Thomas Mallon on Impeachment, and Philip Pullman on “His Dark Materials”

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 15 November 2019

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As he opened public impeachment proceedings last week, Representative Adam Schiff invoked Watergate—which, after all, ended well for Democrats. To understand how that history applies, or doesn’t, to the current proceedings, The New Yorker’s Dorothy Wickenden spoke with Thomas Mallon, the author of the deeply researched “Watergate: A Novel,” and of historical fictions about Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. How would Mallon write the story of the Trump impeachment as a novel? “I would go right inside the heads of Lindsey Graham, Ben Sasse, and Mitt Romney,” he tells Wickenden. “A guilty conscience is one of the best springboards for fiction.” Plus, a conversation with Philip Pullman, whose beloved trilogy, “His Dark Materials,” has been adapted for a new HBO series. But he’s already onto a second trilogy about its heroine, Lyra, because he has more to learn about her universe.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:10.0	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. As Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, opened impeachment proceedings last week.
0:19.4	He very deliberately invoked the specter of Watergate.
0:23.1	These actions will force Congress to consider, as it did with President Nixon, whether Trump's
0:28.0	obstruction of the constitutional duties of Congress constitute additional grounds for impeachment.
0:32.9	Now, you can see why Schiff would want to remind us of those Nixon years. Nixon had won his
0:37.4	second term in a
0:38.4	landslide, but over the course of many hearings and much information that was coming to light,
0:43.6	a very different narrative took hold. Nixon came to be seen as a crook, a man who had put his own
0:49.9	interests ahead of the countries, and finally he lost the support of senators, even in his own party.
0:56.2	To understand how that president applies or doesn't apply to the Trump hearings, we called on
1:00.7	Thomas Mallon. Tom's books include Watergate, a novel, and historical fiction about Ronald
1:07.0	Reagan and George W. Bush. Tom Mallin spoke with the New Yorkers, Dorothy Wicenden.
1:12.3	So I thought you could help us see this drama through your eyes, which is, there are those of a
1:18.2	novelist. So Watergate in so many ways really was tailor-made for a novelist. What, what in
1:25.0	specific, appealed to you as you began that work?
1:29.6	I used to call Watergate a claustrophobic epic because you had all of this frantic action in
1:35.7	Washington, but it was all happening within the space of a few square miles. It played out over
1:41.5	more than two years. And you had a cast of incredibly colorful characters, complicated characters.
1:51.1	Everybody from these figures of unexpected nobility like Sam Irvin at the Watergate hearings, the extraordinary tortured psyche of Nixon, really a tragic
2:05.3	figure in my estimation. Somebody with great political gifts, great really governing gifts, who's
2:12.2	done in by this terrible sense of defeat and unfairness that he carried around. The comic characters from
	...

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