![]() ![]() It destroyed Lyndon Johnson and opened the White House door to that shadiest of operators, Richard Nixon. 1968 was the year of the Tet Offensive that exposed official US lies about the Vietnam war, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr, the meltdown of the Democratic Party among atrocious scenes of police aggression in Chicago. You get the idea, but it doesn’t mean she is a queen of sardonic innuendo. Reporting on a reunion of veterans of World War II in 1968 (‘Fathers, Sons, Screaming Eagles’) and noting their effusive nostalgia, she adds ‘Perhaps it was hard to bring the same sense of urgency to holding a Vietnamese village or two that they had brought to liberating Europe.’ She can load a plain statement with a cool, understated depth charge. She does not try to hide this: ‘To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence as definitely and inflexibly as the position if a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.’ She has a deadly way with a sentence. ![]() That entails expressing an attitude, a point of view. To report a fact requires arranging words. Joan Didion knows that language is not a windowpane. ![]()
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