In Those Days, Editors Paid Peanuts

Bill Thompson (shown with Kathy and me this afternoon at lunch on the Upper East Side) was an editor at Doubleday in 1973 when he decided to offer a $2500 advance to a struggling young writer named Stephen King for a book called Carrie. In the late 1980s, he was running a short-lived imprint, Wynwood Press, when another unknown novelist sent him a manuscript that several publishers had already turned down. "Even the coffee stains had coffee stains," he said. But Bill thought A Time To Kill was a great yarn, so he gave John Grisham his first contract.

If you're keeping score, that means Bill Thompson discovered two of the top-selling U.S. fiction writers of all time. The same day he released Grisham's first novel, he also published mine, which was read by dozens. Two out of three ain't bad.

Kathy and I got to know Bill in the mid-1980s when we assisted Richard Nixon, along with his chief foreign policy adviser Marin Strmecki, on his sixth book, No More Vietnams. Bill was then working at Arbor House, where he helped the great Elmore Leonard (whose Rum Punch became Quentin Tarantino's "Jackie Brown") achieve his first bestseller, Glitz, by getting cartoonist and Leonard fan Charles M. Schultz to draw a panel showing Snoopy engrossed in Glitz. On the basis of that success, he persuaded Nixon to give Arbor House a try and did very well by 37's defense of the Vietnam war and his own policies.

This afternoon's conversation was a leisurely one about, among other things, the radical changes in the book business and Bill's continued cutting-edge work in helping promising new writers. He doesn't have a Kindle yet, and he said he got a headache when I tried to show him how to read the Economist on my phone. But we decided that as long as people keep reading, it doesn't much matter how.

Three Watergates

James Lipton called "Two Cathedrals," the last episode of the second season (2:22 to the scripturally minded) of "The West Wing," the best hour of television ever produced. His benediction is far above my poor power to add or detract. I've already waxed goofy about the last five minutes, when Josiah Bartlett (Martin Sheen, above) receives a cleansing civic baptism while Mark Knopfler hymns on his electric guitar.

Episcopal bones tingle during the scenes in Washington National Cathedral, especially the way the young crucifer and candle-bearers move in perfect, reverential unison -- almost as good as at St. John's! Scriptwriter and series creator Aaron Sorkin makes a complete muck of the funeral liturgy for the president's beloved secretary, Delores Landingham. Ending with the prayer of St. Francis? I don't think so.

As for the Nixon resonances, the whole episode's a learn-from-Watergate, it's-the-coverup-that-kills-you allegory. On learning several episodes before that President Bartlett has been concealing his MS for years, aide Toby Ziegler demands that Bartlett consult his anti-John Dean of a White House counsel, Oliver Babish, who instantly puts the sullen if pliable president on the road to full disclosure, special prosecutor, the works.

Thus will Bartlett survive to run again, though his misdeeds are far more egregious and systematic than Nixon's. I can't tell you the number of people who've said to me over the years, "If only Nixon would have admitted what he did, he'd have survived." Of course unlike Bartlett, who submits to Babish's will, and his principled aides, the stubbornly unrepentant Nixon was surrounded by a considerable number of felons and liars who made matters fatally worse.

It would've been nice to try it Bartlett's way, though, and as a matter of fact, I did, too. In 1989 I published a novel, Patterns of Abuse, that amounted to an anti-Watergate in which a Democratic president breaks the law in the service of national security only to have the scandal manipulated for partisan purposes by a scheming Republican editor of the Washington Post. My president lets it all hang out, too.

It sold dozens of copies (some of which are still rattling around). Published on exactly the same day by the same now-defunct house, Wynwood Press, was the first edition of a novel I like to call A Time To Kill by John Grisham. Our editor, a publishing and agenting legend, Bill Thompson -- who helped get Elmore Leonard his first bestseller, Glitz, and also edited Nixon's book No More Vietnams -- discovered Stephen King in addition to Grisham. Two out of three ain't bad!

Bill now helps authors treat their ailing manuscripts. There's a writing doctor in WW 2:22 as well, namely Lawrence K. Altman, M.D., who recently retired as the New York Times medical correspondent. Bartlett's press secretary, C. J. Cregg, puts him in the front row at a press conference in the vain hope that Bartlett will call on him first for a softball about his health rather than the dreaded question about his reelection plans.

I always thought the part was played by Altman himself, but when I said so on YouTube, I was gently corrected by a woman in Washington who said it was her late husband, a veteran character actor. I regret that I can't find his name. He played someone whom Nixon had admired for outstanding coverage of his near-fatal brush with phlebitis during 1974-75, when his critics unfairly accused him of being a faker to avoid coming to Washington to visit with the all-too-real special prosecutor.