Tuesday, June 30, 2020

the last book I ever read (The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump, excerpt twelve)

from The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump by Mary Jordan:

Marriage thus far had not been a success story for Trump. His first one, to Ivana, ended badly. The second, to Marla, included the sting of having Marla caught on a beach late at night with one of his security guys. People close to Trump said they had never seen him so furious and humiliated. In January, Marla announced that she was publishing a memoir, All That Glitters Is Not Gold, and that it was not expected to be flattering to Trump. Trump is known for threatening to sue to try to stop books about him from being published. Marla’s memoir never appeared, eventually being withdrawn “by mutual consent.”

Jay Goldberg, Trump’s friend and lawyer who worked on his divorce from Ivana, said marriage hadn’t been an easy fit for Trump, who was always looking for the next thing. “I noticed in the relationship with Marla, the philosophy that there’s nothing that destroys love except for marriage… that if you have steak every night, you get tired of it,” Goldberg told me. “He was so in love with Marla when he was cheating on Ivana. Then once they got married, the fun of the chase was over.”



Monday, June 29, 2020

the last book I ever read (The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump, excerpt eleven)

from The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump by Mary Jordan:

CBS newsman Dan Rather invited Trump and Melania to sit for a joint 60 Minutes interview. In a segment taped in December 1999 and aired on January 11, 2000, a visibly skeptical Rather grilled Trump about his unconventional views. Watching the interview in 2019, it is striking how little Trump has changed in both the words he uses and his demeanor. He’s been reading off the same script for decades, with Melania nearby, glowing with admiration. When Rather asked about Senator McCain’s war record, Trump said exactly what he would say on the campaign trail almost two decades later: “Does being captured make you a war hero? I don’t know. I’m not sure.” He said other politicians are “dumber than a rock,” and that George W. Bush “doesn’t seem like Albert Einstein.”



Sunday, June 28, 2020

the last book I ever read (The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump, excerpt ten)

from The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump by Mary Jordan:

Six months before Melania’s Sports Illustrated shoot in Mexico, the Trump-owned Miss Universe pageant held its 1999 competition in the Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago. Trump often invited his pals to be judges, and that year he asked Kylie Bax and world heavyweight boxing champion Evander Holyfield. Perhaps more important, he invited Diane Smith, the influential Sports Illustrated senior editor in charge of the swimsuit edition. Within months of the Miss Universe pageant, Melania, Bax, and Holyfield all appeared int eh 2000 swimsuit issue. (Male sports stars are sometimes featured posing with the bikini-clas women.)

A few weeks after the fall photo shoot, in late 1999, Sports Illustrated’s top editor, Bill Colson, received a phone call out of the blue: Donald Trump wanted to have lunch. Colson had never met Trump, and he thought it strange to be summoned by the celebrity developer. But everybody knew Trump was interested in sports, particularly golf and tennis, so perhaps it made sense that he wanted to chat with the editor of the biggest sports magazine in the country. Colson met him at Jean-Georges, the high-end restaurant housed in the Trump International Hotel and Tower on Central Park West. Colson engaged Trump on sports, and they chatted. But Colson said it soon became clear why he was there.

“Did it go well with Melania?” Trump said.



Saturday, June 27, 2020

the last book I ever read (The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump, excerpt nine)

from The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump by Mary Jordan:

She laid out her story: She was born and raised in a small town. At nineteen, she won a contest at Rome Cinecittà film studios. She left the architecture program at the University of Ljubljana before the end of her first year of studies to pursue modeling. She had lived in Milan, the Paris, and “for the past two years, my address is on Park Avenue in New York City.”

At times, her story seemed to veer into exaggeration or pure confection. She described a luxurious life as one of the highest-paid models in the world and added that she was “among the top 50” internationally, according to multiple articles published right after the press conference. “I know some of the top models personally, as well as other famous personalities, like Elton John, Jon Bon Jovi,” Melania said. “Sometimes we get together, or we see one another at various events.” The Vienna office of Elite models was representing her, she said, and “other big agencies are trying to get me. People all over the world know my name and my work.”



Friday, June 26, 2020

the last book I ever read (The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump, excerpt eight)

from The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump by Mary Jordan:

Zampolli told me that he met Donald Trump before Melania came to the United States. He was typically vague about the details. By the time Melania arrived in New York, Zampolli was already doing Trump-like work in courting the gossip writers at the New York Post’s Page Six. He would tip off reporters to celebrities at parties and then often appear in the newspaper photos next to them. He saw how Trump would use lavish parties, head-turning models, and outlandish stunts to get press attention and realized it could work for him, too. By my count, Zampolli has had more than one hundred twenty Page Six mentions since 1996.

