“Country-and-Western Ghostwriters”

The publication of a Peggy Noonan memoir in 1990 gives Leonard the opportunity to comment on Noonan while excerpting some of the tastier morsels of her book.

About Noonan he writes that she is, “…a dandy maker of phrases, often of sentences, sometimes whole paragraphs” and that she “…stuck around [Washington] long enough to be lip-synched by two different Presidents [Reagan and Bush I]”:

…for the purposes of her memoir she’s invented a literary persona, a sassy crosscircuit of Holden Caulfield and Fran Leibowitz but right-wing smarty-pants too…with a weakness for the sarcastic…and too many exclamation points.

Well said!!!!!!

She also does some “surprising damage to [Reagan] calling him ‘…a beautiful clock that makes all the right sounds, but when you open it up, there’s nothing inside’ ” and “…that the battle for his mind ‘was like trench warfare…Never have so many fought so hard for such barren terrain’ and “quotes a friend(!) of his [Reagan], ‘Behind those warm eyes is a lack of curiosity that is, somehow, disorienting’”…and probably also a bit disheartening.

Peggy and the Prez:

New word: “yahooism” = having a penchant for brutish rowdiness (from Gulliver’s Travels). Interesting as this was written 4 years before Yahoo! The internet company was formed. I wonder if Jerry Yang read Gulliver given the derogatory implications of the term?

New learning: Leonard uses the essay to fight old battles by noting that he left the New York Times because “…people were always messing with my copy”…and strangely works in a reference to former Treasury Secretary Donald Regan about whom it was said “He did not know what he did not know.” A little harsh for a comment about a veteran of Guadalcanal?

“Nancy Reagan, Ugly Duckling”

Leonard’s sort-of-review of Kitty Kelley’s 1991 biography of Nancy Reagan. Some, including the NY Times, considered the book to be no more than a long gossip column. Leonard takes the opportunity to make some very interesting observations about Nancy, her role in the Reagan White House and the state of powerful women in the American psyche. He summarizes the book, “We bought into the notion of King Babar and Queen Celeste. Kitty Kelley suggests, instead, something like Rip Van Winkle and sort of an Ugly Duckling, who really wanted to be a czarina, with her very own Rasputin.” [I just noticed the connection between Rasputin and Putin.]

…but goes on (only part facetiously) to make apologies for Nancy, “So what if she was greedy and stingy? Wasn’t the Reagan revolution all about deregulating greed?”

…and then gets to his point, “What bothers people is that Nancy had some White House clout, as if Betty Ford and Rosalynn Carter didn’t, nor Eleanor Roosevelt, nor Abigail Adams!”

…then brings it home, “She opposed aid for the contras. She was against a pardon for Ollie North. She also pushed Babar into the arms treaty with the Russians…we ought to be glad that he listened to her more than he did the fastbuck Thugees.” [I wonder if he meant to use “Thuggee”?]

Just say no Ronnie...

New phrase: “lynching bees” = like quilting bee or spelling bee, only for a lynching.

New learning: Leonard mentions that, to read the Reagan bio, he had to put down the new novel by Milan Kundera (Czech writer who insisted on being considered French). Since the essay was written in 1991, Leonard is referring to Immortality. Kundera also wrote The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which was made into a film starring Daniel Day-Lewis. I need to read the book and see the movie.

“Cultural Heroes (5): Captain Kangaroo in Court”

In 1988, Captain Kangaroo, Bob Keeshan, was scheduled to be the commencement speaker at Western Connecticut State University. The students were not happy, as Leonard writes, “The little greedheads probably wanted a boost of testosterone from Carl Icahn.” Remember, this was the era of Wallstreet, the movie.

Leonard writes about his kids experience with the Captain who bucked the system and was cancelled as out of touch…“Bob Keeshan wouldn’t play the kidvid game.” He also takes us back to his experience in the 1960s when, for research,  he embedded himself in a harvest season at a New Hampshire Orchard that was manned by poor, black, migrant workers who evidently watched Captain Kangaroo over breakfast before their long, hard, underpaid days at the harvest, “His benign bafflement was a kind of umbrella against brutishness.”

I wonder why Mr. Rogers survived the era and Captain Kangaroo didn't?...probably the haircut.

