Roth an open book on ‘Today’

In a rare moment of politics meeting art meeting television, novelist Philip Roth gave his first TV interview since 1966 Thursday morning on NBC’s “Today” show. He appeared to discuss his new book, “The Plot Against America.” “Today,” in turn, gave him 6 minutes and 19 seconds.

Host Katie Couric went to Roth’s home in the Connecticut woods, put on her glasses and asked some probing questions about the novel, which imagines what the country would have looked like in the 1940s had the folk hero and reputed Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh won the Republican nomination and defeated Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election.

But the most interesting exchange involved Couric’s reference to a piece Roth wrote for the New York Times Book Review in which he called President Bush “a man unfit to run a hardware store, let alone a nation like this one.”

“You know,” Roth said, “living up here in the country, I have friends or acquaintances who own things like hardware stores and general stores and so on, and what made me think of that line is that I watch them operate and think, ‘Bush couldn’t do this.’ ”

“That’s pretty damning and some might say disrespectful,” Couric said.

“Disrespectful has nothing to do with it; he’s the president,” Roth responded. “It is damning.”

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Paul Brownfield