In 1998, Playboy magazine named Trump and Zampolli two of “New York’s Top 10 Playboys.” These were ten men who the magazine believed “personify life, liberty and the pursuit of dreams.” It was quite a list, including Derek Jeter, Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Wahlberg, Sean “Puffy” Combs, and a Tribeca hotel owner who rented rooms to models only.



Thursday, June 25, 2020

the last book I ever read (The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump, excerpt seven)

from The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump by Mary Jordan:

Atanian’s photos show a beautiful young woman, often without makeup, with no high-gloss finish. It wasn’t lost on either of them that Atanian was in a position to help a struggling young model. He did a lot of work for the magazine Marie Claire, and she would ask him, “Matthew, when can you send me through to casting?”

He told her that he had no control over such things, which wasn’t true. He simply didn’t want to see her get hurt. There was a wide gulf between commercial modeling and editorial modeling for high-end fashion photos in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, or even Marie Claire. “Melania was commercial at best. She was never going to achieve her dream of doing editorial,” Atanian told me, adding, “A true editorial model has a certain relationship with the camera lens, in her face and in the way she moves, as if the model gives life to the photograph with her sheer power and chemistry. There’s just something in the picture that you can’t describe, but certain models have it.”



Wednesday, June 24, 2020

the last book I ever read (The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump, excerpt six)

from The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump by Mary Jordan:

Paolo Zampolli has been a rare constant around Melania for more than two decades. He said that two years after she arrived in New York, he introduced her to Donald Trump. Zampolli worked for a while in international development for Trump real estate projects. He also started he own real estate firm and in 2006 was in the news for using catwalk models to help sell Manhattan’s priciest condos and penthouses. The Italian is now an ambassador to the small Caribbean island of Dominica. He maintains extraordinary access to the White House and Mar-a-Lago. His Instagram account is proof of that access, featuring players in the ever-changing landscape of Trump World: Mike Pompeo, Wilbur Ross, Ben Carson, Rudy Giuliani, Kellyane Conway, John Kelly, Rod Rosenstein, and even Fox News superfan Jeanine Pirro. He posts photos of himself with Trump, Melania, and Barron. He has been photographed in the Rose Garden and at Thanksgiving turkey pardons, and he displays online his engraved White House invitations. He is a special planet orbiting close to the Trump sun.



Tuesday, June 23, 2020

the last book I ever read (The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump, excerpt five)

from The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump by Mary Jordan:

Melania, who was moving around Europe following the jobs, said she got a visa to come to New York with the help of an Italian agent in Milan who was scouting models. That man was Paolo Zampolli, a wealthy Italian who became executive vice president of a model management office in New York. Zampolli and Melania were born a month apart in 1970, but they grew up very differently. His father owned Harbert, a toy manufacturing company that sold the Easy-Bake Oven, Star Wars figures, and many popular toys. He said he was distantly related to Pope Paul VI, grew up skiing in the Alps, and frequently yachted off the island of Ibiza, a playground for the rich. When Zampolli was eighteen, his father died in a skiing accident, and the family business was sold to a company controlled by Silvio Berlusconi, who would become Italy’s prime minister

Like other wealthy young men in Milan, Zampolli hung around the city’s vibrant modeling and party scene. He threw parties and met everybody, including John Casablancas, the legendary creator of many models’ images and careers. Zampolli, who dated several models, got into the modeling business himself and began scouting for women to bring to New York,. He said in an interview that when he met Melania, she was beautiful and, unlike many other models, she was “stable and focused.” His New York agency, Metropolitan, arranged her visa to the United States. Melania, tight-lipped about many things, has been particularly silent about whom she dated before she arrived in New York, but several men have publicly said that they dated her. As she was preparing to move to New York, people who knew her said that a Frenchman had called a few people, frantically trying to reach her, telling one that she had abruptly returned the car he had given her as a present. Her reason, it seems, was simple: she was moving on, heading to the city she had been reading about for years.



