Eminentoes / John Dean

...In the Wayne persona, for at least two hours of screen time, we can latch onto something defmite and authoritative, a force ~ that is bound to succeed and may do so with an innate decency...

...THE ALTERNATIVE, Subscription Department, P.O...

...BOOK REVIEW The Dunne Family James T. Farrell / Doubleday / $8.95 John Chamberlain This is Jim Farrell's fiftieth book, published in his seventy-third year...

...In 1938 he wrote the introduction to the Modern Library edition o f James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan trilogy, gantly called wops and guineas in that day when racial slurs were accepted and shrugged off...

...So long as convicted murderers are negotiating film rights at the eleventh hour, it seems reasonable that John and Mo Dean should soon be surrounded and propelled by all the vast engines of modern publicity...

...Dialogue between Dean and his two-fisted, hard-bitten, best-in-thebusiness criminal lawyer (who, incidentally, seems to have helped him not at all) is so contrived as to be silly--i.e., "Now," he said intently, as if he had said all there was to say, "are you ready to go down there and lay out the facts...

...is one of the liveliest, best written, best edited journals of ideas and politics we know...

...Our Malcolm Cowleys and MatthewJosephsons and Kenneth Burkes made shapeliness and sensitivity, not power, their critical touchstones...

...If the subject matter seems repetitious to one who must have read half of the Farrell books, it is no great cause for objection...

...EMINENTOES hy Philip Temian Metamorphoses, or the Story of John Dean If John Dean had not existed, it would have been unnecessary to invent him...

...We didn't hate the wops because they were Latins...

...But it turns out that all the elements so convincing were in fact calculated--his glasses, haircut, monotonous voice, deferential mannerIall carefully tailored to the script...

...No more paradox to explain, no more tortured rationale to concoct, the moral compass points westward where the klieg lights are bright, and John Dean is ready to let fly...

...as bold as Dreiser's and more choice in manner...

...No doubt this is exactly what some people object to about John Wayne, seeing him as a symbol of westward imperialism and nineteenth-century social and legal values...

...What is next...

...I omitted mention of Tom Bergin, who might have been likened (in his teens) to Danny O'Neill, the "dippy punk" who was too intellectual to feel easy in Studs' gang...

...Dean is a quick study, and just as his labors in the White House carried him ever upward, so his lamentations enchanted the public galleries...

...cummings, the lower case kid, wanted a poem that would be something more than .the Sandburgian or the Whitmanesque yawp--his Buffalo Bill rode, not a white horse, but a watersmooth silver stallion...

...She sat resolutely behind her husband throughout the hearings, her blank face and enigmatic smile enchanting the~ nation with its discovery of a lobotomized Gioconda...

...The Studs Lonigan trilogy was so searing in some of its scenes (especially the rape scene that climaxes The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan) that Farrell has had difficulty in surpassing it...

...It is downhill from there...

...The two of them went on to play out their fifth act stoically, the fifth act being prison, featuring the honorable surrender, despairing wife, unexpected pardon, and tearful reunion...

...But Sherman had already gone over to Rascoe's more "modern" values...

...They have an unreal air about them...

...All through Nixon's death agonies his owlish smile hung suspended, awaiting the inevitable...

...My reasons are obviously conventional: one should object to what goes on in the Iron Curtain lands, for example, not because one has a Polish uncle or a Hungarian wife but because brutality is obscene wherever it occurs...

...All expense of shame, as Malcolm Muggeridge has said, in a waste of spirit...

...This persuasive illusion, this confusion between the man and the myth is the culmination of his professional skill and imposing presence, and this is what is being inadvertently admitted...

...He plunged into his assignment with boyish enthusiasm, managing at once to keep the code names straight, prompt perjurers, and hire bagmen--all the customary duties of a counsel to the President...

...He plots and consorts with the Watergate prosecutors as readily as he did with Haldeman and Ehrlichman, sharing their prejudices, laughing gaily at their jokes, scuttling his past allegiances, all the while remaining the essential Dean inside...

...He will root out the bad man, who is a loathsome snake for sure, and when the time comes for him to go for his gun the snake will be as good as dead and gone and that goes for every mother's son of them...

...Of course, the importance of John Dean rests in the importance of Watergate, which I tend, perhaps unfashionably, to underestimate...

