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J.D. Salinger has elevated privacy to a high art in American life. People make pilgrimages to his home in Cornish, New Hampshire hoping to catch a glimpse of the great recluse. Mark Chapman was holding a well-worn copy of “The Catcher in the Rye” when he was arrested after he shot John Lennon. Salinger’s stroke of brilliance wasn’t just to write an angst-ridden coming of age novel that’s been required reading for teenagers for 50 years now.

The genius part was to write very little more, to move to a remote, rural town and never leave it, and under no circumstances to give interviews. The fortress around J.D. Salinger began to crack a few years ago when Joyce Maynard wrote her memoir about living with Salinger when she was 18 and he was in his 50′s. Now his daughter has written a memoir called “Dream Catcher” that just may shatter the Salinger myth once and for all. We’re talking with Margaret Salinger this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Margaret A. Salinger, Author and Daugher of J.D. Salinger

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Pat Buchanan is back from surgery, with a Federal check for his Reform Party campaign in the mail. But where is the pitchfork peasantry when a right-wing-rage candidate wants at least to simulate an uprising. Buchanan is a one-percent candidate at this point, frozen out of the big-boy debates; he’s the personification of everything the Republican convention was happy to be rid of this summer-all that culture-war rancor about immigrants and gay values and the “abortion racket” as he calls it. It sounds like a desperate pickle he’s in.

But then Buchanan might say, as Andrew Jackson did: “One man with courage makes a majority.” And one man with ideas could make the next 8 weeks interesting: all the more, with unconventional “America First” ideas in dissent against free trade, against Balkan peacekeeping, against the Kyoto treaty on the environment. We’re talking about Pat Buchanan and his running-mate Ezola Foster, this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted By Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Pat Buchanan and Ezola Foster, Reform Party Presidential Candidate and Running Mate.