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Stephen King's new novel, 11/22/1963


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I have never read one of King's books.

Peter if you do enjoy Kings new book about JFK please pick up a copy of "The Stand"

I promise you that you will enjoy it

It is my favorite King novel and is an amazing read

It is the best

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11.22.63 by Stephen King - review

Going back in time proves a step forward for a master storyteller

By Mark Lawson

guardian.co.uk,

Wednesday 2 November 2011 09.00 GMT Article history

People are commonly said to remember their location when told of President John F Kennedy's assassination, but many must also wish the place they had been on 22 November 1963 was Dallas, where they might somehow have diverted the motorcade or prevented Lee Harvey Oswald from entering the Texas School Book Depository. The possibility of such an intervention must number, along with its darker twin of going back and killing Hitler, among the principal fantasies of time travel, and is explored in the 54th work of fiction by Stephen King.

11.22.63

by Stephen King

In 11.22.63, Jake Epping, a schoolteacher in Maine (a childhood reference point as recurrent in King's fiction as New Jersey in Philip Roth's), is summoned by the owner of Al's Diner, a local eaterie that has become popular but also suspect as a result of being able to sell, in 2011, burgers at near-1950s prices. The restaurateur, now mortally ill, has found a portal in his pantry that leads to a particular day in 1958, where the time-traveller can begin a stay lasting months or even potentially years, always returning two minutes later. Cancer has interrupted Al during a five-year mission to prevent the event that he believes to have misdirected American history: JFK's death. With the moral arm-lock of a dying man, Al passes on the task to Jake.

Time machines that travel backwards invite a writer towards period detail and nostalgia, and it is striking that King's device defaults to a year in which he would have been an 11-year-old schoolboy in Maine. Jake, who adopts the cover identity of real estate salesman George Amberson when he goes back, luxuriates in the unadulterated root beers and chocolate pies of an era before fast food.

"I wanted to see the USA in my Chevrolet," he sentimentally declares on the brink of one trip. "America was calling me." And, though the "temporal bedouin" from 2011 sometimes struggles with the lingo (what he calls a "motel" is a "Motor Court" there), the flashback America is largely a better one. Back in these days, baseball is played "as it was meant to be played" and Jake/George finds the prices astonishingly low except, interestingly, oranges and long-distance phone calls, both exotic luxuries at the time. Less heart-warmingly, a cancerous miasma of cigarette smoke clouds every 1958 scene and racism is standard.

The only sustained criticism of King, apart from the howls of some incurable literary snobs, has been his books' alternative use as weight-lifter's training aids and there are moments, early in this 700-page work, when we may wonder if the mission couldn't have begun in, say, 1962. But King has an advanced understanding of narrative structure and it's soon clear that his protagonist needs first to undertake a trial mission to establish the rules of intrusion. Running under the book is the question of whether we would have the moral right to dam the river of time, a dilemma explored through a fictional Hitler-like president in King's The Dead Zone (1979).

A novel about thwarting Lee Harvey Oswald is crucially different from one about killing Hitler because many readers will question whether the hero is going after the right man. Jake/George regularly frets that, even if he changes the shape of Oswald's day on 11.22.63, he may discover that the conspiracy theorists were right and JFK is taken out by another gunman from the grassy knoll or elsewhere.

This nagging doubt about the security of the history being altered is beautifully used by King, who also cleverly exploits a major fascination of time-travel or counter-history stories: the historical adjustments that result from meddling. While the latter parts of the novel deserve heavy protection against plot-spoiling, it can be said that the racist Governor George Wallace, Paul McCartney and Hillary Clinton are among those whose Wikipedia entries are intriguingly re-edited.

In a thoughtful afterword – in which King suggests that he partly intends the novel as a warning against "the consequences of political extremism" in contemporary America – the writer reveals that he first tried to write this book in 1972 but felt too close to the raw pain of the assassination. So this book makes, with the monumental Under the Dome (2009), the second recent case in which King has gone back in time to complete a project that previously eluded him.

With some senior writers, the dusting out of bottom drawers indicates creative stasis. But King, whose writing life represents among other things a model of canny career management, has waited until the right time for these novels. In these books, the reader feels the benefit of 40 years of narrative craftsmanship and reflection on his nation's history. Going backwards proves to be another step forward for the most remarkable storyteller in modern American literature.

Mark Lawson's Enough Is Enough is published by Picador

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From bostonglobe.com

An excerpt:

EDITOR’S NOTE: THIS STORY CONTAINS STRONG LANGUAGE.

