Frederick Green, a Bronx man who authorities said has four prior arrests, was charged Tuesday with attempted murder, assault and weapons possession in the shooting of New York Jets defensive back Kris Boyd on Nov. 16 outside a Midtown restaurant.
Green, 20, was hiding in his girlfriend’s apartment in upstate New York and identified through social media posts and a Crime Stoppers tip, police sources told the New York Daily News. U.S. marshals took him into custody Monday in Amherst, N.Y., a suburb of Buffalo.
Boyd, 29, was walking out of Asian fusion restaurant Sei Less with two teammates and another friend around 2 a.m. when he was shot in the abdomen and taken to Bellevue Hospital in critical condition. The bullet lodged near his right lung in the pulmonary artery, police said.
He posted on social media Nov. 19 that he was “starting to breathe on my own,” but two weeks ago was readmitted to the hospital because of health complications. However, Boyd had recovered enough that last week he made a surprise appearance at the Jets’ practice facility and attended a special teams meeting.
NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said at a news conference last month that the shooting occurred after a group of four to five men “chirped” at Boyd and his companions outside the restaurant, making fun of their fashionable attire.
The confrontation continued when Boyd, Jets teammates Irvin Charles and Jamien Sherwood and another friend left the restaurant minutes later after deciding not to dine there. As they left, the same group again began to “verbally insult them, and once again, questioning their clothing,” Kenny said.
A brawl ensued and one of the fighters — later allegedly identified as Green — fired two rounds from a gun, striking Boyd. Investigators released surveillance footage of the gunman and asked the public’s help identifying him.
In an email to The Times on Nov. 17, an NYPD spokesman said, “The sought individual is described as male, medium complexion. He was last seen wearing a black cap, black sweatshirt, black pants, multi-colored sneakers, and carrying a black bookbag.”
Green has four prior arrests, including one in 2024 for reckless endangerment and another in 2018 for robbery that was sealed because he was a juvenile, police told the Daily News.
Boyd’s teammates were delighted to see him at the practice facility Dec. 3.
“I’ve had friends that didn’t survive gunshot wounds, so to be able to see him walking around with a smile on his face, be able to [talk] with him, I mean, it’s always a blessing,” Jets edge rusher Jermaine Johnson told ESPN. “[Guns] aren’t toys and they’re very deadly, so the fact that he walked away from it is a blessing.”
Boyd is in his first year with the Jets after playing the last two seasons with the Houston Texans and from 2019-2022 with the Minnesota Vikings, who drafted him in the seventh round in 2019 out of Texas.
The New York Police Department is yet again trying to shuffle the reporters who cover them—this time to a trailer outside their headquarters. For years, reporters have worked inside police headquarters at 1 Police Plaza, in a section of the building referred to as “the Shack.” There, you’ll find a warren of individual offices occupied by several news organizations—the New YorkPost,Newsday,TheNew York Times, CBS, Gothamist/WNYC, and The New York Daily News—and, on a crowded day, about a half dozen reporters dispersed among them. Rumors that Deputy Commissioner of Public Information Tarik Sheppard—the NYPD’s chief spokesperson—wanted to relocate reporters, purportedly to make more space for NYPD units, have been circulating for months. But on Monday, the idea seemed to become a reality, when two reporters who happened to be at HQ that day got an informal tour of their new digs. They were told they’d be moving the following Monday.
Reporters’ objections to the move are not a matter of comfort. The Shack itself is “pretty disgusting,” as one police reporter noted. “It’s not the Ritz.” But having a desk inside police headquarters has offered crucial access to key players that some fear will be cut off in the move outside. “The concern is: Is this a good faith attempt to make more space for whoever they need to make more space for? Or is this a slippery slope, where we’re going to be eventually pushed out altogether from this area?” said a second police reporter. Sheppard, I’m told, has previously mentioned to reporters that he doesn’t get a fair shake from the tabloids. The move to the trailer comes “against a backdrop of complaints about the coverage of crime,” one veteran crime reporter said, which has “raised everybody’s antenna.” A third police reporter added: “Everybody feels it’s somewhat troublesome, like this is a punitive thing for negative coverage—particularly tabloid coverage.”
