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The Pentagon's New Map > Director's CommentaryThe Title PageFunny thing is, as much as I love coming up with my own titles, I had no hand in either the main title or the sub-title of the book. Well, that's not exactly true. My original title for the Esquire article was something really bad, like "How America Saves Globalization," or something stupid like that. Mark Warren, the Executive Editor of the magazine (and my later prime editor of the book), threw that out immediately with barely a glance. When it came time to discuss the title in late December, I remember very well my conversation with Mark from some hotel room somewhere (I was on the road). Mark started out with David Granger's (Editor-in-Chief) preference, which was "The Pentagon's New Plan." At that I recoiled. No way I was going with that. Too strong and simply misleading. So Mark and I went back and forth on the phone for a while and then the (now) obvious title popped out of Mark's mouth, "The Pentagon's New Map." I say obvious because here we were working over this huge map that would dominate the entire piece and never gave a thought—up to that moment—of putting that word in the title. As soon as I heard it, I said yes in agreement. Later, when we were marketing the book proposal, my agent Jennifer kept dissuading me from adding a subtitle, saying we should leave that to the house that buys the proposal to decide. My favorite subtitle (of course) was: How America Saves Globalization. But alas, nobody liked that—nobody. Soon after G.P. Putnam's Sons bought the proposal, Neil Nyren (Editor-in-Chief and Publisher) proposed this subtitle to me over the phone just on the eve of my first day of writing: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century. Now, as someone with a degree in Russian literature, I was again taken aback by this suggestion. It just seemed so presumptuous to make such a claim, but I held my tongue and dove into the writing and by mid-August (about 40k words in), I decided the subtitle was brilliant and exactly on the mark. In fact, it gave me a lot of courage to write what I really wanted to write. So there you have it: the title is Mark Warren's and Neil Nyren came up with the subtitle. But it's my name on the cover, and having added the second middle initial when I married my wife (I added her maiden name to my middle name of Patrick), I feel like at least that is pretty much my creation (at least the M!). |
Putnam, 2004 |
