From Christopher Dickey, the author of "Our Man in Charleston: Britain's Secret Agent in the Civil War South" and "Securing the City," this site provides updates and footnotes on history, espionage, terrorism, fanaticism, policing and counterinsurgency linked to Dickey's columns for The Daily Beast and his other writings; also, occasional dialogues, diatribes, and contributions from friends.
Showing posts with label john gregory dunne. Show all posts
Showing posts with label john gregory dunne. Show all posts
From Peter Beard to Cold war spies, the French resistance, and Sir Richard Francis Burton—some of my "long reads" of recent years.
Lockdown Weekend Reading: Forays Into Friendships and History
Over the last few years I have written quite a few rather personal pieces, some of them exploring friendships, some of them bits of history that interested me, some of them both. I am thinking of reading some of them aloud as a sort of informal podcast. If you have a preference, let me know.
They are posted here by publication date in reverse chronological order dating back to 2016, which means the subjects appear random, but one might discern certain threads that run through them.
Trapped in my apartment I pulled Joan's books off the shelf. I wanted to learn again from her meticulous observation of detail, character and setting, and her great sense of irony.
Many of us worldwide are stuck at home, which means it's the perfect opportunity to escape with a great travel book. Our first selection? Aldous Huxley's "Along the Road."
The most powerful reporters—and spies—in America were haunted by the death of Mary Meyer, President Kennedy's murdered lover. They knew her well. What secrets were in her diary?
During the same summer that he wrote "The Amiable Fleas," now published in English for the first time, the American author also appears to have been gathering intel for the Agency.
The only training she ever got as a spy was from her lover. But Elizabeth Bentley managed to manipulate the most feared secret police agency in the world—and intimidate the FBI.
Even as Ethel Rosenberg was strapped into the electric chair for spying for Moscow in 1953, decrypted cables might have spared her. But they were released only decades later.
In 1987, Trump attacked Reagan's deployment in the Gulf to protect 'ships we don't own, carrying oil we don't need destined for allies who won't help.' He may still feel that way.
The president, born the year after the war ended, does not remember and probably does not want to know what brought it on or what it was fought to end.
Schoolteachers, archeologists, linguists and mathematicians worked on the Venona project breaking unbreakable Soviet code from WWII. They were heroes. But some had deep regrets.
Igor Gouzenko was a lowly Soviet cipher clerk when he turned the world order upside down in 1945. Nobody could have predicted the espionage hysteria his defection would unleash.
Her beauty was legendary, her fortune enormous, and he was notoriously thick. She made him emperor, but she's been written out of history as a tragic whore. She deserves better.
Given a large fortune by one lover, Harriet Howard ditched him and used it to help her new lover return to France, get elected president, and fund the coup that made him emperor.
The Musée d'Orsay houses a work that still shocks visitors, a painting that united one of the 19th century's most controversial painters with one of its most dissolute gentlemen.
I was looking for a muse, and found in her eyes a gateway to the past, an icon for the present. Victorine Meurent was the painter's star model but remained an enigma for 150 years.
Christopher Dickey's father wrote the novel on which 'Deliverance' was based—and, during filming, Dickey saw Reynolds the womanizer, wit, and actor desperate to be taken seriously.
A newly published short story by the iconic American author, set in WWII Paris, grew out of a "moveable feast" very different from the one he had lived there in the 1920s.
These three journalists died investigating mercenaries tied directly to an oligarch and an intelligence agency indicted by the Mueller probe in the U.S.
The Castros claimed Cuba was never into drug smuggling, then they said it quit. But their own operations were nothing compared to the ones they helped facilitate in Venezuela.
Richard Francis Burton was one of the great adventurers of the Victorian era, and a spy. But several weeks just before the Civil War are curiously missing from his life's account.
One of the world's great adventurers—and a Resistance spy—Jacques Cousteau warned me 25 years ago that humans were reaching the point of no return on environmental destruction.
Before he was a world-famous spy and translator, Richard F. Burton was sent into the boy brothels of Karachi so the British could conquer all of India.
Brave women helped downed Allied flyers escape the Germans. But more than that, they showed Hitler's white nationalists they would not surrender, would not submit.
They were the most important literary couple of their generation. Joan lives on, an icon. John should be remembered as well.
Joan Didion's California, John Gregory Dunne's 'Spectator Patriotism'
Still locked down. Doing a lot of reading from my bookshelves and my computer archives. And it struck me that before reading about Joan Didion in my latest piece for the Beast, maybe one should read something about her husband, John Gregory Dunne, whom she adored, and who inspired some of her greatest work.
Spectator Patriotism (First published October 11, 2005)
On or about Dec. 30, 2002, which was a day after we'd had dinner in New York and a year to the day before he died of a heart attack, John Gregory Dunne put a floppy disk in an envelope and dropped it off at the Manhattan apartment where I was staying. As happens, I misplaced it in my travels after that, and only last weekend did I find it and read the digital newspaper clippings he'd pulled together, which he'd talked about with so much excitement at our dinner.
John was interested in patriotism. He was fascinated by the real substance of it, which he saw as diametrically opposed to what he called "the spectator patriotism" exploited by the Bush administration as it went looking for wars. There was something (it took a while for John to put his finger on it) in the fact that several people he knew had children on active duty: historian Doris Kearns had a son, John himself had a nephew, I had a son. We had people we loved in uniform doing what they saw, and we understood, imperfectly perhaps, as their duty to defend the values and the dreams that are the United States of America. But why were there so few from this circle of acquaintances if the cause was so great?
John would rage. He was articulate and funny then and always, but such was his passion that I remember him as almost inchoate when he talked about the bastards who wouldn't end their Global War on Terror, which was conceived in rhetoric and dedicated to their reelection, yet would send America's sons and daughters on futile errands of suffering and slaughter. John said he was going to write a book about patriotism, but he had a novel to finish first, and then he died.
John's wife of almost 40 years, Joan Didion, has written a breathtaking book about John's death, and the illnesses of their only child, who died in August, and the experience of grief. Joan's book, called "The Year of Magical Thinking," has been reviewed widely and well, as it should be. (Robert Pinsky in the New York Timespointed out, rightly, that it is "not a downer" and parts of it are actually quite funny.) Joan sent me the galleys last summer -- Joan and John have been our friends since we met in El Salvador in 1982 -- and I read Joan's book then in a single sitting, lost in a salt sea of emotion and memory. It is a great, great book.
But it was John's 1989 memoir, "Harp," that I picked up to read again yesterday, trying to understand a little better the meaning of the newspaper stories on that long-lost floppy disk, and I wound up searching out on the Web the essays John wrote for The New York Review of Books about wars and soldiers and, yes, patriotism, in the two years after Sept. 11, 2001.... (MORE)
Trapped in my apartment I pulled Joan's books off the shelf. I wanted to learn again from her meticulous observation of detail, character and setting, and her great sense of irony.
Bill Gates is right when he says the world needs the organization now more than ever. But its reliance early in the pandemic on China's information—and lies—is shocking.
Didier Raoult's a climate denier and was a coronavirus truther. That hasn't stopped the White House from embracing his sketchy studies into an anti-malaria drug to treat COVID-19.
Still locked down. Doing a lot of reading from my bookshelves and my computer archives. And it struck me that before reading about Joan Didion in my latest piece for the Beast, maybe one should read something about her husband, John Gregory Dunne, whom she adored, and who inspired some of her greatest work.
