Word: gordon
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This anguished memoir by novelist Mary Gordon is a desperate search for her father, a self-created enigma who died when she was seven. Perhaps inevitably, the search fails. The father a seven-year-old knows--her hero, her first Prince Charming--does not really exist. But dying, he is frozen forever in a child's adoring perception. At 10, the author recalls, she began to write her father's biography with the words "My father is the greatest man I have ever known...
...David Gordon, however, was a far more complicated case. His daughter's recounting, The Shadow Man (Random House; 274 pages; $24), is well titled; Gordon's shadow was profoundly deceptive. The intellectual who talked of riotous years at Harvard in fact never finished high school. The erudite essayist who had written for the Nation and the Jesuit magazine America was also a literary name dropper and vituperative anti-Semite. The right-wing pamphleteer apparently did write speeches for Senator Joe McCarthy, as he claimed, but the speeches may never have been used. The jaunty, confident head of the family most...
...Catholic International, a magazine he published briefly toward the end of the 1930s, David Gordon praised Mussolini's Italy and raved that Jewish soldiers were being sent to Spain "to help murder nuns in Lincoln's name." Can this be the loving, lighthearted man who taught Mary Gordon to value reading above all other things? "I am losing my father. He is disappearing," she writes of her researches. But she also finds she is losing herself. She had reached adulthood as a fallen-away Catholic intellectual (the thoughts of such a person are the themes of her novels Final Payments...
...Stephen Chao, who had helped develop Cops and America's Most Wanted; he was fired after three months when he hired a male stripper to help illustrate his talk on censorship at a conference organized by Murdoch. A number of top executives--among them ex-CBS News president Van Gordon Sauter and longtime CBS News executive Joseph Peyronnin--came and went after that, and plans changed just as often. An evening newscast was being considered, then it wasn't. A prime-time magazine show, Front Page, went on the air, then was canceled. A late-night news show...
...beginning of the end, though, came in 1966 when a Dutchess County (New York) assistant D.A. named G. Gordon Liddy raided Leary's Millbrook mansion, which the doctor used courtesy of an Andrew Mellon heir. Two minor-possession arrests eventually landed Leary in a San Luis Obispo, California, prison in 1970, but he escaped with the help of the radical Weather Underground, then materialized among the Black Panthers in Algeria. Betrayed and recaptured in 1973, Leary spent most of the next three years in prison. When he was released, he turned his attentions to SMILE (Space Migration, Increased Intelligence, Life...