But Enough About You: Essays Page 17

  For all his physical grace as an athlete—captain of the Yale baseball team; formidable doubles partner at tennis—Mr. Bush was on occasion thwarted by his own physical karma. There was the time he “vomited copiously”—as the news reports insisted on putting it—on his host, the premier of Japan, at that dinner. Years later, Mr. Bush was still shaking his head and blushing. How ironic that this should happen to the most polite person on earth.

  Then there was the pro-am tournament at Pebble Beach after he retired from the presidency. Mr. Bush sliced his drive off the tee at a murderous velocity, into the skull of an unfortunate lady spectator. He rushed over to apologize and comfort her as the medics applied pressure bandages. Hours later, lining up his putt on the final hole, he saw a woman spectator in a wheelchair with her head bandaged. Remortified, he rushed over to renew his apologies, only to be informed that it was a different woman, who had been hit by Clint Eastwood’s ball.

  One dimension the historians surely will be wrestling with is his relationship with his son the second President George Bush. Bob Woodward has provided the indelible moment when he asked Bush 43 in the Oval Office if he had consulted with his father prior to going into Iraq. Forty-three replied that he had “consulted a higher father.” What can his earthly father have thought upon reading that? I never mustered the courage to ask him.

  Interviewing Bush 41 onstage, just as his son’s Iraq war was revealing itself to be something far different from a “slam dunk,” I asked him what it was like, watching his son take hit after hit.

  Mr. Bush shrugged, unperturbed by the question. He replied simply that your children are your children, whatever their age. “When they’re kids and they come home from the schoolyard after getting beat, you hug them. It doesn’t change. You’re still their father.” He said he was proud of his son; and then immediately added that he was proud of all his children. That was George Bush, Have-Half.

  I would never have traded my own father for any other, but I’ve always thought that George Bush is the father we all wish we’d had. His love was unconditional and total. He embodied Shakespeare’s admonition that “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.” His soul was always visible on his sleeve. And in his pocket there was always a handkerchief, usually damp.

  I was present in 2004 at the National Cathedral in Washington when Mr. Bush, struggling through his eulogy to Reagan, came close to breaking down. I’d seen him do that so many times. He’d get choked up during a playing of the National Anthem. As for the Navy Hymn—forget it. Cataracts. For a flinty New England blueblood, Mr. Bush had the tear ducts of a Sicilian grandmother.

  In November 1992, I phoned him at Camp David, a few days after his mother, Dorothy, passed away. A few weeks before, he had lost the presidency to a governor of Arkansas. Into the bargain, a hurricane was on its way to ravage his beloved house on the coast of Maine. Talk about a Melvillean “damp, drizzly November of the soul.”

  Mrs. Bush’s funeral was the next day. I asked if he was going to give a eulogy.

  “God no,” he said. “I couldn’t do it. I would choke up. I would be permanently ensconced as a member of the Bawl Brigade.”

  The Bawl Brigade is the Bush family term for members who cry easily; by my count, it constitutes a majority of Bushes.

  He explained: “I’ve had trouble paying my respects to the fallen soldiers on the Iowa, or the dead out of Desert Storm, without getting emotional. I’d love to, but I know my limitations. I even choked up here at Camp David last night. We had our choir singing. We had a little vespers program with Amy Grant. It was so beautiful, and I found myself choking up. We had a bunch of friends up here and ‘Oh God,’ I said, ‘please hold back the floods.’ ”

  THE NEW YORKER POLITICAL CARTOONS

  Most people have an absolute-all-time-favorite New Yorker cartoon that they came across at some crucial moment in their lives, bearing with it the reassurance that they were not alone in the universe. I still have mine, from twenty years ago. It’s faded from sunlight, the back is torn and sticky from a dozen applications of Scotch tape, the top is perforated from pushpins as it moved with me from house to house, bulletin board to bulletin board.

