Literature as History: The Lives and Deaths of Richard Milhous Slurrie and Walter Bodmor Nixon
The enduring success of any roman-à-clef owes to the ghost of the real world lurking, like a palimpsest, behind the storyworld. Barring a few counterfactual twists, Richard Condon's Death of a Politician follows the chequered career of a dead-ringer for Richard Milhous Nixon through the war-scam 1940s, the red scare 1950s, and the freewheeling-dealing 1960s. Square the revisionist drive of Condon's political fiction with the premise of historical veracity, and you may wonder where sober fact ends and fiction begins. How much of Nixon lies in Walter Bodmor Slurrie? How much of Nixon's banker and confidant “Bebe” Rebozo lies in Slurrie's banker and confidant “Kiddo” Cardozo? How much of the Miami mobster Mayer Lansky lies in Cardozo's boss, Miami mobster Abner Danzig? How much of their crass venality and control is the figment of Condon's imagination? Better still, how much is true? In my article I set out to answer all these questions, using Condon's roman-à-clef as a springboard for analysis of salient aspects of the Nixon presidency and of American electoral politics in general.