Monday, June 22, 2020

the last book I ever read (The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump, excerpt four)

from The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump by Mary Jordan:

Today, it seems as if Melania left few traces in Milan. There are different explanations for the lack of information and also why so many people are so hesitant to talk about her. “I choose to forget,” said one person, explaining why he denied knowing her until I showed him a picture of the two of them together. The early 1990s were particularly tumultuous in Milan. Italy was reeling from a massive political corruption scandal that would lead to the indictments of more than three thousand people and realign the nation’s politics. The arrests began the year Melania arrived. At the same time, some modeling firms were also being investigated for not paying taxes, for ripping off models, and for not getting proper immigration papers for their foreign models. But Borgogelli, who worked for her first agency, also offered another reason. He said being assoacited with Melania is not a credential highlight. “She was not a big model. Yes, she did some catalogs. But for agents, you want to say, ‘I can make you a supermodel,’ not, ‘I can make you the wife of a rich man.’ It’s better in the industry to be known as ‘I can make you Cindy Crawford’ rather than the wife of [former Italian prime minister Silvio] Berlusconi or Trump.”



Sunday, June 21, 2020

the last book I ever read (The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump, excerpt three)

from The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump by Mary Jordan:

As she explored how far her looks could take her, an early stop was a competition at a movie studio five hundred miles away, in Rome. Melanija arrived with her mother at Europe’s biggest film studio, Cinecittà, or Cinema City, to enter a competition. Cinecittà, often called “Hollywood on the Tiber,” had advertised a contest for a fresh face. The winner would receive a movie role. Melanija loved movies—there were not many entertainment options in her town, but Ben Hur, Cleopatra, and other classics shot at the Italian studio were shown. She had a special admiration for Sophia Loren, the feline-eyed Italian beauty who rocketed from poverty to global fame. Loren had started her movie career at Cinecittà. Many people told Melanjia that she resembled a young Sophia.



Saturday, June 20, 2020

the last book I ever read (The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump, excerpt two)

from The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump by Mary Jordan:

Prenuptial and postnuptial agreements are as standard as wedding rings in Trump’s marriages. His first wife, Ivana, renegotiated hers three times; Marla, who separated from Trump after four years of marriage, walked away with such a relatively small sum that even a Trump lawyer said he felt she should have gotten more. Trump wrote about prenups and boasted about them and said any rich man who didn’t have one was “a loser.” During the presidential campaign, Melania felt that a lot had changed since she signed her prenup. She had been with him a long time—longer than any other woman. She believed she made crucial contributions to his success. There was talk that Trump likely wouldn’t return to overseeing the Trump Organization after running the country, and Melania wanted to ensure that Barron got his rightful share of inheritance, particularly if Ivanka took the reins of the family business.

While she sorted out her plans as first lady and a new school for her son, she also worked on getting her husband to sign a more generous financial deal for her and Barron. It was smart timing. “The best thing you can do is to deal from strength, and leverage is the biggest strength you can have,” Trump wrote in The Art of the Deal. “Leverage is having something the other guy wants. Or better yet, needs. Or best of all, simply can’t do without.” While in New York, Melania had new leverage. The vacant first lady’s office annoyed him. He wanted her with him.



Friday, June 19, 2020

the last book I ever read (The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump, excerpt one)

from The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump by Mary Jordan:

The Trump family works together and sometimes vacations together, but they are used to having their own space and a lot of it. Ivanka, her husband, Jared, and tehir three children have their own separate mansion at Bedminster, Trump’s private golf club on over five hundred acres in New Jersey. Donald and Melania aren’t known for inviting their grandkids to cuddle with them in bed in the morning, as George H. W. Bush and his wife, Barbara, famously used to do with their grandchildren. In fact, no matter which of his properties he is visiting, Trump sleeps in a separate bedroom that has been decorated to his taste—he favors darker colroed walls and rugs, while Melania likes whites and light colors. Trump typically wakes around 5:00 a.m., well before Melania, and turns on his televisions.

But that night at Blair House, there were eight grandchildren, including Ivanka’s ten-month-old son, Theodore, as well as nannies and in-laws. And despite the fourteen bedrooms, it seemed to some of the Trumps that they were in close quarters in a tight space. Before arriving at Blair House, the family had been briefed on all the famous people who had slept at Blair, from Abraham Lincoln to Winston Churchill, and had been given the schedule for their minute-by-minute movements the next day. The excitement was palpable. Some of the Trumps barely slept, and others rose before dawn. Trump himself started the day in a foul mood, “really out of sorts,” as one of his group described it. Another said he felt “trapped,” cooped up with too many family members “all under the same roof.” He was antsy and wanted to go out, but the Secret Service insisted that he stay put.



