![]() ![]() Not that it will be all that useful for my spiritual biography of Lindbergh. (More on inevitability before we’re done.) So when Philip Roth died one week ago, it seemed like the right moment to pick up a copy of his attempt at alternative history. I haven’t read much of Roth’s work, but as someone who teaches World War II, did his dissertation on Nazi Germany, and is writing a Lindbergh biography, I’ve felt destined to read Plot Against America. Roosevelt’s attempt at an unprecedented third term, delegates to the Republican National Convention nominate a political unknown: not industrialist Wendell Wilkie, an internationalist who badly wanted to aid Britain in its stand against Nazi Germany, but aviator Charles Lindbergh, an isolationist who as badly wanted to keep the U.S. ![]() Lacking a clear frontrunner to contest Franklin D. So starts The Plot Against America, the 2004 novel by Philip Roth that imagines history taking a diversion in June 1940. Of course no childhood is without its terrors, yet I wonder if I would have been a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn’t been president or if I hadn’t been the offspring of Jews. Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear. ![]()
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