Kurt Andersen

So I found myself chatting with a U.S. Senator not long ago, a Democrat, and asked him about Hillary versus Obama.

He likes them both. But because 2008 is “our year,” he said, he was for Mrs. Clinton — because she’s less likely than he to make campaign blunders.

But if Democrats have such a strong shot, I asked, why not go for it, and use the alignment of the stars to nominate the candidate whom we’d be thrilled (as opposed to content) to elect?

He didn’t really answer. Instead, he said, “In private, Hillary is warm, really different than she comes across in big public situations.”

But that, I said, is exactly what friends of Al Gore said in 2000, and friends of John Kerry in 2004. For all I know friend of Mike Dukakis said the same thing in 1988.

“Oh, John Kerry! Please. He’s one of the biggest assholes in the U.S. Senate!”

Back around 1989, when he was only a great director and not yet an Academy-certified Best Director, I had a meeting with Martin Scorsese. I was co-editor of Spy, and had gone to him to pitch an idea.

We wanted him to create a five-second-long flipbook “film” that we would shrink wrap with an issue of the magazine. The star would be a smirking white-faced mime, who would form the fingers of one hand into a gun shape, raise the hand to his temple and fire. And through the magic of special effects, the mimed finger/gun-barrel would actually fire, blowing the mime’s brains out.

Scorsese laughed. He said he’d like to do it. But then the 1990 recession kicked in, we couldn’t get an advertiser to underwrite the cost of producing the flipbook, and the project never went forward.

When people ask if I have any large professional regrets in life, I’ve always said no, definitely not. But last night, watching the Oscars, I realized that I have exactly one.

Jane Meyer’s recent New Yorker piece about 24 — my only appointment televison series on broadcast TV — was interesting. Not for its inevitable tsk-tsking about the show’s depiction of U.S. counter-terrorism operatives torturing people, but because of the U.S. intelligence officers Meyer quoted concerning the uselessness of torture in real life. Our military personnel evidently watch 24 and then imagine that they can actually be Jack Baueresque heroes — that breaking terrorists’ fingers and sticking shivs in their knees will save the day. The worst case is that when wishful fantasy shapes real-world actions, the result is both failure and a loss of the moral high ground. Which is a pretty fair descrption of our Iraqi misadventure.

When we rush ahead hellbent to enact a large fantasy, and the real world fails to cooperate, we not only don’t achieve the dream but find ourselves in a worse place than we started — we don’t really want to keep slogging forward, but we’re unable to see any good way to back out. The construction of the so-called Freedom Tower at Ground Zero is an example of the same kind of post-9/11 patriotic huzzah-ism. It will be an unecessarily huge, unecessarily ugly high-rise, its height, 1,776 feet, meant to satisfy our America, Fuck Yeah impulse.

One of the many reasons I liked Eliot Spitzer as a New York gubernatorial candidate was his professed skepticism about the Freedom Tower. But now that he’s governor, he’s decided that we can’t really afford to rethink the whole project. He’s unethusiastic, yeah, but it’s under construction, so…well…hell, get on with it; he gave his approval this week. “This should not be interpreted to mean that this is the project I would have designed at its initiation,” he told the Times. “But where we are today, this is clearly the best and the wisest alternative.” The governor of New Jersey said pretty much the same thing: “Maybe we would have done it differently if you could roll it all the way back to another day, but we live in the world we live in.”

Substitute “the Iraq war” for “the Freedom Tower” and most people would sigh and nod. And then maybe turn on 24.

A friend became one of my very very best friends yesterday when she sent me a note of fulsome, apparently sincere praise about the new novel. (She’s a fabulous cook, and said, among other extremely pleasant things, that Heyday contains “the book version of umami.” Maybe she says that to all the guys, but I’d never seen unami used to describe anything except sushi and fried pork.)

“Do you know,” she asked, “about William Spackman’s first novel, also called Heyday?” Embarrassingly, I did not. I thought An Armful of Warm Girl, which he published at age 73 in 1978 (and which I loved), was his first novel. But it turns out that Spackman published his Heyday in 1953. It’s about a group of Princeton graduates in New York in the late 1920s

A different friend, a novelist and playwright, had told me last week of yet another novel with the same title, also about young men and also set in glamorous 1920s New York: Heyday: That shocking novel of New York’s Nite Club Set. Amazingly — given the recherche subtitle, and its self-description as a book that “takes us inside the little-known gay subculture of the Lost Generation, where a forbidden passion grows into undying love” — it came out only a couple of months ago.

The only Heyday I knew about when I named mine (and only because a friend obsessed with old Hollywood told me about it) was the autobiography of the late screenwriter and mogul Dore Schary. In glamorous 1920s New York, Schary worked as a stage actor.