  I was a White House speechwriter at the time, with an office that looked out unimportantly on a sun-deprived courtyard that seemed permanently under construction. My most enduring memory of my time in the fabled corridors of power is that of jackhammers.

  The chief of staff in my department was a retired four-star admiral, who, though a fine and decent man and a genuine patriot, remained every bit a four-star admiral. Which is to say, he looked upon New York writer types (always in need of a haircut, tie always loosened, shoes always unpolished, always ten minutes late) with a military despair that he was at pains to suppress. And come to think of it, did not suppress. Our relationship was similar to the one I now have with my twelve-year-old daughter, who when I ask her to clean her room, replies, “Whatever.” So in retrospect, my heart goes out to Admiral Daniel J. Murphy. At last I feel his pain.

  It fell to Admiral Murphy to vet my prose. Any relationship between editor and writer is a minefield. Ours was a federal disaster area. Once in a speech I quoted the Greek historian Thucydides, which ended up causing the vice president of the United States to become so tongue-tied when he got to the name that he sounded like John Hurt in the movie Alien just before that dreadful alien thing burst from his rib cage. Admiral Murphy came up to me afterward, glowering—I was cowering under the table in a fetal position—and jabbed me in the chest and said, “Next time say Plato!”

  A week or so later, still rubbing the bruise in my sternum, I found my treasured cartoon in that week’s New Yorker. What a 700-volt shock of recognition it gave me! The cartoon was of a politician and his speechwriter going over a draft of a speech. The Capitol Building is in the background, so we know we’re in Washington. The speechwriter has that thousand-yard stare of a wretch with artistic pretensions who knows—knows—that his exquisite couplets are about to be turned into road kill. The politician is telling the writer: “O.K., but change ‘Her tawny body glistened beneath the azure sky’ to ‘National problems demand national solutions.’ ”

  I clipped it and taped it to my lamp. I would look at it and sigh whenever my gorgeous arpeggios on foreign policy came back from the committee looking like a blacked-out Freedom of Information request document, along with comments like “Put more here re: historic synergy betw. U.S. and Brazil.” The cartoon spoke to me. It whispered: It’s all right. I understand.

  What a surprise, then, not to find it here. [The New Yorker Book of Political Cartoons] But how nice to find more than a half dozen cartoons on the theme of speechwriters and speeches, making it by my count the fourth-largest category here. The next largest is Republicans, about which, more in a moment. The second-largest number of cartoons are about spin. The biggest, consisting of twenty-three cartoons, is campaigning.

  Whatever high absurdities and low syllogisms are foisted upon us every four years in the name of getting our votes, it is highly—highly—unlikely that they will be as funny, or as uplifting, or enduring as the moments depicted by The New Yorker’s cartoonists.

  We live, happily and paradoxically, at a time when it is more or less safe not to pay too much attention to politicians. (Such a bold statement must surely tempt the gods. Let me explain.) Surely this is why the television show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire attracts 23 million viewers while the presidential debate on another channel attracts one-tenth as many.

  We can indulge ourselves in this fashion—even to the extent of not voting on Election Day, as indeed 51 percent of us chose not to in the last general election, confident that we will not wake up on the first Wednesday in November to find armored tanks in the street and someone with sunglasses and a mustache standing on the Truman balcony at the White House giving a three-hour-long speech in which he refers to us as “my children.”

  True, we might wake up to find that Congress has approv
ed $217 billion for a four-lane-wide tunnel connecting North Carolina and Bermuda. Or that we now have soldiers stationed in a country no one—even the CIA—can locate on a map. Or that Arnold Schwarzenegger has been elected governor of California. Dire as these eventualities might be, they’re nothing, really, that we couldn’t handle. One way or the other, we’ve already been there and done that.

  This note of preternatural calm is the voice, or, if you want to put a fancy word to it, the ethos—Say Plato, damnit!—of New Yorker political cartoons. They are to the noise and bruit of daily political life what a Zen fountain is to a roaring tsunami. They soothe. They make us all—liberal, conservative, libertarian, vegetarian—smile in recognition. Yes, that’s us they’re talking about. How—sigh—ridiculous we must seem sometimes. And yet . . . and yet . . .

