But Enough About You: Essays

by Christopher Buckley

  Toward the end of the novel, Wormold tells his secretary, Beatrice, “I don’t care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations. . . . I don’t think even my country means all that much. There are many countries in our blood, aren’t there, but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?” Fair question; still, I wonder what King Priam, whose kingdom was brought down over loyalty to love, might have to say.

  Later Beatrice introduces the hoary old moral equivalence argument that we used to hear from the left during the Cold War: “But they [NATO, SEATO, and other international organizations] don’t mean any more to most of us than all the other letters, U.S.A. and U.S.S.R.” All the other letters? Really, Mr. Greene. Given his public record of discerning no moral difference between the United States and the nation that came up with the Gulag Archipelago, it’s no small leap to venture that Beatrice’s views are a proxy for the man who put these words in her mouth.

  In real life, Greene notoriously defended Kim Philby, a traitor of Judas Iscariot dimension. Greene’s championing of Fidel Castro also goes down the gullet hard. As I type these words, fifty-one years into the Castro dictatorship, the papers relate the death of Orlando Zapata Tamayo, who starved himself in prison after seven years’ captivity for the crime of “disrespecting authority.” If Greene were alive today, he’d be cheering on Hugo Chavez, the latest minatory clown in the Tropic of Cancer.

  But I come to praise, not to bury. Our Man in Havana is a great book: for its plot, its characters, and, despite my cavils, for its rendering of the uncomfortable moral ambiguities that it lays on the bar before us, along with the copious daiquiris. And—yes—for its humor, which if not exactly lightheartedly comic, tickles the funny bone deep within.

  Wormold’s recruiter Hawthorne, played to tight-assed British perfection in the movie by Nöel Coward, provides him with a copy of Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, for his code work. “It was the only book I could find in duplicate except Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Back in London, Hawthorne’s superior at MI6 tells him that he has great expectations of Wormold: “I believe we may be on to something so big that the H-bomb will become a conventional weapon.”

  “Is that desirable, sir?”

  “Of course it’s desirable. Nobody worries about conventional weapons.”

  This is comedy of a high order.

  Finally, there’s the virtuosity of language, the hauntingly perfect phrasing. This is a book to be read slowly:

  “He carried with him the breath of beaches and the leathery smell of a good club.”

  “He had left his elegance behind in the Caribbean.”

  “Captain Segura squeezed out a smile. It seemed to come from the wrong place like toothpaste when the tube splits.”

  “The girl screamed but only in a tentative way.”

  “The skyscrapers of the new town stood up ahead of them like icicles in the moonlight.”

  “He found himself taking to truth like a tranquilizer.”

  “A grey stone statue of Columbus stood outside the Cathedral and looked as though it had been formed through the centuries under water, like a coral reef, by the action of insects.”

  “Captain Segura gleamed. His leather gleamed, his buttons gleamed, and there was fresh pomade upon his hair. He was like a well-cared-for weapon.”

  If you are holding this splendid new hand-bound edition of Our Man in your hands, it’s a fair bet that you are not reading it for the first time. So fix yourself a daiquiri and turn now to Chapter One and immerse yourself in Greeneland and the ever-vivid world of Wormold and his daughter, Milly, Dr. Hasselbacher, Hawthorne, and Captain Segura. But for heaven’s sake, don’t spill the daiquiri on it.

  —Introduction to the Arion Press edition of the novel, 2007

  REAGAN’S CARD FILE

  “The battle for the mind of Ronald Reagan was like the trench warfare of World War I: never have so many fought so hard for such barren terrain.”

  A dollar to the first reader who can identify who said that. Christopher Hitchens? Bill Maher? The editor of Pravda?

  No, Peggy Noonan, in her otherwise fawning 1990 memoir as one of Reagan’s speechwriters. That was then. Now it’s 2011, centennial of the Great Man’s birth. In recent years a profusion of books have put paid to the notion that our fortieth president was an “amiable dunce,” in the phrase of the late Clark Clifford (as in Washington “Wise Man” and disgraced BCCI bank scandal player).

