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...
...focus on politics in all its depth and significance...
...This older writing tryout spent a good deal of time wandering around near her desk, where he engaged in a peculiar habit...
...in the end he tells the truth and slinks off to the airport bar...
...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...
...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...
...Coyne sees the burst blood vessels around their noses and hears their wheezing...
...I do not mean to say that these writers...
...There was a meeting in which Coyne was apprised of Jerry's problems with the mother tongue...
...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...
...At least," she sobbed, "Mr...
...His performance is not flawless...
...to them politics |is gossip about power, and this awesome gossip they ponder most studiously.They write with cleverness and a swagger...
...Perhaps he had trouble keeping his shirt tucked in...
...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...
...Buchanan was a gentleman...
...Not that Coyiiejis a wowser-he is too full of fun forthat But Coyne frankly likes Americans, He likes their prejudices, their asininitifes...
...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...
...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...
...better...
...referred to the "great people of Israel" in a toast to Anwar Sadat...
...Still, Coyne is no fool...
...he conveys the essences of out pols merely by reporting on the surface of things...
...But whatever the problem, it finally proved too much...
...and their good sense...
...In America today there is a clutch of writers whose metier is a hybrid of reportage and fiction and whose focus is politics...
...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...
...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...
...Yet, as I say, Coyne may never gain the celebrity he deserves...
...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...
...As he states in his new book, Fall in and cheer, he was not in sympathy with the 1960s " assault on traditional values...
...John Coyne's name does not stagger forth...
...It is amusing, eccentric, lacerating, accurate...
...He tries to explain what happened in American politics during those years...
...As he talked to her he'd unzip his trousers, then make various careful readjustments: Perhaps it was just an unconscious habit...
...pronounced "holo-.caust" as "holy coast...
...In American politics what else is there to report...
...At times he tries.to believe in these jackasses...
...For one thing, he is of sounder mind than the aforementioned More importantly, the audience that buys McGinnis would not buy Coyne...
...His treatment of the Ford administration typifies his art...
...Without readers he will always be on the short end of money and editors...
...introduced Elliot Richardson as "Elliot Roosevelt...
...Ford's problems with words were to : become legendary, as when he mentioned the disease "sickle cell Armenia...
...If they decide to like America, Coyne's fame will be assured...
...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...
...Fall in and Cheer abounds with such anecdotes, all of which compose a gorgeous montage of American politics...
...Yet I forgive him this sin...
...Names like Larry L. King, Marshall Frady, Joe McGinnis, and Timothyl Chnise stagger before my mind's eye, then jthey arc gone...
...He was bad-mouthing Buchanan, as he liked to dp, and had- gone through the zipper routine...
...Here he has performed a public service and deserves a drink on the house...
...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...
...Sucli people frighten the literate...
...these exegeses I am not grateful...
...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...
...praised the "ethnic of honest work" in New Hampshire...
...That would Ue asking too much...
...Being friendly has its occasional costs...
...The less explanation of them the...
...Washington, D.C...
...He is one of those friendly American voices that Orwell listened for...
...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...
...The girl burst into tears...
...But these writers do focus on politics as it is understood in...
Vol. 12 • April 1979 • No. 4