From 11/22/63 by Stephen King. Copyright © 2011 by Stephen King. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc.

George de Mohrenschildt made his grand entrance on the afternoon of September fifteenth, a dark and rainy Saturday. He was behind the wheel of a coffee-colored Cadillac right out of a Chuck Berry song. With him was a man I knew, George Bouhe, and one I didn’t – a skinny whip of a guy with a fuzz of white hair and the ramrod back of a fellow who’s spent a good deal of time in the military and is still happy about it. De Mohrenschildt went around to the back of the car and opened the trunk. I dashed to get the distance mike.

When I came back with my gear, Bouhe had a folded-up playpen under his arm, and the military-looking guy had an armload of toys. De Mohrenschildt was empty-handed, and mounted the steps in front of the other two with his head up and his chest thrown out. He was tall and powerfully built. His graying hair was combed slantwise back from his broad forehead in a way that said – to me, at least – look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. For I am GEORGE.

I plugged in the tape recorder, put on the headphones, and tilted the mike-equipped bowl across the street.

Marina was out of sight. Lee was sitting on the couch, reading a thick paperback by the light of the lamp on the bureau. When he heard footsteps on the porch, he looked up with a frown and tossed his book on the coffee table.

More goddam expats, he might have been thinking......

http://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2011/11/05/the-listening-post/5CsK0UtTZDSB3QZlis7d3K/story.html

Edited by Michael Hogan
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From bostonglobe.com

An excerpt:

EDITOR’S NOTE: THIS STORY CONTAINS STRONG LANGUAGE.

From 11/22/63 by Stephen King. Copyright © 2011 by Stephen King. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc.

George de Mohrenschildt made his grand entrance on the afternoon of September fifteenth, a dark and rainy Saturday. He was behind the wheel of a coffee-colored Cadillac right out of a Chuck Berry song. With him was a man I knew, George Bouhe, and one I didn’t – a skinny whip of a guy with a fuzz of white hair and the ramrod back of a fellow who’s spent a good deal of time in the military and is still happy about it. De Mohrenschildt went around to the back of the car and opened the trunk. I dashed to get the distance mike.

When I came back with my gear, Bouhe had a folded-up playpen under his arm, and the military-looking guy had an armload of toys. De Mohrenschildt was empty-handed, and mounted the steps in front of the other two with his head up and his chest thrown out. He was tall and powerfully built. His graying hair was combed slantwise back from his broad forehead in a way that said – to me, at least – look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. For I am GEORGE.

I plugged in the tape recorder, put on the headphones, and tilted the mike-equipped bowl across the street.

Marina was out of sight. Lee was sitting on the couch, reading a thick paperback by the light of the lamp on the bureau. When he heard footsteps on the porch, he looked up with a frown and tossed his book on the coffee table.

More goddam expats, he might have been thinking......

http://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2011/11/05/the-listening-post/5CsK0UtTZDSB3QZlis7d3K/story.html

Good night nurse. Sounds like he HAS done some homework, of the total disinformation kind. An old friend just posted on my fb page how excited she is to get this "if only" book. Assumed I'd be getting it too. Not in your life.

And as the 50th draws closer there will be more of the same, only worse.

Lies for a new generation.

Dawn

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From bostonglobe.com

An excerpt:

EDITOR’S NOTE: THIS STORY CONTAINS STRONG LANGUAGE.

From 11/22/63 by Stephen King. Copyright © 2011 by Stephen King. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc.

George de Mohrenschildt made his grand entrance on the afternoon of September fifteenth, a dark and rainy Saturday. He was behind the wheel of a coffee-colored Cadillac right out of a Chuck Berry song. With him was a man I knew, George Bouhe, and one I didn’t – a skinny whip of a guy with a fuzz of white hair and the ramrod back of a fellow who’s spent a good deal of time in the military and is still happy about it. De Mohrenschildt went around to the back of the car and opened the trunk. I dashed to get the distance mike.

When I came back with my gear, Bouhe had a folded-up playpen under his arm, and the military-looking guy had an armload of toys. De Mohrenschildt was empty-handed, and mounted the steps in front of the other two with his head up and his chest thrown out. He was tall and powerfully built. His graying hair was combed slantwise back from his broad forehead in a way that said – to me, at least – look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. For I am GEORGE.

I plugged in the tape recorder, put on the headphones, and tilted the mike-equipped bowl across the street.