...I Was Hitler's 20 The Alternative: An American Spectator February 1977 Chauffeur has been turned into I V/as Lowell ~Veicker's Haberdasher, and there is no end in sight...

...Very smart...

...It was a measure of Dean's unique abilities that, at his tender age, he was given responsibility for the cover-up...

...The events, as Dean recounts them, lead inexorably to the climax: but halfway through, the scene leaves the White House, and the balance of the book is occupied with Dean's problems...

...There will be no more boozy nights wasted at Mo's expense, no more fingernails bitten to the quick, dodged questions, festering knowledge...

...He can get rough with the lowly punks without fear of trampling on legal niceties and he can make a courtly bow to a fine lady, not out of a patronizing sexism, but from a bigness of spirit...

...Grand juries, as Dr...

...But no more...

...It seemed at the time that they served as a purgative for him...

...Using slightly disguised names, I identified Tom McHugh, Dick Coyle, Jimmy Cline, Jimmy Corrigan, and others who used to patronize the pool room over Longley's Lunch in New Haven, with individuals in Farrell's South Chicago retinue...

...He might just as easily have recoiled in horror from the cover-up while he was its mastermind as when he was its terror...

...However, this is a misreading of his films, for they operate on the level of entertainment and positive fantasy...

...Mo bursts into tears again...

...But what is it that makes him so unconvincing, so unlikeable, and why is he a modern hero so characteristic of the age, and so unworthy of praise...

...Well, there are the circumstances under which he finally did tell the truth...

...Over the years be has served as daily book critic for the New York Times, and be is author of Farewell to Reform and The Enterprising Americans...

...And suppose the cover-up had worked...

...So you might think it was Yankee against Italian, only it wasn't...

...And, of course, he did...

...Wherever ambition and mediocrity form their unholy alliance, there the John Deans will be...

...So it was probably inevitable that, as book succeeded book, Farrell's place in American literature came to be taken for granted by critics who ran off to talk about Hemingway, or Fitzgerald, or the proletarian novel, or whatever...

...I grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, one block away from the Italian Oak Street slum...

...Mo, certainly, was sent down by Central Casting...

...Of course, his competition has not been fierce...

...Nobody of consequence objected to Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, or Jim Farrell, as purveyors of the post-genteel criteria of truth...

...No single event since World War II has inspired so massive an onslaught of unworthy books as Watergate...

...I remember the era vividly...

...Thanks to journalism, it seemed so at the time...

...How often have we stood around in mindless boredom, fingering our buttons and staring into space as we await the sacrament administered by Ziegler, Nessen, Powell...

...The Baltimore Sun Join [ ] Irving Kristol [ ] Milton Friedman [] William F. Buckley, Jr...

...He has served both God and Mammon, Rolling Stone and John Mitchell...

...The Irish had the edge on the Italians in those days because they had come to America a generation earlier...

...And Fitzgerald's rhythms 22 The Alternative: An American Spectator February 1977...

...I don't like ethnic politics...

...Believing in nothing, he is prepared m believe in anything, and as surely as his right index finger is wetted and held in the breeze his prodigious memory and insatiable appetite will find some--find any--outlet...

...Philip Terzian is on the staff of the New Republic...

...Would anything but his own skin have compelled him to speak up, and out...

...It is problematical whether the decline and fall of Dick Nixon was, apart from a Presidential first, any sort of station of the cross in American history...

...Johnson might have said, wonderfully concentrate the mind, and it was around them that Dean began to ruminate, in his methodical way, about blind ambition...

...Everyone else was a spectator, really, no more privy to the White House machinations than we the ignorant public...

...Appropriately, he is to be found in the pages of a journal devoted to rock music...

...Remembering the smug insouciance with which questions were treated at the time, it is pleasant to learn of the panicked gyrations around the Oval Office...

...I think so, Charlie," I gulped...

...And John Dean...

...Hemingway's prose was "lean, hard and athletic," but its athletic qualities were those of a gifted wide receiver, not the muscularity of the "toad" who opens holes in the line...

...When I met Studs Lonigan and his friends, I had a sensation that I knew every last one of them...

...He is eager--too eager--to offer Nixonian quirks and revealing anecdotes...

...Realism was taken for granted...

