Customer Reviews

Lead Time : A Journalist's Education

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Wills is considered one of America's leading intellectual journalists. This collection of essays written from 1968 through 1982 contains for the most part work on political subjects. There are essays on Presidents Carter, Truman, Johnson, Reagan, Ford.There are also essays on Bobby Baker, Daniel Patrick Monynihan, George Wallace, Bert Lance, Jerry Brown. There are essays on McCarthyism, Alger Hiss , Dorothy Day, Pope John Paul 2. Also essays on 'athletes'Muhammed Ali, Shirley Verret, Raymond Berry, Beverly Sills.

I especially enjoyed the essay on Ali which was a review of books by Wilfred Sheed, and Norman Mailer. In it Wills explains how Ali used his eyes, to control the fight. In an essay on Lyndon Johnson Wills gives a description of an overpowering figure who got what he wanted from people through relentless pressure.

I must admit that I expected a bit more from the essays in terms of flair and wit. For journalistic pieces they read a bit heavily.

I love this book. It is a collection of pieces by Wills that ran in various magazines, mostly in the 1970's. The topics run a wide gamut, and all of them are written with Wills's special mix of intellectuality, clarity, and verve. The chapters I re-read the most are those on Harry Truman (whom Wills debunks as a clod and party-machine hack trying to pass himself off to history as a homemade scholar who routinely dressed down stuffed shirts like MacArthur), Lyndon Johnson (the article on whom contains some of the most cerebral bathroom humor you'll ever read, and which is all the more hilarious for being true), and "The Pope in America" (a caustic review of the papophilia that gripped journalists during John Paul II's first visit to the US).