“Suspenseful, sweeping, provocative…an American War And Peace.”
Twentieth Century Limited.
Twentieth Century Limited is the epic tale of newsman Paul Bernard’s journey from humble beginnings to fame as an award-winning journalist and television celebrity. Gravely wounded in Vietnam, Bernard battles back to launch a remarkable career as a newsman who offers straight talk as he holds a mirror up to America.
Book One – Age of Heroes. Paul Bernard’s Canadian immigrant roots are narrated, the intensity of the early years, his coming of age, college and university. At Berkeley, Bernard stands apart in supporting the American mission in Vietnam and his opposition to the anti-war protests. He astonishes everyone by giving up his deferment and enlisting as a combat infantryman, a sure ticket to the war.
After a vivid depiction of his Vietnam time and his disabling injuries, Bernard’s return and hard-fought recovery are related. Joining the New York Gazette, a top New York daily, Bernard becomes a noted journalist and fierce critic of America’s oil dependency which continues to suck it into misbegotten alliances.
Vietnam exposed Bernard to the hellish results of mixing patriotism and religion. Now he must also deal with the country’s inept leadership and the lies and cover-ups that drive it. Bernard’s unsparing approach earns him fame, awards and powerful enemies. He marries Diane Archer, daughter of a wealthy old family, and soon children arrive.
Book Two – Age of Reckoning. Right-wing media mogul Rudolph Latimer acquires the Gazette, adding it to his business and media empire. Friction soon arises between Bernard and Latimer over their positions on the issues, though for a time they are able to paper over their differences.
Bernard is assigned to the Gazette’s Paris bureau where he reports on the stunning events of 1989 in Europe. His television time on the rise, Bernard decides to join LTN, the Latimer Television Network, in New York, and soon becomes its prime-time anchorman. Always preoccupied with the Radical Right, Bernard is now openly at war with it.
Reflecting on a life of compromise, Bernard realizes how far he has strayed from his reporter’s roots. To all appearances at the pinnacle of success, he is beset by doubts and fears, and devastated when Diane files for divorce, separating him from his son and daughter. Lucie Devereaux, an acquaintance from Paris, a former curator at the Louvre, re-enters Bernard’s life. She moves to New York and their friendship deepens.
The hijacked 2000 election leads Bernard to rip into George W. Bush. Having personally experienced the embrace of uncritical religiosity, Bernard sets out to expose America’s Religious Right. When Latimer tries to muzzle him, he quits LTN. A period of malaise follows. Bernard seeks to regain his footing, joining an upstart cable network and starting over.
Ironically, the shattering events of 9/11 are tonic for Bernard. Infuriating the jingoists, he blames the attacks on misguided American policy. He assails Bush for dropping the ball with bin Laden and manipulating the nation’s anxieties into a needless war. Paul Bernard has become a threat to the extremists intent on taking over America. By now, even ordinary citizens of a conservative bent call him traitor. His stance against the Iraq War makes him powerful enemies, and he pays the ultimate price.
Called an “American War and Peace,” Twentieth Century Limited dramatizes one of the most bitterly contentious periods in American history, an eerie prelude with important links to the Trump era. America’s Radical Right is front and center, anticipating the corruption of the G.O.P. by Trump followers dedicated to one-man rule and preservation of white supremacy.
Joining the search for Paul Bernard’s killers, the reader is swept up in the events, magnificent and sordid, of the last decades of “The American Century” and the beginning of the next. The reader is immersed in the ordeal of the divided nation – peril abroad and, even more ominously, at home as well.
Twentieth Century Limited. Book One – Age of Heroes, Book Two – Age of Reckoning, © 2012
Jan David Blais, All Rights Reserved. Published 2012 Highpoint Press, Gloucester MA
