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I first encountered Mary McCarthy not through her novels or criticism but through her political reporting. A former editor recommended that I read “The Mask of State: Watergate Portraits” before covering Paul Manafort’s arraignment in 2017. (Were we ever so young?) I loved McCarthy’s witty cameos of malefactors—behold Maurice Stans, Nixon’s erstwhile Secretary of Commerce, “a silver-haired, sideburned super-accountant and magic fund-raiser, who gave a day-and-a-half-long demonstration of the athletics of evasion, showing himself very fit for a man of his age.” McCarthy’s sentences were like mousetraps, snapping shut on both visual inf

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