An interview with Tom Wolfe from the Financial Times quotes the author giving President Bush higher marks from literacy than the editor of the super-chic New York Review of Books:
“Bush is portrayed as a moron. I’ve only conversed with him a couple of times – not for very long- but I found he was more literate on literature than the editor of the New York Review of Books, Bob Silvers. I’ve talked to both of them, and he makes Bob Silvers look like a slug.” He laughs, possibly at the idea of New York’s literary-set frothing into their cappuccinos over the latest blow in a long but low-intensity conflict. (In the 1960s Wolfe mocked the Review as the “chief theoretical organ of Radical Chic”, after it published a cover picture showing how to make a Molotov cocktail. Three decades later Silvers published Norman Mailer’s review of A Man in Full, in which the veteran pugilist remarked that reading Wolfe’s 742-page novel of power and racial politics in Atlanta was like “making love to a 300lb woman. Once she gets on top, it’s over. Fall in love or be asphyxiated.”) “Unfortunately,” continues Wolfe, possibly sensing that making someone look like a slug is neither very presidential nor very promising, “We don’t win wars with literature.”