In 1992, former TV Guide editor Dick Russell published one of the best books about the President Kennedy assassination, The Man Who Knew Too Much. It was the story of Richard Case Nagell, a man with shadowy intelligence connections going back decades who had himself arrested in September 1963 so he would not be involved in the assassination itself, after warning the CIA and the FBI about the plot surrounding the President. The book is massive, more than 500 pages-long, and once begun is hard to put down. It has been reprinted recently, by Carroll & Graf, and is a must-have for conspiracy aficionados.
Russell then turned his attention towards the environment. Striper Wars: An American Fish Story is his latest contribution. We may remember the lines from the Billy Joel song about the New England fishing industry, The Downeaster “Alexa”, off his Storm Front album:
"Since they told me I can’t sell no stripers
And there’s no luck in swordfishing here"
If the unfortunate skipper of the Alexa couldn’t sell any stripers, it was due to guys like Dick Russell who, in the 1970s, fell in love with the fish and with catching them all up and down the Atlantic coast. Russell de-objectifies the striped bass in such a way that we can begin to understand why it elicits such intense emotion in all who fish for bass. Even more importantly, Russell – in digging deep into the history of the striped bass, a fish “as American as the bald eagle” – shows us that the first Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock were taught how to go after the stripers by the Native Americans and how catching the luxuriously sweet and meaty bass probably contributed to the survival of the Pilgrims their first few winters in America. In fact, as Russell points out, the very first conservation law passed in the Colonies was designed to protect the striper from being over-fished, its flesh and bones having been used as a popular fertilizer by the colonists.
The Striper Wars began in the 1970s over alarm at the sudden decline of the fish from Maryland to Massachusetts. Russell was appalled at the dwindling supply, and cast about looking for ways to call a halt to the vast over-fishing of the striper’s waters by commercial fishing concerns. His attempts were not met with unadulterated warmth by state legislatures. In fact, he faced an uphill battle for years. Striper Wars is the story of that battle, told in a moving and at times self-effacing way. Russell is careful to give credit where it is due … and blame where it hurts most:
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