THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, March 23, 1996 TAG: 9603230003
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A15 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
SOURCE: Kerry Dougherty
LENGTH: Medium: 92 lines
Writer Robert Timberg did not let a little thing like a heart attack keep him from traveling to Virginia Beach last weekend for a cocktail party honoring him and his best-selling book: The Nightingale's Song.
It was the author's first outing since he had been stricken two weeks earlier, but he leaned on the mantle and graciously spoke to the hundred or so people who had jammed a fashionable Bay Colony living room to meet him. Later, he sank into a wing chair and cheerfully signed books into the night.
Timberg knows that one of the secrets to the success of his extraordinary book has been something publishers dream about and cannot buy: word of mouth. All over the country.
``This is not an easy book to encapsulate in a sentence or two,'' confesses Dominick Anfuso, his editor at Simon and Schuster. ``One of the things that made it so popular was something very unusual in this business. Word of mouth.
``When it was first published in July we made sure a selected group of people got copies of the book and then watched as they couldn't stop talking about it.''
One of the biggest mouths was New York radio personality Don Imus, who discussed the book repeatedly on his popular show.
But it hasn't just been celebrity word of mouth at work. Anyone who's read it wants to share it.
That's how Timberg wound up in Virginia Beach and that's why I'm writing this column. The hostess read the book after a friend recommended it to her. She, in turn, told her husband - an Annapolis grad himself - to read it. They sought out Timberg and invited him to town while inviting scores of their friends.
Why the persistent excitement about The Nightingale's Song, nine months after it was published? Maybe it's the riveting story. The masterful storytelling. The unusual theme. Or the way the book haunts you long after you put it down.
Robert Timberg is a 1964 Naval Academy graduate, a Vietnam veteran who served with the First Marine Division, and the deputy bureau chief of The Baltimore Sun's Washington Bureau.
Like many veterans of that unpopular war, Timberg says his entire being is infused with Vietnam. To paraphrase his book, Timberg sees the world through the bloodied lens of Vietnam.
It's not surprising, then, that as he started covering the Iran-Contra scandal for The Baltimore Sun he noticed a disturbing detail that other reporters overlooked: at the core of Iran-Contra were Naval Academy graduates. Vietnam veterans all.
``I was working this story hard, real hard,'' Timberg says. ``Pretty soon I started detecting the aroma of Vietnam in it. I began to think this was finally the bill for Vietnam coming due.``
For Timberg and many others who served, the world is neatly divided into two camps: those who went to Vietnam and those who didn't.
As he points out in the book, 27 million men came of draft age between 1964 and 1973. Of those, 11 million entered the service. Sixteen million - 60 percent - ``escaped military service by a variety of legal or illegal means.''
It wasn't the going that was so hard, Timberg says. It was coming home and encountering the belief held by many that only fools too dumb to get a deferment went to Vietnam.
``It appeared that these guys were not only unbloodied they were prospering,'' says Timberg of those who stayed home. ``They were wearing their anti-war credentials the way men of an earlier generation wore their war medals.
``It was like a social contract had been broken.''
Timberg's book reads like a novel, but it's not. It is the story of five products of the Naval Academy, Vietnam, the Reagan administration and ultimately Iran-Contra: John McCain, Robert McFarlane, James Webb, Oliver North and John Poindexter.
Timberg begins with their years at the Academy. Using telling details he gives an exquisite foreshadowing of the routes these men would eventually take.
He follows them to Vietnam. To the Reagan administration. And finally through Iran-Contra. Timberg makes a convincing case for his thesis: the seeds for this scandal were sown years before in the soil of Annapolis and the rice paddies of Vietnam.
Robert Timberg says he didn't set out to write a book about Vietnam. Or a book about Iran-Contra. Or a book about the Naval Academy.
His story is much bigger than all that. Timberg said he set out to write a book that examined that fault line in America brought on by the Vietnam War.
``In a way I wanted to declare a kinship with others who had served in that war,'' he said. ``Not because it was a great war. But because they went.''
MEMO: Ms. Dougherty is an editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot.
by CNB