Reviews of Books

As in Gore Vidal's Burr: A Novel, William Safire explores the creation of the American republic through fictionalized versions of the most brilliant and colorful cast in our political history, including George Washington, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Meriwether Lewis, John Marshall, Benjamin Rush, Mathew Lyon, and even a slave participant in Gabriel's Rebellion. Here, however, the New York Times political columnist is primarily interested in two figures at the margins of official power but at the center of a crucial development in American journalism: the creation of a muckraking press.	1
Safire dedicates the novel to his protagonists, the acerbic journalists James Thomson Callender, known by his pen name Timothy Thunderproof, and William Cobbett, the familiar Peter Porcupine. Stocky, self-assured, and gregarious, Cobbett contrasted physically and temperamentally with the wiry, anxious, and angry Callender. The two men served rival parties, with Cobbett slashing the Republicans on behalf of the Federalists and Callender returning the favors. But the English Cobbett and the Scottish Callender also had compelling similarities. Both were ambitious immigrants on the run from criminal prosecution in Britain for political criticism, and they employed similar talents and methods to investigate and mock leading politicians with vindictive glee. By both necessity and principle, they championed a vigorous press free to print what it wanted, without fear of official retribution for sedition or libel—then a radical position when not even truth screened a publication from criminal conviction for undermining the reputation of public men. Usually damned by historians as unscrupulous slanderers, Cobbett and Callender find a vindicating admirer in Safire, who was himself pilloried for characterizing then First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton as a "congenital liar." The two newspapermen nicely serve his central proposition: that the republic must tolerate—indeed, should celebrate—a critical press, no matter how reckless and savage the treatment of political leaders.	2
The early republic of Safire's imagination is a man's world; the only prominent female character in Scandalmonger is Maria Lewis Reynolds, the erstwhile mistress of Hamilton. Beautiful, charming, and troubled, Reynolds makes a great stock figure for a romantic potboiler. Historians usually follow Hamilton in depicting Reynolds as a manipulative temptress in league with her blackmailing husband, James Reynolds. Safire prefers an alternative stereotype: the fallen angel with a heart of gold ever seeking the love of good men. Evidently, she succeeded with both Burr and Callender, who, in Safire's telling, were the best lovers in the republic. In general, the thoughts and words of Mrs. Reynolds and more briefly Betsey Walker are the least plausible and most formulaic in Scandalmonger. Thanks to Maria, Callender "had cut down his drinking and reduced his level of hatred for the world, and she prided herself on that visible improvement. He was more like a son to her than a lover—nobody matched Burr, not even Hamilton—but he could satisfy her, and she enjoyed the way he worshipped her" (p. 326). Because the inner life of women exceeds Safire's imagination, readers will be relieved when the narrative returns to the overtly masculine world of politics and the press.	. . .