This Time, This Place: My Life in War, the White House, and Hollywood - Softcover

Valenti, Jack

3.72

47 ratings by Goodreads

9780307346650: This Time, This Place: My Life in War, the White House, and Hollywood

Softcover

ISBN 10: 030734665X ISBN 13: 9780307346650

Publisher: Three Rivers Press, 2008

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“[Jack Valenti] lived his life as a gentleman and patriot....He might have been the last of the breed.” —New York Times

An Influential and Varied Life

The list of notable names—people that Jack Valenti knew and with whom he worked—is astonishing. Aside from LBJ, there were Jack and Bobby Kennedy, Kirk Douglas, Frank Sinatra, Robert McNamara, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Julia Roberts, Cary Grant, Lew Wasserman, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Jack Nicholson, Michael Douglas, Warren Beatty, and Bill Clinton, to begin a very long list. This Time, This Place is a candid, unforgettable memoir of the life of an extraordinary key political player and Hollywood rainmaker. It is also a sweeping and important historical record, written by a brilliantly successful man who helped shape politics and entertainment in the second half of the twentieth century, and who always found himself at the center of any storm.

“A wonderful story.” —International Herald Tribune

“[Valenti] offers a rousing account of his WWII bombing missions, JFK’s assassination (he was in the motorcade), and his three-year stint as one of LBJ’s closest aides.”
—Entertainment Weekly

“Only the silver screen can really do justice to a man who is bigger than life, moved easily among the stars of politics and Hollywood, and always kept his feet on the ground. An Oscar-deserving lifetime achievement, if ever there was one.”
—Bill Moyers

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About the Author:

JACK VALENTI wrote numerous essays for the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Reader’s Digest, Atlantic Monthly, Newsweek, Cox newspapers, and other publications. He was also the author of four other books of nonfiction and one novel.

From Publishers Weekly:

Valenti, an "obscure owner of an advertising and political consulting agency in Houston," came under the national spotlight when, with little fanfare, he became a special assistant to President Lyndon B. Johnson. Valenti opens with Kennedy's assassination, right after which Johnson told Valenti, without warning, "I want you on my staff." After his arrival in Washington, Valenti jumps back in time, cruising through his Houston childhood, experience as WWII B-25 pilot and subsequent Harvard education. The dramatic arc works well, setting up nicely the book's weightiest portion, an insider's view of the Johnson White House, featuring a fascinating discussion of Robert McNamara's summer 1965 plan to increase U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. The last third chronicles Valenti's 38 years as chair and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America, an organization with close ties to Washington politics; Valenti shares enlightening details of developing and implementing the MPAA's voluntary movie rating system, still in place today, as well as his relationship with numerous "icons of the silver screen" (Kirk Douglas gets the most space). Valenti's informal prose occasionally runs purple, but his life story, populated with Washington power-brokers and Hollywood royalty, is an absorbing one. 15 b/w photos.
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