The rollout of the move has been a major source of frustration among police reporters, who say that DCPI has not provided an official briefing to the group. Reporters who weren’t in on Monday didn’t realize a tour was even taking place. “There’s been no direct communication with all of us at the same time about what’s happening,” said the first police reporter. The line of reasoning for the move, they added, “has been all over the place.” Whether the move actually happens, or starts to happen, on Monday is somewhat unclear, as a third police reporter told me that DCPI has pulled back on Monday due to logistical matters.
In a statement, a DCPI spokesperson said the move will begin “early next week” and disputed the idea that reporters are in the dark about the transition. “Sheppard previously met and spoke with representatives from each media outlet that occupies the existing press area inside Police Headquarters and explained that the move is simply to accommodate additional outlets that have asked to cover the NYPD in the same manner,” the spokesperson said, adding that the new location is “much larger, contains private conference rooms and bathrooms,” and is “located literally feet from the building, still very much inside the secure perimeter of One Police Plaza.” (One of the reporters I spoke to admitted the trailer was “way better” than they expected. It resembles a “semi-permanent module attached to HQ. We’d still be able to go in and out, our badges would work from what I’m told,” they said, adding, “but again, we still don’t have anything official from DCPI.”)
The DCPI spokesperson also disputed the idea that the move is in any way a response to negative coverage. “Change is sometimes difficult for people, we understand. But this is hardly punitive by any stretch of the imagination. This is a planned move—in the works since the start of the current administration—toward greater NYPD transparency, to allow more access to more reporters from more media outlets that desire to cover the police department on an increasing basis.”
It’s not the first time that the future of the Shack, which has been at 1 Police Plaza since the building was erected in the 1970s, has hung in the balance. Other commissioners have tried to evict reporters, such as in 2009, under Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly. The removal of the press offices seemed so assured that TheTimes wrote an entire obituary for the hub, only for department officials to backtrack on the eviction. A few months later, reporters were relocated down the hall to what is the current Shack. “Over the years, as papers and the news media sort of contracted, people in the Shack diminished,” said the veteran crime reporter. “Outlets that had four or five reporters were down to two or one; some were no longer there.”
Lawyers representing the various media organizations with offices in police HQ have been communicating with each other in light of the impending move, according to several reporters. “What can they really do? It’s the NYPD’s property,” the second police reporter noted. The media lawyers’ role in this is more to “show resistance,” said the third police reporter, “so that the next move is not out on the street.”
“Reporters should be in a newsroom collaborating with their fellow reporters, or they should be in a statehouse, in city hall, in police departments,” said the first police reporter. “Meeting and greeting and talking to people and getting the buzz. Isolating people like this is just another way of siloing the public—and that’s who we are, we’re representatives of the public. I think that they forget that.”
Call it coincidence, serendipity, an aligning of the planets—whatever the term, the moment was creepy and amusing all at once. I was beavering away in the basement research room at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, in Yorba Linda, a suburb of Los Angeles, when Henry Kissinger twice came into view—in the flat, cursive form of Nixon’s scrawl in the margins of the book I was reading, and then in the rounder corporeal form of the man himself, in the hallway outside the door.
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Kissinger, the last surviving member of Nixon’s Cabinet, was in Yorba Linda last fall for two reasons: to speak at a fundraising gala for the Richard Nixon Foundation and to promote a book he had published earlier in the year, at the improbable age of 99. The book, Leadership, contains an entire chapter in praise of Nixon, the man who had made Kissinger the 20th century’s only celebrity diplomat.
I was there to gather material for a Nixon book of my own. I had been nosing around in a cache of volumes from Nixon’s personal library. I was particularly interested in any marks he may have left in the books he’d owned. From what I could tell, no one had yet mined this remarkably varied collection, more than 2,000 books filling roughly 160 boxes stored in a vault beneath the presidential museum. Taken together, they reflect the broad range of Nixon’s intellectual curiosity—an underappreciated quality of his highly active mind. To give an idea: One heavily underlined book in the collection is a lengthy biography of Tolstoy; another is a book on statesmanship by Charles de Gaulle; another is a deep dive into the historiography of Japanese art. Several fat volumes of The Story of Civilization, Will and Ariel Durant’s mid-century monument to middlebrow history, display evidence of attentive reading and rereading.
