About that Clemente book
There must be something about prelude that bothers me. Music and movies have enough self-propulsion to keep me in my seat, but books require a manual-push power that I can't always summon for prelude. After my bookmark spent years in the opening pages The Colonel before a final dive, I think David Maraniss' Clemente has the luxury of following. It's only taken a year and change.
I'm not going to say the book's perfect. Some of the reviews say the narrative never gets close enough to Clemente to truly explain his complexity and humanity, and I think they're right in a sense. The material is here, for sure. But the pacing never quite catches or chases the speedy Clemente. Maraniss is a Post editor, and you can feel the paper's recent long-form style throughout his writing. Reportial tone wins the day with little use for flash or hard breaks. When Maraniss tells us how Clemente's wife on the morning of the tragic New Year's Eve flight sings a song about a Good Friday jet crash, there's no pause to admit, yes, the anecdote is bizarre.
The crash is where Maraniss' reporting and reporting-to-writing translating are at their best, putting us on the tarmac with fluidity.
They arrived at the airport around four and were taken to the cargo ramp. The plane was fueling and there was more paperwork to be done, so Clemente, Vera, and Angel Lozano drove to a nearby restaurant to order food. When they returned, Caguitas Colon seemed alarmed. This was the first time he had taken a good look at the DC-7, and he did not like what he saw. The lightning-bolt paint job of orange with black trim did not impress him. He was concerned with the tires. The landing wheels were so squashed they appeared almost flat, and the nose tire was virtually off the ground. "When I saw all this I complained to Clemente and advised him that the aircraft was unsafe and improperly loaded," Colon said later. He hoped that Clemente would forget about the DC-7 and take a Pan-American flight to Miami and go to Nicaragua from there. Vera was standing nearby. As she later recalled, "Roberto said, 'Don't worry. They know what they're doing.' "
There was so much Clemente did not know: Cockroach Corner. Tramp airlines. The FAA's Southern Order. Arthur Rivera's sixty-six transport violations. The ditch incident. Pilot Hill's troubles and lack of sleep. The wholly unqualified copilot and flight engineer. The imbalanced and overweight load. Everything was wrong, but the only physical signs of that were the tires, the tips of the iceberg and though his friend Caguitas raised the issue, Clemente chose not to worry about the tires. …
The sourcing notes explain the narrative breakthrough. (Rereading the Post review today, I find I'm not alone on the improved story.) After running into plenty of walls in search of crash records, the author finds the aviation lawyer who represented the U.S. government in the suit following the crash. Maraniss writes, "After talking with Pangia for several hours, he took me downstairs to a closet and hauled two large boxes marked 'Clemente' — and inside were copies of all the depositions and transcripts from the trial as well as the internal reports from the FAA and National Transportation Safety Board."
If you're thinking about reading the book, consider that find and others to be the advantages of the press box. To what degree they offset the fleeting feet of Clemente, your own love of the game and your own Clemente imagination may be your best arbiters.
