where he is sent on assignment.

Paul Rivoche is the artist and colorist for 'The Comic Book Killer', where his heavy inking suggests EC Comics and which challenges 'The Medical Murders' as the best of the bunch. That tone is perfectly suited for an EC-type tale in which a comics writer is murdered, and which uses the old saw of all his collaborators wanting to take credit--particularly the artist, who goes insane ranting about how the writer's words filled the panels and made it impossible to draw the story. There's a lovely panel, almost entirely a dialogue balloon, in which the Spirit explains why he thinks a comic book can't have too many words! There's also one story drawn in a more modern cartoony style by Jason Armstrong, which somehow doesn't seem to fit. You can see what he's trying to do, but wonder if there's a reason for trying.

The collection may be uneven, and maybe not as compelling visually as the originals, but it's always entertaining, and it's probably the best tribute to Eisner's genius that one can still see the character's possibilities almost 70 years after it was created.

The Spirit Volume 3, Titan Books 2009, £12.99, ISBN 9781848561458
this review also appears at crimetime.co.uk

OF A MOMENT ON THE MOON, AND ANOTHER ON TV

Black boy in Chicago
Playing in the street
Not near enough to wear
Not near enough to eat
But don't you know he saw it
On that July afternoon
He saw a man named Armstrong
Walk upon the moon
 -'Armstrong' by John Stewart

The fortieth anniversary of Apollo 11 is bittersweet. On one hand, we celebrate the amazing feat America accomplished by making John Kennedy's promise that we would have a man on the moon by the end of the decade come true. As my friend Michael Goldfarb suggested in a BBC essay recently, how many other politicians' promises, of a positive nature, can you remember being fulfilled in such spectacular fashion? When we look back at those astronauts, at those crew-cut guys in mission control with their slide-rulers and punch cards, and realise what they actually accomplished, it makes you wonder why the billions we pour into technology today seems to be directed at smaller and smaller ways of keeping people watching screens instead of doing anything.

Of course, most of that technological cash was diverted to the space programme for military reasons, as well as the effort to regain US prestige. It strikes me as deeply ironic that the whole 'Star Wars' programme so beloved of the Reaganauts and neo-cons devoted to military pork, is exactly the stuff we feared the Russians were going to do to us with their Sputniks back in the 1950s. It's not so much we become what we fear, as that we have consistently, throughout the Post-War era, attributed to our 'enemies' all the qualities and aims, methods and motivations that were driving our own dark sides; this is the Jungian theory of the shadow, and it definitely knows what evil lurks.

It's also amazing to recall just how positively news of the moon landing was received all around the world, at the same time the US was deeply unpopular in much of that world for the way it was waging the Vietnam war. In that sense, the successes of the space programme in the immediate aftermath of Apollo might be seen as a very expensive circus, distracting the public from the even more expensive slaughter that was going on in Southeast Asia.

That's the sort of context that, in retrospect, I never felt at the time, not even when people (not least Tom Lehrer, see here) pointed out the space programme was the Dr Strangelovian step-child of a Nazi scientist whose previous rockets had made it only across the North Sea, from Germany to England. That July evening, I was able to put aside those thoughts to simply celebrate a unique small step. That America was self-evidently the greatest country on earth, that our 'can-do' spirit had made the impossible possible, struck me as further evidence that we were caught helplessly in the schizophrenic madness of our leadership. But it did, and does, make me proud of what my country could achieve, not so much if we put our minds to it, but if we put our hearts in the right places.

It was ironic that Walter Cronkite, struck speechless by the sight of a man on the moon, should have died during this anniversary, since it was his voice that Americans would associate with the landing almost as much as Armstrong's (and remember Col. John 'Shorty' Powers—the last military spokesman we liked or trusted?--that's him between John Glenn and Alan Shepard). Cronkite anchored most of the 30 hours of CBS's coverage, with Wally Schirra beside him for the landing. As Spiro Agnew said, famously, when asked for a comment, 'if Cronkite was speechless, what can I say?'