  At the top of this syllabus would be the somewhat verbosely titled: Reagan, in His Own Hand: The Writings of Ronald Reagan That Reveal His Revolutionary Vision for America (2001). Then comes The Age of Reagan, by Steven Hayward, and the almost identically titled The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008, by the left-leaning but admiring Sean Wilentz. And most recently, The Reagan Diaries, edited by the historian Douglas Brinkley.

  Here, again, comes the indefatigable Brinkley with this fascinating addition to the No-Dummy-He subgenre of Reaganalia. As he writes in his introduction, The Notes consists of the collection of four-by-six-inch index cards Reagan kept over the years—his chrestomathy, or commonplace book of wit and wisdom, all of which were written in his “impeccable” scrawl. Brinkley speculates that Reagan began them between 1954 and 1962, when he traveled around the country as spokesman for General Electric, and kept amassing them after he became in 1981 the most powerful man in the world. Thankfully, the Iran-contra counsel Lawrence Walsh didn’t know of their existence or he’d have subpoenaed them and they’d be still languishing in some government warehouse like the one in the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

  Instead, amazingly, they languished for years in a cardboard box at the Ronald Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California. They were discovered only during a renovation leading up to this year’s centennial. The library staff calls them “The Rosetta Stone,” but their discovery puts me more in mind of the archaeologist Howard Carter’s utterance in 1922, upon first peering into King Tut’s tomb. Asked what he saw inside, he replied, “Wonderful things.”

  Indeed, these notes—which make up Reagan’s own personal Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations—are wonderful things. Witticisms, observations, apothegms, newspaper cuttings, statistics, bon mots—as well as some mal mots—from Aristophanes to Mao. In between there’s a lot of Jefferson, a lot of Lincoln, FDR, and a French politician of the 1840s whom I’d never heard of, by the name of Claude-Frédéric Batiat. Also Hilaire Belloc, Whittaker Chambers, Abba Eban, Ho Chi Minh, Ibn Khaldoun (about whom, more in a moment), Lenin, Ortega y Gassett, Pascal, Seneca, and Sun Tzu. For a dunce, Reagan was a voracious pack rat of wisdom in the pre-Google era.

  These notes provide a portal into the—dare one say, fertile?—mind of one of the late-twentieth-century’s great leaders. Two big themes run through the notes: (a) the imperilment of individual liberty by growth of the state; and (b) the oppressive taxation that Leviathan demands. As Barry Goldwater once put it—though the quote is strangely not included here—“A government that is big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.”

  Yet for a so-called right-wing ideologue, Reagan seems to have gotten his inspiration from a diversity of sources:

  “Every time we that we try to lift a problem to the govt., to the same extent we are sacrificing the liberties of the people.” Irving Kristol? Actually, JFK.

  “Strike for the jugular. Reduce taxes and spending. Keep govt. poor and remain free.” Jack Kemp? No, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.

  I’d bet an (aftertax) dollar you won’t guess the provenance of this one:

  “At the beginning of the dynasty taxation yields a large revenue from small assessments. At the end of the Dynasty taxation yields a small revenue from large assessments.” Give up? Who knew that Ibn Khaldoun, identified by the Gipper as “Moslem Phil. 14th Century,” anticipated the Laffer Curve by seven hundred years? Not me.

  Reagan’s delight in humor and wit, never
really in doubt even among his detractors, is on full display here. The section titled “Humor” is indeed the book’s longest. My favorite is the “Chinese Proverb, 400 B.C.” that says, “When the music of a nation becomes fast, wild & discordant it shows the nation is in confusion.” Did Reagan come across this one after his first exposure to Janis Joplin? Or the dulcet arpeggios of Meat Loaf’s singing “Paradise by the Dashboard Light”?

  Alas, Brinkley doesn’t tell us when Reagan found this one, or for that matter, any of the notes. In fairness, it’s possible there was no way of knowing, but even so, The Notes is somewhat lacking in footnotes. There’s a glossary at the back that will tell you who Ibn Khaldoun was. (Answer: a forefather of social science in the East, and as the Gipper noted, something of a philosopher.) Or Claude-Frédéric Batiat. (An early economist known for his clever attacks on certain state policies.) But many of the notes cry out for more notes, unless you already knew why Harrison Gray Otis of the Los Angeles Times circa 1910 was such a stinker. (It’s a long story.)