Wednesday, June 17, 2020

the last book I ever read (Weather: A Novel by Jenny Offill, excerpt ten)

from Weather: A Novel by Jenny Offill:

The dentist gave me something so I won’t grind my teeth in my sleep. I consider putting it in, decide against it. My husband is under the covers reading a long book about an ancient war. He turns out the light, arranges the blankets so we’ll stay warm. The dog twitches her paws softly against the bed. Dreams of running, of other animals. I wake to the sound of gunshots. Walnuts on the roof, Ben says. The core delusion is that I am here and you are there.



Tuesday, June 16, 2020

the last book I ever read (Weather: A Novel by Jenny Offill, excerpt nine)

from Weather: A Novel by Jenny Offill:

And then it is another day and another and another, but I will not go on about this because no doubt you too have experienced time.



Monday, June 15, 2020

the last book I ever read (Weather: A Novel by Jenny Offill, excerpt eight)

from Weather: A Novel by Jenny Offill:

It’s raining. The bus is full. It’s reached that density where being seated feels like a form of guilt. I look around. I will grudgingly stand for the infirm and the pregnant and those with children. But miraculously, it is all able-bodied teenagers with earbuds. I forgot my phone, or I too would have blotted out all these humans.



Sunday, June 14, 2020

the last book I ever read (Weather: A Novel by Jenny Offill, excerpt seven)

from Weather: A Novel by Jenny Offill:

“Get everything done now,” Ben insists. He is worried one or both of us will lose our jobs. But I don’t like to go to the dentist. Won’t he just have bad news for me? “Please, Lizzie,” he says. “You’ve had that temporary crown for years.”



Saturday, June 13, 2020

the last book I ever read (Weather: A Novel by Jenny Offill, excerpt six)

from Weather: A Novel by Jenny Offill:

It was the same after 9/11, there was that hum in the air. Everyone everywhere talking about the same thing. In stores, in restaurants, on the subway. My friend met me at the diner for coffee. His family fled Iran one week before the Shah fell. He didn’t want to talk about the hum. I pressed him though. Your people have finally fallen into history, he said. The rest of us are already here.



Friday, June 12, 2020

the last book I ever read (Weather: A Novel by Jenny Offill, excerpt five)

from Weather: A Novel by Jenny Offill:

Somehow I have stuffed a too-full garbage bag down the chute. I am flushed with triumph as I enter the hallway. Then I see Mrs. Kovinski by the elevator. She’s got a cane now. She slipped and fell while on jury duty. Funny thing is it was a slip-and-fall case, she tells me. And tells me and tells me.

Sometimes I bring her books to read. She likes mysteries, she told me. Regular-type mysteries. But this last one I gave her was no good, she says. It was all jumbled up. In it, the detective investigated the crime, tracked down every clue, interviewed every possible suspect, only to discover that he himself was the murderer.

You don’t say.



Thursday, June 11, 2020

the last book I ever read (Weather: A Novel by Jenny Offill, excerpt four)

from Weather: A Novel by Jenny Offill:

I do have one bookish superstitution about my birthday. I like to see what Virginia Woolf said about an age in her diaries before I reach it. Usually it’s inspiring.

Other times…

Life is as I’ve said since I was 10, awfully interesting—if anything, quicker, keener at 44 than 24—more desperate I suppose, as the river shoots to Niagara—my new vision of death; active, positive, like all the rest, existing; & of great importance—as an experience.



Wednesday, June 10, 2020

the last book I ever read (Weather: A Novel by Jenny Offill, excerpt three)

from Weather: A Novel by Jenny Offill:

The problem with Eli’s school is it’s not on a human scale. Five stories tall. A dozen first grade classes. When the bell rings, the teachers march the kids out in strict little lines. The playground is big, but it backs out onto the avenue. There is a hole in the fence where the wire is bent, and every time I see it I feel a jolt of dread. All year, I’ve been on some soul-crushing committee where we talk about getting it fixed. I’m not a joiner, but believe me, I work less than these immigrant parents.



Tuesday, June 9, 2020

the last book I ever read (Weather: A Novel by Jenny Offill, excerpt two)

from Weather: A Novel by Jenny Offill:

A few days later, I yelled at him for losing his new lunch box, and he turned to me and said, Are you sure you’re my mother? Sometimes you don’t seem like a good person.

He was just a kid, so I let it go. And now, years later, I probably only think of it, I don’t know, once or twice a day.