Marina was out of sight. Lee was sitting on the couch, reading a thick paperback by the light of the lamp on the bureau. When he heard footsteps on the porch, he looked up with a frown and tossed his book on the coffee table.

More goddam expats, he might have been thinking......

http://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2011/11/05/the-listening-post/5CsK0UtTZDSB3QZlis7d3K/story.html

Good night nurse. Sounds like he HAS done some homework, of the total disinformation kind. An old friend just posted on my fb page how excited she is to get this "if only" book. Assumed I'd be getting it too. Not in your life.

And as the 50th draws closer there will be more of the same, only worse.

Lies for a new generation.

Dawn

The book is FICTION! How is going to have disinformation when nobody is going to take this book as fact?

The guy who stops the assassination is time traveling!

I cant believe how some forum members are acting like this book is a non fiction book about the assassination

I read one review that said one of the best parts of the book is how the main guy starts to worry that even if he stops Oswald JFK might still be killed by a Grassy Knoll shooter

I am going to walk into Barnes and Noble on November 8th right when they open and pay full price for this book and go home and read it from cover to cover and I already know that because of my love for King and my lifelong study of the assassination that I will love this book

And you know why?

Because im going to read it like it supposed to be read! Its fiction, why anybody would treat it any different is beyond me

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Ok I have been at home just flipping through the pages looking for names before I start reading

I have not been this excited about a book in a long time (and with well over 2000 books in my home library I get excited about lots books, but not THIS excited so thats saying something)

Anyways just for the curious I have seen De Mohrenschildt's name many times and it looks like he is a big part of the book

Gen. Edwin Walker has been mentioned (in what context I have no idea but it looks like the Jake is spying on Oswald while Oswald spies on Walker)

James Hosty comes to his house

Dr Perry gives Jake Pain Meds after the assassination

Spoilers! if you dont want me to ruin the book then stop reading right now

Bonnie Ray Williams lets Jake into the TSBD to stop LHO

Again I have no context behind what happens I just read the sentences with the names in them

I will make posts with my thoughts and feelings on the book as I read

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Ok I have been at home just flipping through the pages looking for names before I start reading

I have not been this excited about a book in a long time (and with well over 2000 books in my home library I get excited about lots books, but not THIS excited so thats saying something)

Anyways just for the curious I have seen De Mohrenschildt's name many times and it looks like he is a big part of the book

Gen. Edwin Walker has been mentioned (in what context I have no idea but it looks like the Jake is spying on Oswald while Oswald spies on Walker)

James Hosty comes to his house

Dr Perry gives Jake Pain Meds after the assassination

Spoilers! if you dont want me to ruin the book then stop reading right now

Bonnie Ray Williams lets Jake into the TSBD to stop LHO

Again I have no context behind what happens I just read the sentences with the names in them

I will make posts with my thoughts and feelings on the book as I read

Hi Dean; agreed it appears very interesting, i just wish, that he would have read a much better assortment and, more serious works for his source material than just the L/Nrs, that he names, on page 845.in reading what he did, i wonder who he thinks or believes the shooter was, wonder it's a guy initialed LHO...b

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Thanks for the links Bernice :)

I read so much yesterday that my eyes are burning like crazy this morning

And this book is not as LN crazy as everyone thinks, one of the very first things that Jake says before going back in time is what if I stop Oswald before he gets to the TSBD that day and some assassin takes JFK out from the Grassy Knoll

Then they go into talking about reading every book on the assassination as possible

I really dont want to spoil the book for anybody but if most of you that are not going to read it want toknow I can make a post each day laying out what is happening and what is going on

If forum members dont want the book spoiled then I wont

They talk about William Manchesters book first

I just have to say that the first part of the book is about the time travel and lets just say that Jake has watched the movie Back to the Future 2 many times

This book has me so hooked I cant stop reading, it is intense and has Stephen Kings detailed like writting that makes you feel like your in 1958

So far this book has been perfect, I wish members would read it as a work of Fiction and enjoy it that way

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I hope you'll post as suggested, just leave out the last line, please?

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I hope you'll post as suggested, just leave out the last line, please?

What do you mean?

I mean exactly what I said. :)

I Like King, but I have so many books to read and am reading that I have no idea when I'll (if ever) get around to that one, so a description, without the last line, which I think is often important in Kings novels, so by, or if I get around to it I probalby only have a vague memory of it, besides there are some novels of his I'll happily read many times over the years.