  Brinkley’s introduction is pleasant and informative, but is marred by sentences such as: “The reader gets the impression that Reagan is a redwood tree and these are the decorations of his own philosophy, the ammunition that he will need to survive the hustings ahead.” Okay, if you insist. But surely “U.S. federal government” is tautological, and not to nitpick, but was James A. Garfield technically “assassinated on July 2, 1881” if he died on September 19? The Notes would have been a richer book had its editor invested more effort. Brinkley, a protégé of the late Stephen Ambrose, is a humblingly prolific historian and writer. How many historians are capable of writing a biography of Dean Acheson and editing the letters of Hunter S. Thompson? The man must sleep only one hour a night.

  Still, this is a dandy little volume. And may also be an important one. Much has been said and written about Reagan’s enigmatic, elusive personality. True enough, Reagan has been, and may forever remain, a puzzle to his biographers. A few recent books claim finally to have uncovered the real Reagan, but we might never get closer than in these scribbles, which reveal so much about a curious mind, glad soul, and warm heart. They reveal him to be a man who’d known sorrow and defeat, but who by dint of indomitable cheer, gentlemanly grace, and extraordinary energy overcame all obstacles—to say nothing of an evil empire—while always keeping his smile. As Reagan jotted to himself: “An undeveloped Nation—that’s one Henry Kissinger hasn’t visited yet.” Or in a line that may inspire the next gusher of Reaganalia: “When a woman loves a man he can get her to do most anything she really wants to.”

  —Bloomberg BusinessWeek, May 2011

  THE PATRIARCH

  The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph Patrick Kennedy

  The next time you land at Logan Airport in Boston, pause a moment to reflect that you are standing on landfill annexed to what was once Noddle’s Island. Here, sometime in the late 1840s, a young escapee from the Irish potato famine named Patrick Kennedy first set foot in the New World. A cooper by trade, Patrick died of cholera in 1858 at age thirty-five. His grandson and near namesake, Joseph Patrick Kennedy, was born in 1888 in a neighborhood now known as unfashionable East Boston. The rest, as they say, is history. In the hands of his biographer David Nasaw, it is riveting history. The Patriarch is a book hard to put down, a garland not lightly bestowed on a cinder block numbering 787 pages of text.

  Nasaw is the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Not quite the disinterested credential one might hope for in a Kennedy biographer, but Nasaw informs us that the family placed no restrictions on him, and allowed him unfettered access to the deepest recesses of the archive. This book is a formidable labor of six years.

  Kennedyland is terrain notably susceptible to idolatry, hatemongering, whitewash, conspiracy thinking, sensationalism, and other agendas. Nasaw credibly avers that he has taken forensic pains to excise anything that could not be confirmed by primary sources. I am no historian, but the evidence appears to support his claim. His research is Robert Caro–esque; barely a paragraph is not footnoted. And he is unsparing about his subject’s shortcomings, which are numerous.

  Given the extraordinary sweep of Kennedy’s life—banker, Wall Street speculator, real estate baron, liquor magnate (but not bootlegger), moviemaker, Washington administrator, ambassador, paterfamilias, and dynastic founder—the miracle is that Nasaw was able to tell the whole damned story in only 787 pages.

  The book’s subtitle, “The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times,” is if anything an understatement. Joe Kennedy was personally involved in virtually all the history of his time. There has been no dearth of books about America’s royal family, but this one makes a solid case that the ur-Kennedy was the most fascinating of them all.

  Fascinating, that is, as opposed to entirely admirable. Not that he wasn’t in ways, but boy, was JPK one complicated boyo. To paraphrase the heavyweight Sonny Liston’s manager: Joe Kennedy had his good points and his bad points. It’s his bad points that weren’t so good.

  On the positive side of the ledger, he was an utterly devoted father. He adored his children and, when he was there—which wasn’t often—was a touchy-feely, hands-on daddy. When he wasn’t there, he regularly wrote them all copious letters. He superintended every aspect of their lives. And in his own highly idiosyncratic way, he was a devoted husband to his wife, Rose, a priggish, pious, humorless, and deeply boring woman, while conducting conspicuous affairs with Gloria Swanson, Clare Boothe Luce, and “hundreds” of other women.

