According to Ron Kaiser, much has been said of age, the circle of life, the trajectory, the rise and fall, the arc. What’s rare in this geometry is the projectile, the rocket, the unforeseen explosion toward the end of a pure literary force. Who knew that for 90 years Ron Kaiser had books germinating in his head to rise near form in his eighties. Not just books, but the insight and language to bring them to the surface with power and panache now that he was no longer occupied affecting sales and sympathies with hard-ass campaigns and sexy slogans.
Some people spend years slaving over a manuscript, others never start. With Ron Kaiser, it’s as if late retirement beckoned him into a Scrabble game with a plot. Knowing his time was limited, he set himself up to tell not just one, but many stories, so that publishers would have a future with his work.
The first, Herbert’s War, is a gripping story of devious behavior at the highest levels of our government, with incidents of attempted murder, bribery, and suicide. It unearths why Mike Wallace and 60 Minutes joined the White House, the Pentagon and the Army to help silence one lone war hero from telling the truth. Just the research alone could kill a man.
But Ron Kaiser is no ordinary fellow. As Herbert’s War came to life, Ron was working on not one, but two others, with another finding its outline in the reaches of his brain, building scaffolding as we speak. The second, Slippery Slopes, is a thriller packed with dreams, twists, revenge, murder and a touch of grit and sex. It’s remarkable that such wildly graceful plot twists could come from a man who had already lived the life of a top advertising magnate who, one would think, was satisfied with the creative legacy he had left in the world.