I was struck by the ill-feeling toward Cronkite in a couple of the obituaries I read—one blamed him for Rupert Murdoch's Fox News in some bizarre twist of retribution towards those about whom we aren't supposed to be speaking ill. It somehow sought to attack Cronkite for not being more than what he was--a skilled reporter who approached the CBS Evening News the same way he had approached working for United Press: as a way of bringing important news concisely and accurately to people who depended on it as their main news source--and refused to credit that work with being useful. The battle between the news agencies meant local papers in America were supplied with lots of foreign news in those days, a far cry from the present. And Cronkite, as an overseas reporter turned news reader, used his position as 'managing editor' of the Evening News to make sure the world got covered. That this appealed to audiences in ways the modern focus-group selected Kens and Barbies don't should be obvious from the way the mantle was passed, eventually, from Cronkite to ABC's Peter Jennings, the last of the anchors to have been a working overseas reporter.

But Cronkite was also the voice and face of reassurance; he did inspire trust. I was disappointed by the BBC, who in their notice ran the opening of the Evening News followed by Cronkite's announcement of JFK's death, as if that announcement had been the lead item on a newscast, rather than a 'flash' stuck into the afternoon programming, where the emotion that Cronkite fights hard to repress ultimately becomes evident on his face. In that instant, all reassurance was gone.

None of the obits I read made much of the programmes Cronkite hosted before taking over CBS Evening News--'You Are There', which 'sent' reporters to historical events, and more importantly, The Twentieth Century, whose documentaries covered the world, and the world of ideas (and, with one episode, 'The Violent World Of Sam Huff', did almost as much to boost the NFL into popularity as the 1958 title game had). The Twentieth Century had a relatively liberal outlook, though it was tempered considerably by its sponsor, Prudential, and by the network, and it was heavily influenced by the US military, who were portrayed in all their Cold War glory. But those were the times, and America's leadership wasn't being called into question they way it would be after Vietnam.

And yes, Cronkite's conversion marked the turning point of America's perceptions of the Vietnam War. LBJ didn't run for re-election because he knew if he'd lost Cronkite, he would lose America. But Cronkite hadn't turned against the war because he was a liberal, but because he was a reporter, and had gone to Vietnam to see for himself. Todd Gitlin, in a New Republic story about Cronkite, quoted my friend and ex-ABC colleague Jack Laurence, as follows:

I asked John Laurence, formerly one of the stars of CBS's Vietnam reporting, what he remembered of Cronkite's special report. "The reason his Vietnam War broadcast in 1968 had such a big impact," he wrote back in an e-mail, "was that it was so unlike him to take a position on anything. It just wasn't done in those days." Laurence recalled dinner the night before Cronkite left Saigon: "Walter said he wanted to know what was really going on. The senior US military officers he had spoken with had told him the Tet Offensive was turning out to be a huge success for the allies because they were killing so many VC and NVA. They were predicting victory. I acknowledged the huge numbers of deaths, but pointed out that the Northerners would replace their losses and come at us again. And again, and again. And that the sooner we realized the fact that we were not going to win this fucking war, the better for everyone, especially the Vietnamese and Americans who were being butchered by the thousands. For no good purpose. I got a bit emotional and [chief CBS Vietnam correspondent Robert] Schackne gave me a polite but stiff kick in the shins under the table at one point, to suggest that I cool it".'

Gitlin continues: The CBS special aired on February 27, 1968, with this peroration: "To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy's intentions, in case this is indeed his big gasp before negotiations. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could."

Hardly the words of a radical. But more honest than the words of, say, Robert McNamara, who died just a week before Cronkite, and whom we now know was aware even then that the war was unwinnable, but just neglected to tell us, and didn't dare stand up to LBJ and tell him. McNamara was one of the 'best and the brightest', exactly the sort of guys who built NASA and put a man on the moon. They were the opposite side of America's Vietnam coin.

But do we need to look all the way back to Vietnam to note instances of the facts arguing for themselves against the pre-conceptions and subtrefuges of the war mongers, and to note the way an increasingly subservient media rush to condemn as leftists, subversives, traitors and/or terrorists those who simply, like Cronkite, present the facts?

What I like to think Cronkite stood for in the end was the decency of the common American, the nobility of journalistic curiosity, and the possibility that you could pursue news honestly on television, that you could respect and perhaps even give the benefit of the doubt to your audience, respect authority without bending over to it. Most of all, in a world of news, both local and national, that stokes the fires of fear and hatred, in the interests of power and profit, it was reassuring to be told that 'that's the way it is', and actually believe that it might not be all that bad, and that it might get better. That we might, someday, do something like put a man on the moon.