  Also on the positive side: he was a genius at management and organization; a Midas at moneymaking. He amassed his immense fortune without even seeming to break a sweat. As a Wall Street manipulator, he was involved in some shameful episodes; but he was also the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and headed up the Maritime Commission at critical times in the nation’s history. At these enormous tasks he performed tirelessly and valiantly.

  As for the not-so-good part: he was a deplorable and disastrous United States ambassador to the Court of St. James’s during the crucial prewar period. One ought to refrain from smug judgments on the commonplace biases of prior generations. Kennedy was culturally anti-Semitic, but over time his anti-Semitism metastasized into a grotesque and paranoid obsession.

  His isolationism was formidable and adamant, but in that, too, he was hardly unique. A lot of Americans, notably Charles Lindbergh, wanted to keep America out of another European war. But Kennedy’s relentless drive to appease—indeed, reward—tyranny was monomaniacal, preposterous, and dangerous. In his view, Hitler was really just another businessman with whom a deal could be struck. Here his business genius impelled him in a direction that would have led to hell.

  But it was his profound defeatism, a trait seemingly contrary to his talent for rising to a challenge and getting things done, that was so—to quote from the subtitle—remarkable. At one point we see him fulminating at the Royal Air Force. Why, you may ask, is Ambassador Kennedy in such a rage? (“Yet another rage” would be more accurate, for you can open The Patriarch to almost any page and find him spluttering in fury, indignation, or resentment. Or all three.) Well, the answer is that he was livid at the RAF for winning the Battle of Britain and thus halting the German invasion of England. No, Nasaw is not making this up. You see, all that those brave young men in their Spitfires had really accomplished was “prolonging” Britain’s inevitable defeat. One rubs one’s eyes in disbelief. Next to Joe Kennedy, Cassandra was Dr. Pangloss.

  As the saying goes, to be Irish is to know that sooner or later the world will break your heart. Daniel Patrick Moynihan adduced this chestnut of Hibernian Weltschmerz on November 22, 1963, upon the assassination of the patriarch’s son. Nevertheless, for someone on whom the gods had lavished every blessing—as well as one hell of a lot of the proverbial “luck of the Irish”—Joe Kennedy was possessed of a pessimism that ran deeper than the Mariana Tren
ch. And yet—and yet—in the end, his suspicion that the cosmic deck was stacked against him was weirdly and tragically validated. When, in 1969, this vibrantly alive man, who over a lifetime generated more energy than a nuclear reactor, died after eight years as a drooling, stroke-afflicted paralytic able to utter only one word—“No!”—he had outlived four of his beloved nine children.

  His firstborn son and namesake was taken from him by the war he had so desperately tried to avert. His most cherished daughter, Kathleen, known as Kick, went down in a private plane that had no business being aloft in dangerous weather (a recurring Kennedy tragic theme). Two more sons were gruesomely murdered in public. Then there was the daughter, also much loved, whose life was permanently destroyed by a botched, if well-intentioned, lobotomy that her father had authorized.

  The invalid patriarch was told about the assassinations of his sons. Nasaw does not reveal whether he was told about his remaining son’s rendezvous with karma at Chappaquiddick. Probably not; and probably just as well. His devastation was already consummate. To whom the gods had given much, the gods had taken away much more.

  The dominant animus in Joe Kennedy’s life was his Irish Catholic identity. (Identity, as distinct from religious faith.) He was born into comfortable circumstances, went to Boston Latin and Harvard (Robert Benchley was a classmate and friend). But as a native of East Boston, he was permanently stamped as an outsider. He could never hope to aspire to the status of “proper Bostonian.” This exclusion, harnessed to a brilliant mind and steel determination, fired the dynamo of his ambition.

  One of the more arresting sections of the book is the betrayal—and it was certainly that, in Joe Kennedy’s view—by the Roman Catholic Church when his son was trying to become the first Catholic president. The Catholic press relentlessly criticized John, while the church higher-ups sat on their cassocks, murmuring orisons for a Quaker candidate.