...The younger critics, however, wanted what Dorothy Dudley, in her great Forgotten Frontiers: Dreiser and the Land of the Free, has called "a fused native art...

...parlayed his facility with one language, English, into the fifty books he has had published and the three or four he still has on the back burner...

...He understood nearly too late the depths of dishonor among thieves, and cut his losses while he could...

...The Duke's manner of style and bearing outweighs any current political theory...

...Dean the manipulator and Dean the tactician is the same fellow outside the White House as in...

...How vivid they were: the leering, twitching President, contrite Segretti, pious Magruder, ponderous Mitchell...

...This makes Dean credible, but scarcely worthy...

...And to maintain, of course, that smooth exterior so valued by the Nixon White House ("the tougher it gets the cooler I get...

...His on-screen creation has become so convincing and so ingrained in people's thinking, that his would-be debunkers are themselves prone to the naive belief that the actor really is the Ringo Kid, Tom Dunson, Rooster Cogburn, that he really is capable of scaling up to the roof of a speeding stagecoach to hold off an Indian attack with a blazing Winchester...

...In a way, he has suffered the fate of his great forerunner, Theodore Dreiser, who is part of our literature but not a salient feature of our literary discourse...

...The Brush, maniacal Liddy, Ehrlichman the bearded New Mexico novelist, Strachan, Kalmbach, LaRue, Gray--the quivering bowls of jello--Baker, a snake in snake's clothing...

...How feverishly we tear the copy from the wire, pour the coffee down our throat, tap out the leader, grab that taxi, shove that microphone, run, shout, pursue the glimmering, illusion...

...They were at once confessional and unveiling...

...He has encountered its often horrifying and sometimes tender realities without quibble or distortion...

...But Dean underwent no conversion of the spirit at all...

...It may have been that he was once seduced by the glimmer and blandishments of power, a political acolyte watching in horror as the high priest fumbles and slobbers...

...He has been transformed into the supplicant come to his senses, a victim, as it were, of blind ambition, who spreads before us the sordid mysteries of his past life...

...And as for the unveiling--well, the hearings were only the beginning...

...Our Park Street gang included, besides a Ray Montgomery and a Linwood Tower, a Pole (Sinosky), a Jew (Silver), a German (Zimmerman), a Swede (Swebelius), a black (Clue), and an Irishman (Murray...

...Each has weighed in with a mighty tome, one more turgid than the other, recounting the familiar events from their worm's eye view, celebrating their prescience or grace under pressure, revealing a vignette or two good for a wire-service story...

...His history is the 1970s pilgrim's: his career, such as it is, has wandered from one temptation to another, whoring for whoever or whatever has come along to summon him forth, now this, now that...

...Rock music is similarly a phenomenon of our times--most of its classics are jarring and inarticulate, usually of three to five minutes duration, the fashionable grist of scholars and publicists...

...In a world of shallow events and shallow interpretation, surely everything counts and nothing matters...

...And ultimately, what does this man-myth illusion amount to...

...Even his name has a kind of symbolic simplicity about it--' 'John Dean" rolls so trippingly off the tongue that it could not serve as anything but allegory...

...Dean was the central figure in the tortuous process, from the initial cracks in the cover-up through the damning revelations of the tapes...

...All we remember now are the faces and the voices, and in another generation, perhaps sooner, they will be forgotten, too...

...Housman poem, calls "a world I never made...

...Jim Farrell has preserved his vitality by sticking to his own--the world of the South Chicago Irish who represented the first of those ethnic minorities that our politicos, every second or fourth year, cultivate so assiduously in spite of the theory that we are all Americans together...

...He is the dream of what a single man can do...

...I don't know why Jim Farrell asked me to do the introduction to the Modern Library edition of his Studs Lonigan trilogy (we always seemed to talk baseball when we got together in the New York City of the early thirties), but I leaped at the chance...

...Stuart Sherman, the Illinois professor who hated Dreiser, had replaced the pertinacious Burton Rascoe as editor of the Herald-Tribune Sunday Book Section...

...In times when nothing is permanent, when so much is brought into question, when the trend of one month is likely m become subject for nostalgia in the next, the Duke remains a fixed point of reference, embodying a firm moral stance...

...In speaking out, of course, Dean found his metier, and in between the labored accounts of plea bargaining and criminal statutes a sigh of relief is audible...