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NOVEMBER 10, 2011

Errol Morris Interviews Stephen King

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/10/errol-morris-interviews-stephen-king/?hp

In the Nov. 13 issue of the Book Review, the documentarian Errol Morris reviews Stephen King’s new novel, “11/22/63.” The book, like the film Morris is currently completing, is about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Because of their overlapping interests, and because Mr. Morris’s technique as a filmmaker is to chase down every clue, he requested an interview with Mr. King after finishing his review. The resulting Q. and A. is below, with Mr. Morris’s introduction. — The Editors

.

Stephen King’s new novel inhabits a gray area between fact and fiction. It tells the story of Lee and Marina Oswald in the years leading up to the Kennedy assassination. But this isn‘t just historical fiction; it’s a fictional vision of a historical event that has never been satisfactorily explained. To write the true history of the Kennedy assassination, we need to know it. But how much do we know of what really happened?

King believes that Oswald is guilty, and argues in terms of the stories we tell about that day: “Early in the novel,” he writes in an afterword, “Jake Epping’s friend Al puts the probability that Oswald was the lone gunman at 95 percent. After reading a stack of books and articles on the subject almost as tall as I am, I’d put the probability at 98 percent, maybe even 99. Because all of the accounts, including those written by conspiracy theorists, tell the same simple American story: here was a dangerous little fame-junkie who found himself in the right place to get lucky.”

Q.

Errol Morris: Aren’t you going to have to deal with that whole lone gunman vs. conspiracy thing? The endless debates about what really happened?

A.

Stephen King: Well, I’ll tell you what. I’m prepared for trouble when the book comes out. Conspiracy people guard themselves pretty jealously. They have their theories and some of them are pretty complex, and some of them are pretty simple. Some of them have been disproved. But one of the things that sticks in my mind is that none of them has been proved. None of them. So it’s like U.F.O.s… If they’re really U.F.O.s, how come one has never landed, or we’ve never been given definitive proof?

Q.

But, do you have to resolve these questions? Is it even possible? Nearly 50 years later, people are still arguing about it. In the afterword, you caution people that this is not history.

Patricia Wall/The New York TimesStephen King’s new novel, “11/22/63.”

A.

No. It is a novel.

Q.

But resolved or unresolved, the mystery of what happened stands behind everything. It is perhaps unavoidable. There are cases where you have the feeling of puzzle pieces coming together. Where the evidence leads to a conclusion. But there are other cases that devolve into chaos, confusion. The Kennedy assassination, I would argue, is one of them. The question is why? What happened? Why did it become an investigative morass?

A.

Well, the reason is, I would say, because Ruby shot Oswald. And when Ruby shot Oswald, he shut his mouth. He permanently silenced him. So there was never any light cast from that standpoint. As a result, you have all these witnesses who stepped forward who saw this and saw that and saw guys on the grassy knoll and this and that and the other thing. It’s a little bit like the blind man describing the elephant. One’s got the trunk and says it’s a snake. And one’s got a leg and says it’s a tree. One’s got an ear and says it’s a banana plant. They all say different things because none of them can see the whole thing. The only one who could really tell us what happened is dead. I’m not saying he would have, but I think he would have, I believe he would have, if he did it. And I do think he did it.

Q.

You mention in your afterword Thomas Mallon’s novel “Mrs. Paine’s Garage.”

[Mallon chronicles the relationship between the Oswalds and the Paines, Quakers who befriended them. They are of particular historical interest because Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano rifle was stored in the Paines’ garage.]

Associated Press Lee Harvey Oswald

A.

Yes. He has a good take on conspiracy people. And Norman Mailer, who provides an epigram at the beginning of the book, says people find it very difficult to believe it could have happened the way it happened because it suggests an absurd universe. But there it is. The line is pretty conclusive to me. The mail-order gun that he bought — he used that gun to try to shoot Gen. Edwin Walker. And that’s the gun that was found at the depository with his fingerprints on it. And then he ran, he shot the police officer J. D. Tippit, and they caught him. To me, that’s it. The chain of events seems outrageous, but let me tell you a story. This happened a couple of weeks ago in the Midwest. This guy won the lottery, he won a million dollars or something on the lottery. Maybe it was multimillions. But you know how it is, it’s a great human interest story. So the press comes and this film crew from one of the local stations says to him, “We want to recreate you winning the lottery.” You know where this is going, right?

Q.

I’m not sure.

“The book that I wrote is a time-travel story. “

— Stephen King

A.

