In narrative and dialogue, Landfall tries not to reconstruct actuality but to reimagine it. As I’ve noted in earlier novels: “I have operated along the always sliding scale of historical fiction. The text contains deviations from fact that some readers will regard as unpardonable and others will deem unworthy of notice. But this remains a work of fiction, not history.”
I didn’t realize I was writing the last volume of a trilogy until my editor, Dan Frank, encouraged me to see Landfall as the concluding portion of a political narrative that began with Watergate (2012) and extended itself through Finale (2015), two novels I had conceived of as discrete entities. Dan’s calm and incomparable guidance on matters large and small has sustained me over ten books and across twenty-five years—a publishing era as tumultuous as our political one. This quick expression of my gratitude doesn’t begin to cover my debt to him.
Within the walls of Penguin Random House, I also owe thanks to Sonny Mehta; Edward Kastenmeier; Altie Karper; Nicholas Latimer; Michiko Clark; Betsy Sallee; Vanessa Rae Haughton; and many others. A couple of blocks away, at my agent’s office, I am grateful to Andrew Wylie, Kristina Moore, Jessica Calagione, and Katie Cacouris.
A residency at Yaddo during the summer of 2017 helped me to write this book; I would like to thank Elaina H. Richardson and the colony’s staff.
Ed Cohen has once again been my dogged copy editor, and Thomas Giannettino my sharp-eyed proofreader.
I have depended on help from Jennifer Spurrier of the Southwest Collection at the Texas Tech University Library; Jeff Flannery at the Library of Congress; Brandon Zogg and Neelie Holm of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. The George Washington University Library is important to me on an almost daily basis.
The following people were generous with their time and insight during interviews: Jim Granberry, the former mayor of Lubbock, Texas; Ruth Schiermeyer, former chairwoman of the Lubbock County Republican Party; Peter D. Feaver (Duke University) and Will Inboden (Clements Center for National Security), both former members of the National Security Council staff during the George W. Bush administration; and Stephen Caputo, manager of the Hotel Monteleone in New Orleans. I appreciate their willingness to talk to a novelist—someone who eagerly absorbed and then departed at will from the facts they imparted.
I have similarly used innumerable published sources, including the memoirs of many real-life characters fictionalized in these pages. Among histories and biographies, I would offer particular thanks to this very incomplete list: Peter Baker, Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House; Dan Baum, Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans; Douglas Brinkley, The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast; Frank Bruni, Ambling into History: The Unlikely Odyssey of George W. Bush; Elisabeth Bumiller, Condoleezza Rice: An American Life; Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone; Robert Draper, Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush; John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime; George Packer, The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq; Jan Reid, Let the People In: The Life and Times of Ann Richards; Emma Sky, The Unraveling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq; Jean Edward Smith, Bush; Bob Woodward, State of Denial and The War Within.
I could not have done without the electronic archives and websites of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
And I could not have done without the essays of my irreplaceable friend Christopher Hitchens, whose dialogue here is often informed by what he wrote.
For various tips, assistance, and encouragement I owe a debt to my neighbor and friend, James Graham Wilson, a historian at the Department of State. Thanks, as well and as always, to Lynn Freed and Patricia Hampl.
I lived in Lubbock, Texas, during the fall of 1978, when George W. Bush ran for Congress. I cherish the troop of lasting friends I made there—among them, Jim and Pamela Brink, Ann and Dick McGlynn, Lynn and Mary Hatfield.
Decades later, during the era in which this novel’s main action takes place, I served in various capacities at the National Endowment for the Humanities (never actually combined, as in these pages, with the NEA). My work brought me to both New Orleans and Afghanistan, where I had the honor of presenting an award to Dr. Mohammed Yusuf Asefi for his heroic and ingenious resistance to the Taliban. The glimpses of him here, as well as his trip to America, are a fiction that I hope he will pardon. He is the bravest man I have ever met.
For thirty years my books—and happiness—have depended on Bill Bodenschatz.
August 1, 2018
Washington, D.C.