  . . . we do care about politics. We must. Politics is—also—fanatics flying planes into our buildings. We may have learned to turn the channel in search of a more soothing reality (show), but in an election year, politicians are hard to avoid. We become agitated. We argue with each other—even with our loved ones. We fume, we hurl our napkins down on the dinner table like characters in Henry James novels. We pronounce each other invincibly ignorant.

  But in New Yorker cartoon land, such asperity is banished. Sturm becomes a bright summer day. Drang is defanged, a junkyard dog turned Pekingese; pomposity is deflated and even the Orwellian machinations of spin doctors—so awful in real life—appear for what they are: posturings from commedia dell’arte. Here we find a man pleading his case at the Pearly Gates before an unamused-looking St. Peter: “Wait, those weren’t lies. That was spin!” Distilling all this fury into a tone of gentle wit and piquancy is no mean achievement, considering the antecedents in American political cartooning. The ur-political American cartoonist was of course Thomas Nast (1840–1902), whose scathing depictions of William Marcy “Boss” Tweed of New York City’s Tammany Hall and of his cronies Peter “Brains” Sweeny and Richard “Slippery Dick” Connolly—why can’t our politicians have nicknames like that?—helped to bring down Tweed. Tweed is (apocryphally) said to have ordered one of his associates to “Stop them damned pictures . . . I don’t care what the papers say about me. My constituents can’t read. But, damn it, they can see pictures!” Not to press the point, but according to polls, significant numbers of people today get their only political information from our late-night comic hosts.

  The Bavarian-born Nast was himself no lovely piece of work. He was fiercely bigoted, a virulent anti-Catholic and Irish-baiter—among his other prejudices. Many of his most celebrated cartoons would stand no chance of being published today in the mainstream press. The Nast-iness that characterized his work was prevalent in much of the other cartooning of the day, which depicted Negroes and Jews and Native Americans in racist caricature that would today arouse gasps and contumely. Those days are happily behind us, but the anger of the American cartoonist lives on. The Washington Post’s Herblock was capable of pretty rough stuff. Professor Roger A. Fischer’s Them Damned Pictures is a catalogue of nineteenth- and twentieth-century visual invective. He quotes The Chicago Tribune’s Jeff MacNelly’s revealing comment that “Many cartoonists would be hired assassins if they couldn’t draw.”

  New Yorker cartoonists may too, deep down, be spitting mad, but they do a good job of channeling their anger and ontological disappointment into exquisite generic commentary on the old human condition. The events of the past several years, for instance (the Clinton years), have been harrowing and very nearly cataclysmic. And yet I could find only one cartoon out of 118 that specifically referred to the whole mess, and even then it managed to do so with an obliqueness and deftness utterly sublime. A White House aide is knocking on a door emblazoned with the enormous, great seal of the president of the United States, asking, “Are you decent?” Fifty years from now this cartoon may be more relevant and—to use that inelegant word—accessible than the hundreds of sputtering editorial cartoons that appeared during the years of Clinton scandal.

  If a newspaper editorial cartoon shouts its opinion at you over the scrambled eggs, The New Yorker cartoon hands you a Scotch and nudges you toward whatever truth it has in its sights. A candidate for office sticks his head out the phone booth and tells the line of anxious people waiting to use it: “I may be awhile. I’m soliciting funds for my re-election campaign.” While most of the cartoons here are timeless and general, this particular one may require a little context years from now. But for the time being, it’s a nice gloss on Vice President Gore’s violation of the Pendleton Act of 1883. Another cartoon might also require some explaining years from now. A crowd has gathered around an ambulance at the scene of an accident. “Let me through,” declares a businesslike-looking man holding a briefcase, “I’m a compassionate conservative.” What’s in that briefcase? A health insurance waiver? Or a legally concealed handgun with which to finish off the poor victim?