Bear with me. So they went to the store where he had bought the scratch ticket and won the million dollars. And they filmed, and he scratched the ticket and he said, “Holy — I just won another $100,000.” Now, that’s the sort of thing where if you’re not there, if you’re not part of it, you just say to yourself, “This is just absurd.” But it happens all the time. Oswald just happened to be at the right place at the right time. He and his wife were effectively done, and she was living with Mrs. Paine out in Irving. He used to come on the weekends, but that week, he came on Thursday — the night before the assassination. And it seems pretty clear from his actions and from the things he said that he had decided to do this, but that he could be persuaded to change his mind. He and Marina went to bed that night and in bed, he asked her, “Is there a chance that we can get back together?” And she was very cold to him. She said, “No, I don’t think that’s ever going to happen, Lee.” And in the morning, he left his wedding ring and he left all the money in his pockets in a teacup in the kitchen for her. And that was it. There is this chain of ifs, but really, it’s as simple as that. He wanted to shoot somebody. He wanted to be somebody famous. It’s all there. The pieces all click together pretty nicely.

Q.

And yet you don’t really believe in coincidences, do you?

A.

Yes, I do. The book that I wrote is a time-travel story. The coincidences are minimized by this idea that the past tries to echo itself over and over again. But it’s not fate when somebody wins the lottery. Some guy picks numbers, or the computer picks numbers, and those numbers come up. You know? It’s a coincidental world.

Q.

You have created a rabbit hole into the past. But the Kennedy assassination has always struck me as the mother of all rabbit holes. You disappear into it and never emerge again. The books get longer and longer as people write them. They started out at a couple of hundred pages. And now, the books have metastasized. Vincent Bugliosi’s book, “Reclaiming History,” is, I don’t know, more than a thousand pages. With a CD-ROM that adds a couple of thousand more.

A.

Yes. That’s one I didn’t read. The Mailer book, “Oswald’s Tale,” is 800 pages long. That’s a pretty long one. He goes way back to Marina’s antecedents in Russia and all the rest. But when people bring it up, I’m just going to say, “You believe what you believe.” My wife believes it’s a conspiracy.

Q.

You mentioned that in the afterword, that you and your wife disagreed.

A.

She loved John Kennedy in a way that I never did. I grew up in a Republican household, though my mother cried her eyes out when Kennedy got shot. Little John-John salutes the casket when it goes by. You couldn’t help it, whether you were Republican or Democrat. I don’t know what would happen now, but I do know one of the reasons to write the book was because there’s so much hate in the air now, so much hate. A lot of it’s directed at Obama. I think I decided I wanted to write this book when Obama was giving the State of the Union speech and that guy shouted, “You lie!” You know? It’s a real change in American politics, and it goes back to Kennedy, because people hated that guy, too, until he died.

Q.

One of the things that I liked about the book is what I keep thinking of as twin mysteries. There’s the mystery of whether one man can change the world by going back in time. Will it be for the better or for the worse?

A.

Right, the consequences.

Q.

Yes, the consequences of changing the world, if one could do so. The other thing, which I really, really like, is that even if we go back into the past, history remains a mystery. Is Lee Harvey Oswald guilty? Your protagonist still has to investigate because he’s a good man. He doesn’t want to kill somebody just for the sake of killing somebody. It would be immoral, it would be wrong.

A.

It would be wrong.

Q.

Before he can act, he has to give himself some assurance that he’s acting correctly, that he’s acting responsibly. So all of that stuff, placing the surveillance equipment in the Oswald apartment—

A.

Oh God, that was hard. The guy and his wife spoke Russian the whole time. That was the worst part of writing the book. I hope it’s not too boring.

Q.

I loved that part. What was so hard about it?

A.

Well, there was certain information I wanted to put across about how they got along and about Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother, who was just a harridan. And his feelings about socialism, how they changed, how he felt about Cuba. And I thought, the guy lives across the street. I don’t want a lot of technological huggermugger; I don’t really want to get bogged down in a lot of detail, you know?

Q.

There are these forces of malefaction, and then there’s one scene that I wanted to ask you about, where you make your argument for why Kennedy is a good man. It’s this moment with a gentleman in an alpine hat and lederhosen.

A.

Where the guy’s playing “Hail to the Chief” on the accordion for the president. It’s one of my favorite things in the whole book. You can watch it online. It’s one of the places where you see Kennedy as a real guy. I think it’s Tampa. And it’s the same car, and Kennedy does the same thing where he gets out of the car and he walks into the crowd. You can see the Secret Service people are just going absolutely nuts about this. And there’s not a thing they can do about it, because that’s the way he was. He really wanted to be with people and touch people.