...Though I am what I suppose should be called a Yankee, I knew Farrell for real the first time I made the acquaintance of his character Studs Lonigan...

...an opportunity to present his compelling case, to speak the awful truth, to cornea'm, indeed, what was generally thought...

...Box 877, Bloomington, Indiana 47401 Please enter a [] new [] renewal subscription for: [] One year -- $10 [] Two years -- $18 [] Three years -- $25 D Payment enclosed [] Please bill me (please print) Name Address City State Zip 105B The Alternative: An American Spectator February 1977 21 being famous for being famous...

...As his testimony was eagerly awaited and consumed, so has his book (BlindArabition, Simon & Schuster, $11.95) been pounced upon and stamped with authority...

...Our morality plays, it would seem, are just plays after all, and public life just a process of planning and preening...

...Dean breaks into a cold sweat, he pours still another glass of scotch, Mo bursts into tears, Dean straightens his tie and takes it like a man, he feels buoyed, betrayed, abandoned...

...What is its attraction...

...The new fashion exalted Glenway Wescott saying goodbye to Wisconsin in beautiful sentences, e.e...

...We were an ethnic foreign legion...

...Nonsense, to be sure...

...what we resented were the occasional incursions they made on our own turf...

...Tom parlayed his facility at learning languages into a Dante professorship at Yale (Italian was the best of his ten foreign tongues) just as Jim Farrell (he was Danny O'Neill, wasn't he...

...So soon after Watergare's climactic events, what of them today...

...The amazing thing about it is that it shows no loss of ancient skills, no diminution of the ability to project character alive and kicking--mostly kicking--onto the printed page...

...Unlike the protagonist of the Housman poem, Farrell has never been a stranger and afraid in his own world...

...But, oh...

...he knows too well the mean spirit that lurks in all of us, how quickly the benign becomes the malignant...

...John Wayne's true importance may be as a symbol of permanence...

...Are its characters more memorable or more venal than Teapot Dome's, or Grant's cabinet...

...yesterday's villain, today's hero...

...He is a survivor, not a repentant...

...We on Park Street were rivals of those who were ineleJohn Chamberlain, the veteran journalist, is a columnist for King Features Syndicate...

...The Genteel Tradition was dead, by virtue of Mencken's onslaught and Sherman's desertion...

...To apply political definitions to these adventures is inappropriate, because, at their core, they are visions of what should have been, not what necessarily was...

...Dean's demeanor was subdued, almost apologetic...

...Only in recounting his dramatic appearance before the Ervin committee does anything like the authentic voice of Dean come through...

...As few others did, Dean told the truth to the Ervin committee, and was vindicated...

...After all, what is more contemptible, a true believer or a chameleon...

...Those with something to hide, naturally, have had little to say...

...Dean, however, offers the first authoritative, insider's account...

...William E. Simon and thousands of other thoughtful Americans who read the The Alternative...

...Willie Murray was the most imaginative of the bunch: I admired his vocabulary, and had my mouth washed out with soap for bringing some of his words home with me...

...And, undoubtedly, with good reason...

...That is how it seemed, and that, certainly, is how it was played...

...The televised hearings served a dual purpose for Dean...

...John Dean has truly sailed into harbor...

...It is the individual that counts, not the race...

...His version of events must be accepted as reliable, or roughly so...

...Since then John has pursued every profitable avenue, settling at last into his current metamorphosis as journalist...

...Farrell had the misfortune of coming to New York just after Mencken, in his "bulldog" work for Theodore Dreiser, had bested Puritanism as a literary force...

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...beware of those on the side of the angels...

...It is possible with hindsight to see the gathering whirlwind as the cover-up is assembled, but Dean certainly didn't see it, at least not until it threatened to reap him...

...It is all very well to fall down on the road to Damascus, and it is both natural and charitable to c!as p a prodigal son to our forgiving selves...

...We must be inured to it by now, the phenomenon of "The Alternative...

...What was once fodder for our secular sermons, its lessons already collect dust, drop peacefully into restful sleep...

...But novelists deal with what is-and ethnicity is part of the American world which Farrell, in a book title adapted from an A.E...

...He was prompted to change sides by the upheaval of circumstances, not by conversion or remorse...