Every morning a friendly factotum would wheel out a gray metal cart stacked with dusty boxes from Nixon’s personal library. On the afternoon Kissinger arrived, I had worked my way down to an obscure book published in 1984, a decade after Nixon left the White House. A significant portion of Bad News: The Foreign Policy of The New York Times, by a foreign correspondent for the New York Daily News named Russ Braley, is a blistering indictment of the Times’ coverage of the Nixon administration. In Braley’s telling, the Times’ treatment swung between the unfair and the uncomprehending, for reasons ranging from negligence to malice.
The book had found its ideal reader in Richard Nixon. The pages of his copy were cluttered with underlining from his thick ballpoint pen. It occurred to me, as I followed along, that Nixon was being brought up short by his reading: Much of the material in Bad News was apparently news to him.
My reading was interrupted by a commotion outside the research room. I stuck my head out in time to see Kissinger and his entourage settling into the room across the hall. A group of donors and Nixonophiles had gathered to hear heroic tales of Nixon’s statecraft.
I dutifully returned to Braley. When I got to a chapter on Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, I found an unmistakable pattern: Most of Nixon’s markings involved the man holding court across the hall. And Nixon wasn’t happy with him. Kissinger, Braley wrote, had actually invited Ellsberg to Nixon’s transition office in late 1968 to explicate his dovish views on Vietnam, more than two years before the Papers were released. Nixon’s pen came down: exclamation point! Kissinger gave Ellsberg an office in the White House complex anyway, for a month in 1969—a stone’s throw from the Oval Office. Slash mark! Kissinger spent his evenings “ridicul[ing]” Nixon “in private conversations with liberal friends.” This last treachery summoned the full battery of Nixon’s marginalia: a slash running alongside the paragraph, a check mark for emphasis, and a plump, emphatic line under “liberal friends.”
Page 551 from Bad News: The Foreign Policy of The New York Times, by Russ Braley (Photograph by Joel Barhamand for The Atlantic)
Still, Braley went on, when the Pentagon Papers were leaked, their publication alarmed Kissinger, because they posed a “double threat” to national security and to the conduct of foreign policy. “And to K!” Nixon wrote in the margin.
The contrast between Nixon’s bitter hash marks about Kissinger from the 1980s and Kissinger’s present-day celebration of his old boss offered a lesson in the evolving calculation of self-interest. It also conjured the image of a solitary old man in semiretirement, learning things about a now-vanished world he’d once thought he presided over. It happened often in the reading room in Yorba Linda: With unexpected immediacy, the gray metal cart carried the past into the present, in small but tangible fragments of Nixon himself.
The task of a marginalia maven is at right angles to the task of reading a book: It is an attempt to read the reader rather than to read the writer. For several decades now, scholars have been swarming the margins of books in dead people’s libraries. Those margins are among the most promising sites of “textual activity,” to use the scholar’s clinical phrase—a place to explore, analyze, and, it is hoped, find new raw material for the writing of dissertations. Famous readers whose libraries have fallen under such scrutiny include Melville and Montaigne, Machiavelli and Mark Twain.
A book invites various kinds of engagement, depending on the reader. Voltaire (whom Nixon admired, to judge by his extravagant underlining in the Durants’ The Age of Voltaire) scribbled commentary so incessantly that his marginalia have been published in volumes of their own. Voltaire liked to argue with a book. Nixon did not. He had a lively mind but not, when reading, a disputatious one; he restricted his marginalia almost exclusively to underlining sentences or making other subverbal marks on the page—boxes and brackets and circles. You get the idea that he knew what he wanted from a book and went searching for it, and when he found what he wanted, he pinned it to the page with his pen (seldom, from what I’ve seen, a pencil).
In his method, Nixon resembled the English writer Paul Johnson. I once asked Johnson how, given his prolific journalistic career—several columns and reviews a week in British and American publications—he managed to read all the books he cited in his own very long and very readable histories, which embraced such expansive subjects as Christianity, ancient Egypt, and the British empire. His reaction bordered on revulsion at my naivete. “Read them?!” he spat out. “Read them?! I don’t read them! I fillet them!” As it happens, Nixon was an avid reader of Johnson, whose books he often handed out to friends and staff at Christmastime.