“I don’t want a lot of technological huggermugger; I don’t really want to get bogged down in a lot of detail, you know?”

— Stephen King

Q.

And you liked it so much because—?

A.

Because it was human. You know, it was just a human moment. It humanizes him, and changes him. It’s a first-person narrative, and the best I could do is to try to humanize people from afar. See Oswald a little bit, and show that he’s not completely a monster. He did apparently love his kids. He didn’t beat them. He only beat his wife. I didn’t want them to be figures on a chessboard, O.K.? Best I can do. It’s a sentimental book in a lot of ways, but sentiment’s a part of life. I tried not to wallow in it.

Q.

But there’s also evil.

A.

Well, I try to shy away from the word “evil” because it’s so simple to say, “Well, these things happen because there’s evil in the world.” And as you say, most of it’s just little evil. But if it’s all connected — maybe it is big evil. And maybe we don’t need to say that right out loud.

Q.

I also wanted to ask you about the difficulty of actually writing something that is connected with real history.

A.

Well, I never tried anything like that before, and I’m not sure that I would ever want to try again because, man, it was too much like work. I mean, I’ve done stuff that’s used reality as a base before. In this case, that’s why I stopped the first time I tried it. I was teaching school, and it was 1971 and I was in the teacher’s room and people were talking about the Kennedy assassination. The 22nd would roll around and people would talk and write about the assassination and stuff. I guess somebody must have said, What would it have been like if Kennedy had lived? And I thought to myself, “I’d love to write a story about that.” But there are so many real people and there’s the whole idea of trying to integrate the past and make it real. And it just seemed too big to me at that time, and it was big. I’ve still got a roomful of research materials. Then once you start, the other trick is to not make it into something that’s boring, that’s all history. “Look what I read, and here are these interesting facts.” I didn’t want to do a James Michener thing.

Q.

Well, your romance intersects with history. It’s not historical per se. It’s a love story, and the fact that you’re off in a small town and not in the middle of everything allows you to write something that goes well beyond a collection of facts.

A.

Yes, a real novel. But most of the stuff about Oswald and Marina that I thought is interesting is true, and a lot of the stuff about Marguerite Oswald is true. I just tried not to overwhelm the reader with it.

Q.

And the idea of making the future worse?

A.

Well, that was always going to be the kicker for the book. When I actually sat down to write the book, I started to ask people — my wife was a history major and I asked her, “Well, what would have happened if Kennedy had lived?” And I asked some other people. Finally, I went to Doris Kearns Goodwin, who was an aide for Johnson in those days, and her husband, Dick Goodwin, who was part of the Kennedy team. And I asked them to sort of spitball about things that might have happened if Kennedy had lived. And one of the things they pointed out –– it’s a weakness with Obama, too –– Kennedy was inexperienced enough to have a real difficult time dealing with the Senate and the House of Representatives. Johnson was much better at it. He was able to push a lot of stuff through. He was very canny about it. Johnson said, “Well, we ought to do this, this and this to help memorialize our dead Jack Kennedy.” And so we got the civil rights thing and a bunch of other stuff as well, including Medicare, I think.

Q.

And the chances that Kennedy would have done this or have been able to do this–––

A.

A lot smaller. It was Doris who said – I thought of this, but it just seemed so wild – Wallace might really have gotten elected in 1968. It’s fascinating, though, isn’t it? That one minute – less than a minute – in Dallas, and everything’s up for grabs. I believe in those watershed moments. In 1999, I got hit by a van and almost killed. I was out taking a walk in the afternoon; I’ve thought back on that many times. And I’m thinking if I’d left a minute earlier or if I’d left a minute later, if I’d stayed another 15 minutes at lunch, if somebody had dropped by — if, if, if. But those things didn’t happen, so I happened to be at that one particular place at that one particular time. And something happened that changed my life. Today, it probably doesn’t matter if we talk until 10 minutes of 1 or 10 minutes past 1, things are going to go pretty much as planned. Most days, they do. But not always.

Q.

Did you change your view of the past at all in writing this?

A.

I don’t think so. I think that it clarified a little bit. When you write about the past, the more you write, the clearer the past becomes. It’s like being regressed under hypnosis. My view of the past is that attitudes change, but they change very slowly. Underneath, they stay pretty much the same. “The fundamental things apply as time goes by.”

Q.