The first half of my Heyday is set largely in glamorous 1840s New York. I’d thought about calling the book Wonderstruck — but didn’t, in part because that’s the name of a children’s science show on Canadian TV. The moral: I need to decide whether to call my next novel Tuesdays With Morrie, The Great Gatsby, Freakonomics or The Bible.

Maureen Dowd’s column today is about the Barak Obama fundraising party thrown last night by David Geffen, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg at Geffen’s house in Beverly Hills. Unlike other Democrats, who are excited by Obama partly because they think he’s more electable than Hillary Clinton, Geffen thinks his party has a lock on the 2008 election: “Whoever is the nominee is going to win.” People of all ideological stripes, evidently, are susceptible to slam-dunk overoptimism.

The column is also filled with extraordinarily impolitic quotes about the Clintons — a suggestion that Bill Clinton is still recklessly horndogging, that the Hillary “machine” is going to be “very unpleasant and unattractive,” that both lie “with such ease, it’s troubling.”

The Clintons and Geffen used to be mutually, passionately smitten. At one Clinton White House dinner, I learned from a friend who sat at the president’s table along with Geffen and George Kennan, Clinton simply ignored Kennan — the éminence grise who masterminded our successful “containment” policy toward the Soviets — in order to gossip with Geffen about Hollywood.

So what made Geffen fall out of love? According to Dowd, it was because Bill Clinton refused to grant a presidential pardon to federal prison inmate Leonard Peltier. Peltier is the 62-year-old “Native American activist” who was convicted of killing two FBI agents in 1975 on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

That is enough to abandon a president and beloved pal? The Hollywood political bubble is even more peculiar that I’d imagined.

Obligatory Heyday connection: the story is set mainly in 1848, and several of the novel’s characters travel west by wagon train into Indian country, passing through Sioux country. At the time, Beverly Hills and the rest of California had just become part of America, thanks to the Mexican War.

America’s first elective foreign war and first imperial war was our war with Mexico, which ended 159 years ago this month. And like a certain 21st century elective foreign war, the Mexican War was started by a gung ho president claiming that the Mexicans posed a grave and imminent military threat to our national security. The New York Herald editorialized that it was “a part of our destiny to civilize that beautiful country.”

One of the expedition’s fierce opponents was Abraham Lincoln, then serving his single term in Congress. After two years of hard fighting, Lincoln gave an extraorindary speech on the House floor insisting that President Polk explain exactly how and why he had dragged America into it, to answer “fully, fairly, and candidly. Let him answer with facts, and not with arguments….

“And if…he can show that the soil was ours, where the first blood of the war was shed— that it was not within an inhabited country…then I am with him for his justification….But if he can not, or will not do this… then I shall be fully convinced…that he is deeply conscious of being in the wrong…that originally having some strong motive…to involve the two countries in a war, and trusting to escape scrutiny, by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory…he plunged into it, and has swept, on and on, till, disappointed in his calculation of the ease with which Mexico might be subdued, he now finds himself, he knows not where.”

The economic stakes in the Mexican War were not (yet) control of oil, of course, but of land for settlement: the U.S. wanted northern Mexico — present-day Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, New Mexico and California — and before we invaded we’d offered the Mexican government $20 million for it. After two years of fighting, we paid Mexico $15 million. In other words, 13,000 Americans died in order to save the Treasury $5 million.

In Heyday, one of my characters, Duff Lucking, is a veteran of the war.

“In the end,” he says bitterly to his journalist friend Timothy Skaggs at one point, “it was all a negotiation for some real estate, wasn’t it? American bankers and Mexican bankers using men with cannon and rifles to bargain hard.”

Yes, Skaggs thinks but refrains from telling his disillusioned friend, and why should this war would be different from any other?

Heyday will be in bookstores, Random House says, on Tuesday, March 6th. Yikes.

As I told a friend today, waiting for one’s own book to be published reminds me not so much of waiting for actual children to be born, but rather of skydiving just before you go: plane door open, parachute packed, wind and engines howling, the ground two miles down, an adrenalized mixture of terror and excitement and hope and obsession with self, shuffling forward as others hurl themselves into space ahead of you….

“Yes,” said the friend, a novelist and publisher, “it’s just like skydiving, except you’re in the plane for years and years.”

Right: I conceived the book in the 90s, began researching in earnest in 2001, and started writing in 2002. Geronimo! (Geronimo himself, by the way, was 18 as the story in Heyday begins. When he was 21, Mexican soldiers massacred his wife and three children, the event that turned him into…Geronimo.)