Franklin Affair by Jim Lehrer Read Free Book Online Page B

scholarship.”
    She made a sound slightly below the magnitude of a laugh. “Rest assured I am available to continue my research and other duties under a new regime,” she said.
    â€œLet’s rest it there.”
    She seemed puzzled by that response. He meant her to be.
    He took another two sips of chardonnay.
    â€œHow goes the witch hunt against Rebecca Lee?” Clara asked, in a tone no different from the one she had just used in applying—with inconclusive results—for a job. “I saw you talking to her at Gray House.”
    â€œWitch hunt?”
    â€œEveryone knows that four out of five or twenty-one out of twenty-four or one thousand and seven out of one thousand and twelve male historians have done, now do, or will do what Rebecca did,” said Clara, as the waiter set down their main course before them. “And everyone knows, of course, that ninety-five percent of what Ben himself put in his almanacs was lifted from others either in words or meaning.”
    â€œYou’ve been well briefed, Clara,” said R, a growing edge in his voice. “That’s exactly Rebecca’s argument.”
    He wanted this dinner to be over.
    â€œHaven’t you yourself, the distinguished R. Raymond Taylor, done at least once what Rebecca is accused of doing?”
    â€œNo,” said R, as he quickly went to work on his spiced rubbed skate wing and roasted-pepper pomme purée in an olive vermouth sauce.
    He very much wanted to get away from this young woman with the long legs.
    â€¢ • •
    Back in his room, R immediately opened the big TV cabinet and clicked on the set with the remote control.
    No
Law & Order.
Not on NBC or any of the many cable channels that, between them, always seem to have at least one of their many teams of cops and DAs pursuing and prosecuting bad people in New York City. Watching these one-hour episodes, mostly repeats with a variety of casts, had become one of R’s obsessions, the only one involving television. It was another sticking point between him and Samantha. She couldn’t understand how a man with a mind and a mission would waste both by watching mindless TV cops-and-robbers shows. He argued that
Law & Order
was anything but mindless.
    It was nine-fifty. Maybe he’d get lucky and a
Law & Order
episode would be on at ten.
    He muted the television sound, moved over to the desk, and switched on his laptop.
    With a few clicks of the mouse he was into the file that contained his notes and the beginning draft of his
Post
op-ed piece. Samantha hated the fact that he could come back like this after an evening out and do some writing. It drove her nuts; at times she was hateful. Envy is clearly the worst of sins between writers.
    On the way down through the op-ed working file, he came once again to Timothy Morton’s 1977 essay on Ben in
Yesterday,
the University of Chicago’s long-gone historical journal.
    For years Benjamin Franklin has been the least appreciated Founding Father. He’s known mostly as the kite-flying, French-leaning, dirty old man who created electricity, firemen, libraries, stoves, and aphorisms but left the heavy intellectual and political lifting of the American Revolution to Jefferson, Washington, Adams, Madison, Hamilton, and others.
    This factually inaccurate and grossly unfair characterization of this remarkable man must be corrected. I hereby call upon my fellow historians and scholars to step up to the public plate and do so.
    They can begin by raising hell with the fools who created that ridiculous Broadway musical
1776.
Franklin was portrayed as a buffoon whose contributions to the debate over declaring independence from Great Britain were mostly one-liners.
    Second, they can proclaim that it is a national disgrace for there to be no monument in Washington, D.C., honoring Benjamin Franklin. There’s not even a federal office building or major national institution of any kind that bears his