Indeed. Your protagonist is sort of guilt-tripped into the past. He wasn’t even alive when Kennedy was shot. But he has nothing to lose; his life is a shambles.

“My view of the past is that attitudes change, but they change very slowly. Underneath, they stay pretty much the same.”

— Stephen King

A.

Well, it’s true that he doesn’t have much of a life in 2011. He goes back into the past and finds a life, which is probably another kind of romantic, sentimental idea, but I like it. I like the idea that he finds somewhere that he would like to stay, and I like it at the end he realizes that he cannot. If he learns anything, he learns that you have to leave things alone. Things are better left the way that they are.

Q.

Do you think that’s true?

A.

No, I don’t think it’s true for us because we can’t see the future. We don’t know the influence that our actions have. It’s something that’s unique to the time-traveler’s story; he’s screwing with the cogs and wheels of the universe. But for most of us, we go along and we do the best that we can and we try not to hurt other people. Most of us do, anyway. I guess there are always, you know, the Ted Bundys of the world. If you could go back and stop Hitler or something like that, you would, wouldn’t you?

Q.

Would I stop Hitler? Yes.

A.

Yes, sure you would.

Q.

My mother’s dead, but I think my mother would be proud of me.

A.

But, of course, she wouldn’t know who Hitler was. Because he would have been totally whisked off the stage. This book is, in a way, like a photo negative of my novel “The Dead Zone.” In that book, Johnny Smith is the guy in the high place with the rifle who feels like he’s seen the future. He’s seen this guy, Greg Stillson, and he sees what he’s going to do when he becomes president because he has this precognitive talent. And he feels like he has to kill him. At the last moment, fate intervenes. I got really uncomfortable with the idea of saying, “Well, under certain circumstances, assassination is a good thing.” And this book is a chance to do it the other way and to take the assassination back.

Q.

Philosophers have endlessly speculated about the nature of evil. Why there has to be evil––

A.

Well, it does seem to me that, without evil, there is no good because we wouldn’t have anything to compare it to.

Q.

But in your novel, history seems to involve a kind of balancing act between good and evil. We don’t know the interrelationship of things. What you call the “butterfly effect”: change one thing in the hope of making the world a better place, and something’s going to happen to make the world even worse.

A.

Well, Ray Bradbury called it the butterfly effect before me. It’s also been called the Rube Goldberg effect –– where you see the world as an infernal machine. When you pull lever A, spring B hits cog C. The next thing you know, the models are all over the floor. I’m not saying it’s the way things are, but it’s certainly plausible. I tried as much as I could when I wrote the book not to get caught up in any of the paradoxes and things that go along with time travel.

Q.

Well, the book is really not about time travel per se.

A.

Not at all. Not at all. It’s just a device.

Q.

It’s a device to allow us to examine fate, love, memory, history. And as such, it’s truly compelling.

A.

You know what? It’s like “Gulliver’s Travels.” Swift never goes into this big long thing about well, there was a genetic mutation and therefore these people became small, and all the rest. We don’t really care about that. It’s just the idea: they’re there. Then we can use it to examine real life.

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Guest Robert Morrow

Stephen King consulted Doris Kearns Goodwin about Lyndon Johnson?

Read a Washington Post article by Sally Quinn "A Tale of Hearts and Minds" (dated 8/24/75) and you might think, as I do, that Doris Kearns Goodwin (then Doris Kearns) had sex with Lyndon Johnson. I do not think Doris Kearns Goodwin is capable of telling us about the ugly truth of the JFK Assassination and Lyndon Johnson's role in it. Doris Kearns Goodwin, like Jack Valenti, is compromised when it comes to LBJ.

I think Doris was/is infatuated with Lyndon Johnson. Her husband Richard Goodwin has made some significant contributions to history by letting us know that by the mid 1960's President Lyndon Johnson was literally a paranoid in disintegration in the White House. LBJ was as nutty as a fruitcake and extremely dangerous.

Sycophantic LBJ biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin was likely having an affair with Lyndon Johnson

LBJ pressured Kearns for sex, later asked her to MARRY him! Doris met Johnson in 1967 when she was age 23 and Johnson was age 58.

