Volume 39, Number 21 · December 17, 1992
The Middle Way
By Alfred Kazin
Memories of the Ford Administration
by John Updike
Knopf, 371 pp., $23.00
In 1974 John Updike published a long, fascinating closet drama, Buchanan Dying, about his fellow Pennsylvanian, James Buchanan, the fifteenth president of the United States, a figure generally viewed as Lincoln's sorry predecessor. In the politically hysterical 'secession winter,' the four months between Lincoln's election in November 1860 and his assuming office in March 1861, Buchanan was caught between his pro-Southern sympathies—three leading members of his cabinet were Southerners supporting South Carolina's secession—and the tortured legalisms with which he defended his position that while he abhorred secession there was really nothing in law that ordered him actively to resist it.
Review, 2604 words
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