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THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE

INTRODUCTION: THE VIEW FROM THE CROCODILE'S BACK
by David Willis McCullough

Every now and then a novel comes along whose title is appropriated first by editorial writers and then by the general public. The names Uncle Tom, The Ugly American, 1984, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit all have meanings and echoes far greater than -- and sometimes far different from -- what they had when they first appeared on a title page.

When this happens in business, teams of lawyers get involved. Companies who own patents and copyrights on Xerox, Kodak, Jell-O, Scotch Tape and Frigidaire spend fortunes to keep their names from going, as they say, generic. In the literary world, however, recognition like that is taken as a sign of success beyond a publisher's wildest dreams. In 1959 it began happening to the second novel by a 44-year-old Hollywood press agent named Richard Condon. The title of the book was The Manchurian Candidate.

As years go, 1959 had the usual number of high and low points. Vice President Richard Nixon visited the Soviet Union and was photographed "debating" Nikita Khrushchev in the kitchen at an American trade show. Later in the year Khrushchev was photographed slogging through an Iowa cornfield. Ben-Hur was packing them in at the movies. Advise and Consent, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Goodbye, Columbus and John Updike's first novel were published. Raymond Chandler, Billie Holiday and Frank Lloyd Wright died. The previously all-white Little Rock High School was integrated under federal orders. Hawaii and Alaska became states. Yet another Miss Mississippi was crowned Miss America in Atlantic City. The Dodgers, newly relocated in Los Angeles, won the World Series, and in Houston the last Civil War veteran, Walter Williams, died at age 117.

After seven years, now often mistily referred to as those peaceful Eisenhower years, Ike's term in office was coming to an end, but two unhappy recent memories remained shadows on the American conscience: the Korean "conflict" and the disturbing allegations of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Looking back on Korea, now that we have lived through Vietnam, it is difficult to remember what a shock that war was to the American public. As the fighting ground to a stalemate along the 38th parallel, there was little celebration. The United States may not have actually lost, but the outcome of the conflict was certainly not what veterans of two world wars would have called victory. And what about those dozens of American prisoners of war who preferred to remain with their captors after a ceasefire was signed? What rational, un-brainwashed American would reject his country for a Communist backwater in Asia? As for McCarthy, in spite of the senator's personal collapse after the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954, his fevered charges that America was riddled with Communist spies and traitors had left a raw wound.

This was the America into which The Manchurian Candidate was published. And in the months ahead, while people were reading it first in hardcover and then in paperback, came the U-2 incident with its never-explained ambiguities, more Nixon debates (this time with Senator John Kennedy of Massachusetts), an election, the Bay of Pigs, the Berlin Wall and -- not long after the novel appeared as a brilliant motion picture -- an assassination.

It was the movie, directed by John Frankenheimer, coupled with John Kennedy's assassination that firmly established The Manchurian Candidate's reputation as something more than an above-average thriller. The novel, although it had won a good deal of critical praise, had not been a major best seller. The movie, its producer-screenwriter George Axelrod once said, "went from failure to classic without ever passing through success." Yet somehow a connection was made, and the public imagination seized upon the disturbing, threatening notion of a Manchurian Candidate lying in wait.

Editorial writers, columnists and political cartoonists had no trouble recognizing that the Manchurian Candidate was the hidden enemy, the apparently all-American time bomb planted by a foreign power to destroy his neighbors. He was the programmed assassin waiting to get us all. As a product of Cold War paranoia, he was clearly a first cousin of the pod-people in Don Siegel's 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, evil aliens who were able to take over the bodies of typical small-town Americans so that the conscienceless enemy looks as downhome and wholesome as you or I. Probably more so. What these pundits who so blithely tossed around the name Manchurian Candidate sometimes missed -- possibly because they had not actually read the book -- was not only the true identity of the Candidate but also that the novel is a dark comedy, an often wicked satire on subjects that range from senatorial privilege to the trials of modem motherhood. For a novel famous for its chills, it has more than its share of laughs.

So let's touch on the plot without giving too much away. This is a novel that should be enjoyed without needless warnings and underlinings.

Raymond Shaw -- Medal of Honor winner, stepson of a U.S. senator -- returns from the Korean War a hero much beloved by the men who served under him. This is a clue that something is wrong. To a man they remember him as "the greatest, warmest, most wonderful" guy they had ever known. But anyone who ever met Raymond knows he is a cold, emotionless bastard. He also had a love affair. Another clue. Before returning from the war at age 23, he had never even kissed a girl. He has also murdered two of his men. Only the readers know that. He was in a secret prison camp in Manchuria at the time, brainwashed, when his trainers ordered him to kill. His men, also brainwashed prisoners, witnessed the killings, but they had been told to believe they were attending a particularly boring meeting of a New Jersey women's garden club. Only in their dreams do a few of the men, years later, begin to remember murder.

Raymond's mother -- that's what she is always called -- is one of literature's unforgettable monster mothers. Try to imagine Hamlet's Gertrude as played by Lady Macbeth and you begin to have some idea of her demonic possibilities. Readers of the novel will soon realize that Angela Lansbury's flamboyant interpretation of the role in the movie was not in the least outrageous. If anything, she rather underplayed the novel's opportunities for the grotesque. Senator Johnnie, Raymond's boozing stepfather, is clearly based on Joseph McCarthy. Perhaps trying to duck feminist criticism, Richard Condon has said that Raymond's mother is actually based on Roy Cohn, Joseph McCarthy's staff assistant.