New word: Mice (in ad agencies) = children

New learning: In the eighties, New Hampshire apple orchards brought in migrant workers for harvest, mostly black migrant workers. Not just from the deep south, but also from the slums of New Haven…the North east version of “indentured servitude” that we normally associated with Mexican migrants in California.

“Iconic Clowns (3): Hunter S. Thompson, Duke of Despair”

On the occasion of election night in 1988, Leonard takes the opportunity to put Thompson out of his misery…~17 years before his actual death in 2005. I think HSTs writing in the 70’s (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, F&L On the Campaign Trail) are phenomenally entertaining and energizing pieces of writing…the best of gonzo journalism literature.

Having said that, hard to disagree with Leonard that Thompson had gone completely ‘round the bend in his old age….should not be surprising given how far around the bend HST lived his entire life. Writing about HSTs collection Generation of Swine:

It’s as if, on his mountaintop [in Colorado], Thompson is picking up, by ham radio in his limbic wastes, all those radio signals from red dwarfs and black holes; as if he amplifies and modulates all the madness and paranoia of the dying culture.

This reads like an homage to Thompson’s writing style as much as it is a eulogy for his writing. Leonard writes “I think he’s going crazy so I won’t have to. This is a dangerous favor. It means I owe him.”

He closes with a sad but accurate recounting of HSTs appearance at an election night event in NYC:

…friends would call to say that Thompson had shown up at the Ritz only two hours late, waving a rifle , wearing a rubber Nixon mask, embarrassing himself…It occurs to me…that America hates the sixties and one reason for this hatred is that many of us who came of political age in that decade are tiresome performers.

New phrase: limbic waste = old memories?

New learning: Not new to me, but, you can’t think of Hunter S. Thompson without seeing Ralph Steadman drawings. Ralph is also the artist behind the labels for Flying Dog Beers:

“Cultural Heroes (4): The Golden Age of Izzy Stone”

Leonard’s homage to recently passed I.F. Stone (he died in 1989 a week before this essay was written). He opens with a comparison of Stone to all of the journalists who cozy up to power to get their in-side stories vs. Stone, “…working in his garage, a very different breed of journalist.” When Stone was blacklisted in the ‘50s (he was an active member of the anti-fascist Popular Front), he started his own newsletter called I.F. Stone’s Weekly. Leonard describes Stone’s rigorous investigative methods that put him “…way ahead on human rights atrocities, Viet Nam and Watergate.” Leonard ends the piece by calling Stone “…a skeptic, but not a cynic…an agora.” – the agora reference is to Stone’s famous book The Trial of Socrates, not to be discredited just because John Edwards named it as one of his three favorite books.

You can download a free PDF of The Best of I.F. Stone or read old copies of the I.F. Stone Weekly at:

http://www.ifstone.org

New word: agora = a central spot in a Greek city, base of the term agoraphobia. Never put the two together before. Duh.

New learning: Interestingly, Stone has been accused in print of being a communist spy on several occasions. The evidence is based on hearsay and comments taken out of context, usually quoted by a conservative writer. He was sort of a Rachel Madow fighting Fox news before its time.

Here’s a recounting of one allegation made by from the I.F. Stone official Web Site:

In March 1992, Guardian journalist Andrew Brown quoted a Soviet Embassy attaché, KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin, as saying, "We had an agent — a well-known American journalist — with a good reputation, who severed his ties with us after 1956. I myself convinced him to resume them. But in 1968, after the invasion of Czechoslovakia ... he said he would never again take any money from us". In June 1992, Herbert Romerstein, a former official of the USIA and minority chief investigator of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and Ray Kerrison reported in the New York Post that Kalugin identified Stone as that agent. The allegations were further developed in a book written by Romerstein and Eric Breindel, editorial page editor of the New York Post, The Venona Secrets.

Brown subsequently conceded that when he had "used the phrase 'an agent' to describe someone who turned out to be I. F. Stone", that he understood the term, "agent" to mean "useful contact", and that the "take any money" reference simply meant that Stone would not permit a Soviet employee to pick up the check for lunch then, or in the future, as had sometimes been done before. He adds that New York trial lawyer and author Martin Garbus recounted that in September 1992, while at the Moscow Journalists Club, Kalugin had explained to him, "I have no proof that Stone was an agent. I have no proof that Stone ever received any money from the KGB or the Russian government, I never gave Stone any money and was never involved with him as an agent."