John Adams, another busy producer of marginalia, liked to quote a Latin epigram: Studium sine calamo somnium. Adams translated this as: “Study without a pen in your hand is but a dream.” Nixon acquired the pen-in-hand habit early, as his surviving college and high-school textbooks show, and he kept at it throughout his life. For Nixon, as for the rest of us, marking up books was also a way of slowing himself down and attending to what he read. He was not a notably fast reader, by his own account, but his powers of concentration and memorization were considerable. Going at a book physically was a way of absorbing it mentally.
One of the most heavily represented authors in Nixon’s personal library is Churchill, whom Nixon revered not only as a statesman but also as a historian and an essayist. Nixon’s shelves sagged with Churchill’s multivolume histories and biographies: The World Crisis, Marlborough: His Life and Times, The Second World War, A History of the English Speaking Peoples. Churchill’s Great Contemporaries, a series of sketches he wrote in the 1920s and ’30s sizing up roughly two dozen friends and colleagues, was clearly a favorite. When I retrieved Nixon’s copy from a box, I found it dog-eared throughout.
Nixon’s tastes ran heavily toward history, but he could be tempted away from the past to a book of present-day punditry, if the writer and point of view were agreeable. According to a report in Time magazine, when half a million citizens descended on Washington, D.C., in November 1969 to protest the Vietnam War, Nixon holed up in his private quarters with a book called The Decline of Radicalism: Reflections on America Today. The book, slim and elegant, had been sent to Nixon by its author, the historian Daniel Boorstin.
Judging by his notations, Nixon was interested less in Boorstin’s turgid cultural analysis of “consumption communities” and more in his thesis that the ragged protesters gathering outside the White House fence constituted something new in American history: They were not radicals at all but nihilists. Nixon brought out the pen, and in Yorba Linda, a continent and decades away from his White House hideaway, I could still feel the insistent furrow of his underlining on the page. He marked several consecutive paragraphs in a section called “The New Barbarians,” in which Boorstin criticized protesters for their “indolence of mind” and “mindless, obsessive quest for power.”
People read books for lots of reasons: instruction, pleasure, uplift. This was Nixon reading for self-defense.
The book I most wanted to see in Yorba Linda was Nixon’s copy of Robert Blake’s biography Disraeli(1966). A re-creation of Nixon’s favorite room in the White House was one of the Nixon museum’s prime exhibits when it opened, in 1990, a few years before Nixon’s death. (It has since been redesigned.) Nixon himself chose Disraeli to rest on his desk for the public to see. The book was given to him during his first year in the White House, in 1969, by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Harvard professor, prominent Democrat, and future U.S. senator from New York. To the surprise of just about everybody, the year he took office, Nixon made Moynihan his chief domestic-policy counselor, a counterpart in those early days to Kissinger as head of the National Security Council. Despite Nixon’s enduring image as a black-eyed right-winger, his political ideology was always flexible, if not flatly self-contradictory.
Moynihan the liberal hoped to persuade Nixon the hybrid to take Benjamin Disraeli, the great prime minister of Victorian Britain, as his model. Disraeli was a Tory and an imperialist, and at the same time a social reformer of vision and courage. According to Moynihan, Nixon read the book within days of receiving it. Soon enough, the president was calling himself a “Disraeli conservative.” The precise meaning of the tag was clear to Nixon alone, but we can assume it underwent a great deal of improvisation and revision as his presidency wore on.
Disraeli’s appeal to Nixon went beyond his light-footed ideology. Speaking to his Cabinet at a dinner one evening in early 1972, Nixon called Disraeli a “magnificent” politician. Now, he went on, the “fashionable set today would immediately say, ‘Ah, politicians. Bad.’ ” As he saw it, the “fashionable set”—the epithet, suffused with reverse snobbery and class resentment, is pure Nixon—believed that politicians disdain idealism and think nothing of principle. “But,” Nixon said, “the pages of history are full of idealists who never accomplished anything.” It was “pragmatic men” like Disraeli “who had the ability to do things that other people only talked about.” Nixon, who had never shied away from calling himself a politician, wanted to see himself in Disraeli, or at least in Blake’s Disraeli—this “classic biography,” to which, he told his Cabinet, he often turned for inspiration on sleepless nights. And here the book was, Nixon’s own copy, at the top of my growing stack in Yorba Linda.