The one thing that everyone knows about The Manchurian Candidate is that it ends with an assassin, primed to kill, lurking in the girders of New York's Madison Square Garden, high above a national political convention as the party's presidential nominee and his running mate are about to be introduced.

Critical reaction to the novel in 1959 was enthusiastic and studded with glittering phrases that have been appearing on paperback book jackets for nearly three decades: "brilliant ... wild and exhilarating ... shocking, tense ... breathlessly up-to-date ... savage ... extraordinary ... apocalyptic." But there was some confusion as to just how up-to-date the novel actually was. The critic at The New Yorker seemed to find it a bit old-fashioned. Comparing Richard Condon to the nineteenth-century novelist Wilkie Collins, he described the book as a "hopelessly unfashionable demonstration ... of how to write stylishly, tell fascinating stories ... make acute social observations and ram home digestible morals." Others found the book to be breaking new ground. A New York Times critic, writing later, claimed that with The Manchurian Candidate Condon became one of the founders of "the most original novelistic style" of the 1960s. The critic, Leo Braudy, called the style "paranoid surrealism" and named Thomas Pynchon and Joseph Heller as two of its many disciples.

Richard Condon doesn't much like the word "paranoid," although it turns up frequently in discussions of The Manchurian Candidate. "Paranoia has nothing to do with it," he said in a recent interview. "As a writer, I just clean house and point out stains on the carpet. There are three definitions of paranoia: delusions of grandeur, delusions of persecution, and retrospective falsification. Brainwashing existed in 1959; the very word had people terrified. It was like science fiction. McCarthy existed. Antagonism with Russia existed. At the time I was writing The Manchurian Candidate, all that was business as usual. What I did was to point things out with melodramatic humor."

Recognition of that humor is what Condon finds to be the biggest change in reader reaction since the book was first published. "People then were still so poleaxed by McCarthy that they couldn't see what was funny. Now, they have been around more. They know comedy when they see it. They have been battered and bruised and kicked around the ring and bitten, and they can understand and enjoy political complexity. They know that politics can be a lethal matter. It's more than holding your hand over your heart when the flag goes by."

Condon credits the movie with making his title part of folklore. He thinks it is one of the two best pictures he has ever seen (the other, not so surprisingly, is Dr. Strangelove), but it was almost never distributed. According to Hollywood legend, a studio executive, a man active in the higher reaches of the Democratic Party, thought the picture was somehow an attack on Kennedy and the Democrats. Frank Sinatra, who played Raymond's nemesis in the film, seems to have got him to change his mind. "As I heard it," Condon says, "and you better not ask Francis Albert Sinatra about it, he went to his then-buddy Jack Kennedy and said United Artists was sitting on the movie. Kennedy said he had thoroughly enjoyed the book and Sinatra got him to write a letter saying so." That, at least, is the legend.

The film was released, and to Condon a mark of its success was that during the same week in 1962 it was picketed in Paris by the Communists and in Orange County, California, by the American Legion.

With Kennedy's assassination, The Manchurian Candidate's ties with the President became complete. Condon was living in Switzerland at the time. "My wife had the radio on and we heard something about Kennedy, Dallas and krankenhaus, but we didn't catch what was going on. Then our neighbor Hank Ketcham, the creator of Dennis the Menace, called up with the story. Within ten minutes a London newspaper was on the phone. They wanted to know if I felt responsible for Kennedy's death. A week later a Paris newspaper was running long quotes from the novel and comparing them with things people were saying about Lee Harvey Oswald. But they only had to read the book to see that the situations were nowhere near alike."

In fact, a case can be made that The Manchurian Candidate is not about that kind of assassination at all, the kind with smoking guns. It is about character assassination, about public relations, about salesmanship, about the creation of pseudo-events. It deals with a world in which the press coverage of an event is more important than the event itself, in which the marines might be preferred to the army because they have a better publicity operation. It is a world where what a brainwashed army squad thinks happened during a night patrol in Korea is more important than what really happened in that Manchurian prison camp. That is, it is more important until truth eats its way to the surface.

To create this near-fantasy world, Condon did his homework. There is a wealth of factual detail on matters that range from the psychology of brainwashing to the history of the Medal of Honor to the architecture of Madison Square Garden, the old Garden that stood on Eighth Avenue, not the new one huddled over what used to be Pennsylvania Station. Only rarely does the book give its age away, as it does in the paragraph that carefully explains what the KGB is. To keep us informed, Condon quotes sources as diverse as Lucky Luciano ("A U.S. senator can make more trouble, day in and day out, than anyone else") and an obscure French journalist named, improbably, Ostrogorski, who, in 1902, covered an American political convention and came to understand the old saying that "God takes care of drunkards, little children, and the United States."

Richard Condon began writing novels relatively late. His first, The Oldest Confession, was published when he was 43. Before that, he worked for nearly twenty years as a Hollywood press agent, "manufacturing fame," as he puts it, "for people who would otherwise be gas station attendants." Since then he has written more than twenty-two books, including Prizzi's Honor, An Infinity of Mirrors and Winter Kills. Yet, it is his Hollywood experiences rather than any political or social philosophy that really left their mark on The Manchurian Candidate. Talking about those days, he says, "It's like having been one of those birds that sit on the backs of crocodiles. It leaves you cynical. You never again get starry-eyed about the human condition."

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