Monday, June 8, 2020

the last book I ever read (Weather: A Novel by Jenny Offill, excerpt one)

from Weather: A Novel by Jenny Offill:

But the man in the shabby suit tells me things I want to know. He works for hospice. He said that it is important when a loved one dies to try to stay alone in the house for three days. This is when the manifestations occur. His wife manifested as a small whirlwind that swept the papers off his desk. Marvelous, marvelous, he said.



Sunday, June 7, 2020

the last book I ever read (Patrick Radden Keefe's Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, excerpt twenty)

from Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe:

In one of his conversations with Anthony McIntyre, Brendan Hughes said something similar, in the form of a metaphor. Think of the armed struggle as the launch of a boat, Hughes said, “getting a hundred people to push this boat out. This boat is stuck in the sand, right, and get them to push the boat out and then the boat sailing off and leaving the hundred people behind, right. That’s the way I feel. The boat is away, sailing on the high seas, with all the luxuries that it brings, and the poor people that launched the boat are left sitting in the muck and the dirt and the shit and the sand, behind.”



Saturday, June 6, 2020

the last book I ever read (Patrick Radden Keefe's Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, excerpt nineteen)

from Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe:

In 2016, the Abbey Theatre, in Dublin, premiered a provocative new play by the East Belfast playwright David Ireland called Cyprus Avenue. It is a scabrous black comedy, the story of a Belfast loyalist named Eric Miller. His daughter has recently given birth to a baby girl, but Eric is seized by a mad delusion: he thinks that the baby looks like Gerry Adams. At first, this is played for a joke. Eric asks his daughter whether the Sinn Féin president is not in fact the father of her child. At one point, when he is alone with the baby, he takes a big magic marker and scribbles a black beard onto the child’s cheeks. “The Gerry Adams beard is part and parcel of the Gerry Adams persona,” Eric points out. “It symbolizes his revolutionary ardor, his passion for constitutional change. And now as it whitens it cements his status as éminence grise, aging philosopher king.

Eric was played by Stephen Rea. He had worked steadily since the death of his ex-wife, in film and in theater, and had still not spoken in any substantial way about the life or legacy of Dolours Price. But now he was playing a man who is undone by his own obsessions with Gerry Adams. Eric’s delusion intensifies, and Adams seems to represent, for him, all that threatens his identity as a Belfast Protestant and as a loyalist. He comes to believe that the baby actually is Gerry Adams. When he encounters a loyalist gunman named Slim in a local park, Eric confides, “I think that Gerry Adams has disguised himself as a new-born baby and successfully infiltrated my family home.

Slim, without skipping a beat, replies, “That’s exactly the kind of thing he’d do!”



Friday, June 5, 2020

the last book I ever read (Patrick Radden Keefe's Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, excerpt eighteen)

from Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe:

In the early years of the Troubles, Bell and Adams were allies. They worked intimately together on the Belfast Brigade and did time together at Long Kesh. It was Bell who’d insisted that the 1972 peace talks could happen only if Adams was released from prison, and it was Bell who’d made the trip to London with him. Bell was a great proponent of physical force and had served as the IRA’s “ambassador” to Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya, procuring huge shipments of heavy weaponry from the pariah state. By the mid-1980s, he had risen to become chief of staff of the IRA. But after Sinn Féin embraced an electoral approach during the hunger strike of Bobby Sands and started running other candidates for office, Bell grew concerned that resources and attention were being diverted from the armed struggle in order to campaign for seats. Too much ballot box, not enough Armalite. Eventually, Bell and some allies grew so dubious of this strategy that they plotted to overthrow Gerry Adams. But word of this defection reached Adams, and he moved swiftly, court-martialing Bell for treachery—a charge that could lead to a death sentence. Bell was found guilty, but when it came to the penalty, Adams stepped in—out of loyalty to his old friend, perhaps, or out of consideration for the optics of such a move—and spared his life. So Bell retreated from the movement, with a possible death sentence still hanging over his head, and lived a quiet life in West Belfast. He had refused, ever since, to speak to journalists about his experiences in the IRA. When Big Bobby Storey made the rounds during the 1990s, asking former Provos what they knew about the Jean McConville case, Bell was unhelpful. “Go and ask Gerry,” he said, offering Story the same line that Dolours Price had. “He’s the man.”



Thursday, June 4, 2020

the last book I ever read (Patrick Radden Keefe's Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, excerpt seventeen)

from Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe:

The McConvilles found some solace in other families whose loved ones had disappeared. Several of the families would convene at a “cross-community” trauma center called Wave, which became a source of support for the relatives of the disappeared. Some had been through indescribable anguish. After Kevin McKee disappeared, his mother, Maria, went slightly mad. Some nights, she would roust her other children from bed and bundle them into their coats, insisting that they head out into the city on fruitless searches. She would accost neighbors, pounding on their front doors, shouting, “Where’s my son? What have you done with Kevin?” Other nights, she would prepare a plate of food and tell her children, “Put that in the hot press to keep it warm for Kevin,” as if he had just stepped out to run an errand.