Disraeli is packed with observations about political tradecraft. They are penetrating, specific, and cold-blooded. The little dicta come from both the biographer and his subject. “He was a master at disguising retreat as advance,” Blake wrote approvingly. Nixon underlined that sentence, and then this one from Disraeli’s contemporary Lord Salisbury: “The commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcasses of dead policies.”
A line, a check mark, a circle—why Nixon deployed one notation and not another for any given passage is a question as unanswerable as “Why didn’t he burn the tapes?” But it was politics that always caught his eye, and activated his pen. Disraeli, Blake wrote, “suffered from a defect, endemic among politicians, the greatest reluctance to admit publicly that he had been in the wrong, even when the fault lay with his subordinates.” Another from Blake: Successful politicians “realize that a large part of political life in a parliamentary democracy consists not so much in doing things yourself as in imparting the right tone to things that others do for you or to things that are going to happen anyway.”
Should we take marked passages like these, with their ironic acceptance of the fudging and misdirection called for in the political arts, as a gesture toward self-criticism on Nixon’s part? Probably not: Nixon knew himself better than psycho-biographers give him credit for, but self-awareness is not self-criticism. In his chosen profession, he took the bad with the good, and his casual, creeping concessions to the seamier requirements of politics are what eventually did him in.
If you go looking for them, you can see reflections of Blake’s Disraeli throughout Nixon’s presidency, encapsulated in enduring phrases here and there. It was in Blake that Nixon came across Disraeli’s famous description of “exhausted volcanoes.” Disraeli coined it to disparage the feckless time-servers in William Ewart Gladstone’s cabinet after they had been in office a few years. Nixon underscored not only “exhausted volcanoes” but the rest of the passage from Blake’s text: The phrase, Blake writes, “was no mere gibe … For the past year, the Government had been vexed by that combination of accidents, scandals and blunders which so often for no apparent reason seem to beset an energetic administration in its later stages.”
Nixon feared the same fate for his second term—a loss of energy and direction. The day after his landslide reelection, in 1972, he called together his Cabinet and senior staff. He told them of Disraeli’s warning about “exhausted volcanoes.” And then, with his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, serving as the lord high executioner, he demanded their resignations en masse.
Not everything inBlake’s Disraeli caught Nixon’s interest; certainly not everything was useful to him. As I paged through, I saw there were many longueurs, stretches of several dozen pages, sometimes more, where no filleting of any kind happened. And then—inevitably, suddenly—Nixon the reader is seized by passages of sometimes thunderous resonance, and the pen is again called into play.
“Disraeli,” Blake writes, “really was regarded as an outsider by the Victorian governing class.” One can almost see Nixon sit bolt upright and pick up his pen. This is the same ostracism that Nixon himself felt keenly throughout his personal and professional life, in fact and in imagination. The following page and a half, discussing the disdain of the “élite” for Disraeli, is bracketed nearly in its entirety. Some sentences are boxed. Some passages, like this one, are underlined as well as bracketed:
Men of genius operating in a parliamentary democracy … inspired a great deal of dislike and no small degree of distrust among the bustling mediocrities who form the majority of mankind.
The antagonism of the elites was not the determining fact of Disraeli’s career, but both biographer and subject perceived its profound effects, and so did the man reading about it 90 years after Disraeli’s death. As president, Nixon felt himself similarly situated: the political leader of an imperial nation, highly skilled, aching for greatness, yet in permanent estrangement from the most powerful figures of the politics and culture that surrounded him, nearly all of whom he judged, as Disraeli had, “bustling mediocrities.”
When reading about the elites, Nixon pressed the ballpoint deep into the page. We marginalia mavens, tracing our fingers across the lines today, can only guess, of course. But it may be that in 1969, sitting in the reading chair in his White House hideaway, he already sensed that this was not bound to end well.
This article appears in the October 2023 print edition with the headline “Nixon Between the Lines.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
