Scandalmonger revoew
...he 1792, 1796, and 1800 elections and was also Jefferson’s vice president. James Madison was our fourth president. James Monroe was our fifth chief executive. Thomas Jefferson was our third president and Callendar’s main target later in the novel. The book also contains lesser-known folk such as Vermont congressional Rep. and reporter Matthew Lyon, who is called Spittin’ Lyon after hawking one in the face of Connecticut Rep. Roger Griswold. Is there a Deep Throat in all this (in case you don’t watch the X-Files, a deep throat is an inside provider of information)? As a matter of fact, there is. The novel's prime leaker is a congressional clerk named John Beckley, whose job of copying sensitive papers allowed him to unsettle lots of muck for the raking. (If not for Beckley, Hamilton might have been our third president.) All these characters are diverting, but "Scandalmonger" is most taken up with two men eminently gifted in, as Safire puts it, "the poetry of slander": William Cobbett, a Federalist pamphleteer pseudonymously known as Peter Porcupine, and James Thomas Callendar, a Scots-born ink-stained republican gadfly, also known as Timothy Thunderproof. Callendar is the eponymous one, "a dark spirit who chews the cud of his rejection," as Safire writes. A pre-presidential Jefferson, it seems, used Callendar as his attack dog. The Virginian even sanctioned the Scot to strew "papershot," as Safire artfully calls invective against George Washington, something no politician could do in public and expect to survive. And what is Callendar's reward? Upon gaining office, Jefferson disavowed him -- only to have Thunderproof storm his revenge in print. (He was a prime spreader of the Sally Hemings story.) There is another girl in the book. And what a girl she is. This vixen is the beguiling Maria Reynolds, the “statuesque” and “near-violet-eyed” mistress of both Hamilton and Burr. Basically, this woman is the Monica of the seventeen nineties. Safire even winkingly calls her “that Reynolds woman.” The Maria stuff if fun in both a laugh-with and a laugh-at kinda way. Burr, for instance, is “discreet and controlled, taking his time, with incredible stamina in his lovemaking, watching in the long looking-glass.” Later in the novel, Maria assists Callandar when he writes of Sally Hemmings, mostly in order to keep him from using a word that once described her in a newspaper (whore). Things in the novel go better when Safire cites his primary sources (which, good for him, he does quite often). For example, Adams on the ever-randy Hamilton: “A superabundance of excretions.” I will acknowledge that Safire is quite the wordsmith. One of the best qualities of Scandalmonger is Safire’s gusto for research. I learned, for example, that nobody shook hands then, in the belief that the act transferred yellow fever. In addition, the novel has “The Underb...