After a gun was discovered on a police raid of the McKee house, Maria ended up getting arrested and spending months at Armagh jail, where she happened to overlap with the Price sisters. She allowed Dolours Price to do her hair, unaware that this was the woman who had driven her son across the border to be shot. When Eamon Molloy’s body was recovered, Maria McKee attended the funeral and experienced the blissful delusion that she was burying her own son. But they still had not found Kevin when she died. Maria’s extended family kept the memory of him alive by naming children Kevin. Sons. Cousins. Nephews. Whenever a baby boy was born, it seemed, they’d call him Kevin.



Wednesday, June 3, 2020

the last book I ever read (Patrick Radden Keefe's Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, excerpt sixteen)

from Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe:

“You cannot mourn someone who has not died,” the Argentine-Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman once observed. In Chile, more than three thousand people were disappeared during the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. In Argentina, the number may have been as high as thirty thousand. In tiny Northern Ireland, the figure was much smaller. The commission ultimately identified sixteen individuals who had been disappeared through the whole course of the Troubles. Even that was a reflection of the extraordinary smallness of the province: in some other countries, there were debates about the aggregate numbers of people who were buried in unmarked graves. In Northern Ireland, you could list the victims on the back of an envelope: Joe Lynskey, Seamus Wright, Kevin McKee, Jean McConville, Peter Wilson, Eamon Molloy, Columba McVeigh, Robert Nairac, Brendan Megraw, John McClory, Brian McKinney, Eugene Simons, Gerard Evans, Danny McIlhone, Charlie Armstrong, Seamus Ruddy. But to name the dead was one thing. To find them was another.



Tuesday, June 2, 2020

the last book I ever read (Patrick Radden Keefe's Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, excerpt fifteen)

from Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe:

Once O’Rawe started telling Mackers the story, he found that he could not stop. He began to cry, choking up at first, then bawling uncontrollably like a child. For twenty years, he had been walking around with the weight of those six dead strikers on his conscience, and after two decades of silence he felt purged, emotionally, to be talking about it. “I don’t give a fuck anymore, this is coming out,” he told Mackers. “Guys died here for fucking nothing!”

But when he reflected on the notion that Adams might have cynically determined that a steady supply of martyrs was indispensable in launching Sinn Féin as a viable political party, O’Rawe was forced to concede a jarring possibility: were it not for that decision, the war might never have ended. As Ed Moloney subsequently wrote, “The hunger strike made Sinn Féin’s successful excursion into electoral politics possible: the subsequent tension between the IRA’s armed struggle and Sinn Féin’s politics produced the peace process and ultimately the end of the conflict. Had the offer of July 1981 not been undermined, it is possible, even probable, that none of this would have happened. There will be those who will say that the end justified the means, that the achievement of peace was a pearl whose price was worth paying.” To O’Rawe it seemed that anyone capable of playing such a long and calculating game and dispatching six men to an unnecessary death must be a genius of political strategy—but also a sociopath.



Monday, June 1, 2020

the last book I ever read (Patrick Radden Keefe's Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, excerpt fourteen)

from Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe:

In the summer of 1981, after Bobby Sands and three other hunger strikers had died, O’Rawe was helping to lead negotiations from inside the prison. According to O’Rawe, the prisoners received a secret offer from Margaret Thatcher that would have granted almost all of their demands. It wasn’t a complete capitulation, but it guaranteed that they would be able to wear their own clothes—one of their chief requirements—as well as other key concessions. O’Rawe and another negotiator smuggled a message to the Provo leadership outside the prison, indicating that they were inclined to accept the British offer and call an end to the strike. But word came back from the outside—specifically, from Gerry Adams—that what Thatcher was proposing was not enough, so the strikers should hold out.

Six more men died before the strike concluded. The public narrative had always maintained that it was the prisoners themselves who insisted on persevering with the strike, and O’Rawe had never spoken out to question this version of history, deferring to what he came to think of as the “carefully scripted myths” that had solidified around these dramatic events. But privately, he felt enormous guilt for not standing up at the time and being more forceful. He wondered why Adams and those around him would have sustained the strike rather than take an offer that the men on the inside had been prepared to accept.