Word: puzo
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Godfather, Mario Puzo...
...death in 1988 was one of the most effective lawyers Washington had ever seen, the attorney of choice for malefactors of great wealth or high profile (among them Senator Joe McCarthy, Teamster chief Jimmy Hoffa, Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Mob boss Frank Costello, the model for Mario Puzo's Godfather). Evan Thomas, Washington bureau chief of Newsweek, tells the Williams story as it should be told, with due attention to the man's boozy, backslapping charm, his genius for the law, and his untiring willingness to place his gifts at the service of dubious characters...
...modern reader, who will probably be more attentive to Puzo's vivid cynicism and gallows humor than to his gridlock plot. When two nutty M.I.T. students blow up Manhattan's sleazy Times Square area with a miniature A-bomb, it seems as if the author has urban renewal, not tragedy, on his mind...
Elsewhere Puzo is dead serious about the tendency of money and power to corrupt. The Fourth K of the title is President of the U.S. Francis Xavier Kennedy, a fictive cousin of John and Robert's. F.X.K. is a clever invention, but he also shares characteristics with The Godfather's Michael Corleone. Both are intelligent young men whose high ideals are tarnished by a brutal world. In fact, it is idealists who cause most of the trouble. When a group of Arab terrorists known as the One Hundred kill the Pope, hijack a jet carrying the U.S. President's daughter...
...aggressive ways in which F.X.K. handles foreign and domestic threats to his presidency and his life allow Puzo to pull out all the stops. Philosophical dialogues about the nature of power, byzantine schemes and even elements of science fiction find their way into the mix. Amazingly, it works. Puzo's inventions may read like a parody of a best-selling thriller, but his characters give off sparks of intelligence and complexity. If some of the principals seem to belong to the Hollywood power structure rather than to the Washington elite, it is undoubtedly because the author knows the entertainment...