  Which brings us to the critical question: Why do Republican-oriented cartoons here outnumber Democrat ones by five to one? I have a good guess as to the politics of New Yorker cartoonists, but somehow it’s hard to think of them as agents of the vast left-wing conspiracy.

  I remember two other New Yorker cartoons from the Reagan era that still bring me joy every time I see them. One shows two mild, balding men in suits presenting themselves at the White House gate. “We’re from the far right. We’re here to be mollified.” The other is a fierce Mongolian-type warlord sitting on a throne made of human skulls and bones. In the foreground, one courtier is whispering to the other, “I, too, was alarmed when he took over, but I think events will inevitably push him back into the political mainstream.” I don’t care how they vote—give those two cartoonists a Pulitzer.

  The bottom line is, really, so plain that anyone with a C average from Yale—or Harvard, for that matter—could figure it out. As objects of fun, Republicans make better targets than Democrats; as do conservatives than liberals. What was it Oscar Wilde said about the trouble with socialism? “Takes too many evenings.” Perhaps someday Democrats will be as funny as Republicans.

  Meanwhile, it’s the New Yorker cartoonists, not the nattering talking heads and pundits and spin doctors, who are the true gnostics of American politics, the keepers and revealers of its deepest truths. To our candidates for office high, middle, and low, I can only say: After your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live. (No, that’s not ungrammatical, it’s Hamlet.)

  Let us close with a few greatest hits:

  The candidate standing at the podium, grinning with open arms: “People of North Dakota! Or possibly South Dakota!”

  The angry congressman standing at his desk in the chamber, replying to his distinguished colleague: “Listen, pal! I didn’t spend seven million bucks to get here so I could yield the floor to you.”

  The two aides looking on in horror as their candidate addresses a large crowd of distinctly displeased-looking people. “Good God! He’s giving the white-collar voters’ speech to the blue-collars!”

  One more for the road: the senator at his desk, scowling at the secretary who is approaching holding a coat: “No, no, Miss Clark! I asked you to bring in the Mantle of Greatness, not the Cloak of Secrecy.”

  Feel better? See, it’s still a great country.

  —from the Introduction to The New Yorker Book of Political Cartoons, 2000

  VP QUESTIONNAIRE

  As vice president, my highest priority would be to:

  A. Support the president’s agenda.

  B. Quietly leak to leading columnists that I completely disagree with the president’s less popular policies.

  C. Attend as many funerals of foreign leaders as possible.

  D. Position myself to run for president in four years.

  Complete John Nance Gardner’s famous sentence: “The vice presidency is not worth . . .”

  A. A bucket of warm piss.

  B. A bucket of warm spit.

  C. A
bucket of live worms.

  D. A bucket of dead tarantulas.

  The quality I most admire in the presidential nominee is his:

  A. Vision for America’s future.

  B. Willingness to work across party lines for the common good.

  C. Personal hygiene.

  D. Willingness to reverse his long-held positions on fundamental issues for the sake of marginal electoral votes.

  If the president were incapacitated and I had to assume executive responsibility under the provisions of the 25th Amendment, the first thing I would do is:

  A. Emphasize “continuity.”

  B. Party down!

  C. Have the president declared legally dead and quietly bury him at Arlington.

  D. Redecorate the Oval Office to match my coloring.

  In my capacity as president of the Senate, in the event of a tie vote, I would:

  A. Seek instructions from the president.

  B. Announce that the issue will be decided by a coin toss.

  C. Dress in tights and recite Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy from the rostrum.

  D. Quietly put out word to the interested competing lobbies that my vacation home is in need of extensive renovation.

  The vice president I most identify with is:

  A. Dan Quayle.

  B. Dick Cheney.

  C. Andrew Johnson.

  D. Hillary Clinton.

  In my acceptance speech at the convention, I would pledge to:

  A. Restore dignity to the office of the vice presidency.

  B. Work tirelessly to advance the president’s agenda.