State Department

Pale Dread is the next great Washington novel

My only novel, Every Man a King (published in 1989), included a caricature of a famous political figure for whom I worked – and whom I might treat more kindly today, for as the years melt away so do the harsh judgments. As Babs Streisand sang, what’s too painful to remember we simply choose to forget. Judging by A.G. Doran’s new novel, Pale Dread, set in the State Department during the chaotic first Trump administration, its author has chosen to forget nothing of his sentence in our nation’s capital.

My theatrical Senate confirmation hearing

It’s a bit difficult to explain a Senate confirmation process to those who haven’t gone through it. It is, to put it in a single word, intense. Years ago, the first time I had a hit piece written about me, I wanted to crawl into a hole in the ground and die. During my confirmation hearing, my attitude was more, “Oh, Chuck Schumer is denouncing me from the Senate floor as a racist, anti-Semitic, white supremacist. It must be Monday.” I still haven’t even bothered to read the vast majority of press accounts or descriptions of me that have come out in the days since the hearing. It’s important in these processes to always know and remember who you are, because if you know that, what they are saying you are just doesn’t matter all that much.

Jeremy Carl Senate