Was LBJ biographer Doris Kearns having an affair with Lyndon Johnson? Here is the response of a very well known JFK researcher when I posed that question to him: “No doubt about that one ….” Sally Quinn had said some rather provocative things about Doris Kearns-Goodwin's relationship with LBJ in those "final years." Here is a reference to that in a Wash Post article (“A Tale of Hearts and Minds, 8/24/75) alluded to in the LA Times in 2002:

Goodwin's first dip in the waters of infamy came in 1967, when, having received a White House fellowship, she was photographed dancing with Lyndon Johnson at a reception. The story turned on the fact that the president's dance partner, then Doris Kearns, had just co-written a piece for the New Republic under the headline: "How to Remove L.B.J. in 1968."

Later, in the early 1970s, Kearns and Richard Goodwin, lovers but not yet married, set off a literary scandal that attracted national media attention. It involved a "psychobiography" that Kearns was writing about Johnson, based in part on intimate conversations they'd had on his ranch in Texas, and a decision to bring Goodwin aboard as a co-author.

Their plan was to expand what had begun as a scholarly work--intended to help secure for her a tenured professorship at Harvard University--break with a smaller publishing house and sell the book elsewhere, for about five times the money. As the dispute grew, the story oozed outward to include speculation in print about whether Kearns might have had an affair with Johnson.

Sally Quinn, flying at her highest as a feature writer in the Washington Post's Style section, wrote a lively, at times almost embarrassingly explicit, account of the chaos that had come to Kearn's love and literary life. The piece ran for what seemed like forever, and it included a rather tart summation:

" Kearns has always gotten what she wanted--and made it look as if she didn't even try. She got elected student-body president at Colby College in Maine, got the best grades, got the best beaux, got into Harvard, got a White House fellowship, got Lyndon Johnson, got her Ph.D, got her professorship at Harvard, got her book, got author Richard Goodwin and got Goodwin to collaborate with her on the book. Those are all things she wanted, or thought she wanted when she got them."

At one point in the story, the then-32-year-old Kearns is quoted as saying: " I really believe that Johnson was picking a person he wanted to write about him. People say he was in love with me and things like that. Partly that's true. But it was much more serious than that."

Here is another excerpt from Sally Quinn’s 1974 article

"Johnson was terribly possessive of her time, more and more as he came closer to death. She was seeing many men at this point in her life but had no real attachments until she met Richard Goodwin six months before Johnson's death."

One time Doris Kearns gave a lecture and said that Lyndon Johnson had compared her to his mother. [LBJ's mother was quite the enabler of him; as was Lady Bird.] When Kearns comments became public and appeared in print, LBJ said:

"So I'll just take the knife out of my heart and close up the wound, and we'll have you back here and we won't look back in pride or shame. We'll just start from here and we'll go on with your book without Parade. We're both still alive and that's what counts.”

Kearns has later admitted that Lyndon Johnson used to crawl into bed with her and just talk, but with nothing else going on....

As for me, I am not buying that nothing else went on. The Doris Kearns case is just another example of Lyndon Johnson's ability to manipulate people and even turn them into sychophants protecting his legacy decades later. Jack Valenti would be another good example.

Doris Kearns Goodwin: "I got to know this crazy character [Lyndon B. Johnson] when I was only 23 years old.... He's still the most formidable, fascinating, frustrating, irritating individual I think I've ever known in my entire life.” [Academy of Achievement June 1996 interview, p.1]

Doris Kearns also told authors Richard Harwood and Haynes Johnson about her relationship with LBJ in an interview that Sally Quinn refers to:

"They both took copious notes. In the interview Kearns told the reporters that her relationship with President Johnson was extraordinarily complicated, that she was still having trouble placing it in perspective, that she was troubled about how to handle her personal relationship with Johnson when she published her own book.

She told them that the essence of their relationship was that LBJ was in love with her, the he "pressed me very hard sexually the first year," that he courted her aggressively, the he asked her to marry him, that he was jealous of other men in her life."

[sally Quinn, Washington Post, 8/24/75 "A Tale of Hearts and Minds"]

My comment: Really, this kind of behavior from Lyndon Johnson was typical. It is how he behaved his whole life, and I don't just mean sexually. I am referring to his narcissism, neediness, ability to manipulate people, ability to turn folks into sycophants and slaves and have them do things they would not normally do.

I guess this just reproves the old saying that women love power; even if power is a old bloated, craggy man and a paranoid, mendacious, delusional nut job.

Here is an email to me from a Harvard alum (a nationally known political writer):

“Robert,

I was a graduate student at Harvard in the Political Science Department when Kearns was writing her LBJ book — the gossip at Harvard was always that she was LBJ’s lover — Kearns was first and foremost an opportunist — if sleeping with LBJ advanced her career, I doubt she hesitated.”

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