Fall in and Cheer
Coyne, John R. Jr.
BOOK REVIEW Fall in and Cheer John R.Coyne, Jr. / Doublcday /. $8.95 R.Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. In America today there is a clutch of writers whose metier is a hybrid of reportage and fiction and...
...Here he has performed a public service and deserves a drink on the house...
...At times he tries.to believe in these jackasses...
...Washington, D.C...
...This older writing tryout spent a good deal of time wandering around near her desk, where he engaged in a peculiar habit...
...John Coyne's name does not stagger forth...
...Sucli people frighten the literate...
...It is amusing, eccentric, lacerating, accurate...
...I stand ready to buy a dozen copies of his next book, in hopes of making up in sojne small way for the conservatives who never will buy enough of Coyne's books to make him celebrated...
...But these writers do focus on politics as it is understood in...
...But whatever the problem, it finally proved too much...
...Without readers he will always be on the short end of money and editors...
...in the end he tells the truth and slinks off to the airport bar...
...Being friendly has its occasional costs...
...pronounced "holo-.caust" as "holy coast...
...They do not, however, have much staying power, and after a book or two theyjretire to the gin mills or to secure berths pn some remote, albeit toney, college faculty...
...In Fall in and Cheer, Coyne recollects his years as a graduate student at Berkeley, and then as a speechwriter for Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon, and Gerald (Jerry) Ford...
...and their good sense...
...Coyne sees the burst blood vessels around their noses and hears their wheezing...
...In American politics what else is there to report...
...better...
...And for those wishing to meet a genuine Ford speechwriter, consider this: There was the would-be writer who briefly occupied Pat Buchanan's handsome old office...
...As he states in his new book, Fall in and cheer, he was not in sympathy with the 1960s " assault on traditional values...
...And for him to gain readers, the reading audience in America will either have to shift to the right or the liberals will have to acquire the broad values of latiju-dinarianism-an acquisition most unlikely...
...A Ford crony gathers the erstwhile Nixon speech-writers about him and essays the problem: Ford, he told-us very seriously, suffered something be called "swimmer's breath"....Further, ...Ford had trouble with long or unfamiliar words or phrases, tending to get them tangled in his tongue...
...Names like Larry L. King, Marshall Frady, Joe McGinnis, and Timothyl Chnise stagger before my mind's eye, then jthey arc gone...
...His treatment of the Ford administration typifies his art...
...Until then, he has this problem: Liberals do not often read conservatives, and conservatives do not often read...
...He begins with Nixon and he ends explaining weird phenomena like Jerry Brown and the Wonderboy...
...In America today there is a clutch of writers whose metier is a hybrid of reportage and fiction and whose focus is politics...
...I do not mean to say that these writers...
...He tries to explain what happened in American politics during those years...
...The less explanation of them the...
...He should be flying around the country right now, observing the pols in action as they spray themselves in nauseating cologne, plant wet kisses on innocent babes, down surf 'n turf, annoy waitresses, and participate in all the wondrous revels that compose statecraft as practiced in the Great Republic...
...To be sure his writing has vigor, sauciness, and street-smart acuity, but, alas, he is conservative...
...When they narrate, and restrain their schoolmarm's urge to pontificate and explicate, they also often instruct...
...praised the "ethnic of honest work" in New Hampshire...
...Ford's problems with words were to : become legendary, as when he mentioned the disease "sickle cell Armenia...
...he conveys the essences of out pols merely by reporting on the surface of things...
...There was a meeting in which Coyne was apprised of Jerry's problems with the mother tongue...
...Nevertheless, they amuse, and while iirttifeir salad days they are eminences of the-first water, often showing up at significant dinner parties, on the talk shows, and in popular journalistic forums...
...His performance is not flawless...
...Perhaps he had trouble keeping his shirt tucked in...
...The girl burst into tears...
...He is one of those friendly American voices that Orwell listened for...
...That would Ue asking too much...
...As he talked to her he'd unzip his trousers, then make various careful readjustments: Perhaps it was just an unconscious habit...
...to them politics |is gossip about power, and this awesome gossip they ponder most studiously.They write with cleverness and a swagger...
...Yet, as I say, Coyne may never gain the celebrity he deserves...
...At least," she sobbed, "Mr...
...Buchanan was a gentleman...
...Yet I forgive him this sin...
...Fall in and Cheer abounds with such anecdotes, all of which compose a gorgeous montage of American politics...
...referred to the "great people of Israel" in a toast to Anwar Sadat...
...Joe McGinnis' customers would find that astonishing, yet now that the Cambodians arid the North Vietnamese have shown their prosaic side, Joe's customers know not where to turn...
...Still, Coyne is no fool...
...If they decide to like America, Coyne's fame will be assured...
...Not that Coyiiejis a wowser-he is too full of fun forthat But Coyne frankly likes Americans, He likes their prejudices, their asininitifes...
...introduced Elliot Richardson as "Elliot Roosevelt...
...He was assigned a secretary, young and attractive, who had frequently filled in for the regular secretaries in various writers' offices, among them Buchanan's...
...For one thing, he is of sounder mind than the aforementioned More importantly, the audience that buys McGinnis would not buy Coyne...
...these exegeses I am not grateful...
...He was bad-mouthing Buchanan, as he liked to dp, and had- gone through the zipper routine...
...focus on politics in all its depth and significance...
...Yet Coyne also wants to convey the flavor of the era, and to offer us the pols as he saw them, drenched in sweat and democratic grandeur...
Vol. 12 • April 1979 • No. 4
