Editorials/ Worst Books of the Year/Doped/Chef Kroc
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
E D I T O R I A L S WORST BOOKS OF THE YEAR b y R. Emmett T y r r e l l , J r . As years go, 1983 is now a ghost, which means that it is again my privilege to announce the J. Gordon Coogler...
...He seems to have been haunted for over a quarter of a century by "the little cloud which rose out of the deserts of Arabia...
...Possibly they see anger as the path to what the philosophers call the good life...
...These hamburgers have no soybean additives, nor oatmeal, nor any of the other fillers that might tempt less scrupulous hamburger tycoons...
...The Sketch Book still offers refreshing discoveries...
...These books are donkeys that have strayed in Adapted from PET's weekly Washington Post column syndicated by" King Features...
...The indian, says Irving, "is formed for the wilderness as the Arab is for the desert...
...At the moment, as it happens, he is on a golf cart in Palm Springs and when he gets back to THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1984 7 decided to publish The Sketch Book at his own risk...
...For 200 years what seems to have clung to his memory is the smell of success...
...Curiouser and curiouser, it was a family of Muslim Cutchi Memons who gave Gandhi employment in South Africa after he had qualified for the bar in England but could find no work on his return to india...
...He was the Henry Ford of the hamburger and he saw to it that his meticulously chosen franchise -operators were all drilled in their art at his "Hamburger University" in Elk Grove, Illinois where diligence was rewarded with a "Bachelor of Hamburgerology" degree and " a minor in french fries...
...but the idea of extended conquest seems to have been an afterthought...
...their wives might even make the [,'ten best-dressed" list...
...Certainly there will be no objection from me...
...2Summit Books, $19.95...
...He is always hard working and resourceful...
...I'm sure that William French Smith is an awfully nice man, but he is unfortunately the kind of fellow who tends to undermine .interest in the Republican party among the educated classes: the country club lawyer who earns a ton of money, spends an inexplicable amount of time on the golf courses of Palm Springs, and thinks of Washington as a place where you have an opportunity to drive about in a chauffeur-driven limousine if you have the right White House connections-this being thought of in the corporate Tom Betheil is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...Certainly not the Olympics, though he was the youngest boy ever to win his event...
...Through much of his youth he had been one of America's great athletes...
...Why my old friend turned to cocaine I cannot say with certitude...
...American fast food is one of the marvels of our culture...
...If we are far from considering Mahomet the gross and impious imposter that some have represented him, so also are we indisposed to give him credit for vast forecast, and for that deeply concerted scheme of universal conquest which has been ascribed him . . . . Had he, indeed, conceived from the very outset the idea of binding up the scattered and conflicting tribes of Arabia into one nation by a brotherhood o f faith, for the purpose of carrying out a scheme of external conquest, he would have been one of the first military projectors...
...Fasten your seat belts...
...When he tries he usually falls for the crackpot...
...From the perspective of middle age I now look back and recognize that he was from the start "elevated above his peers by extraordinary charm...
...lndeed, until the end of his bicentenary year, the New World's first man of letters was remembered more for his literary "real estate...
...Chef Kroc saw to this...
...All around the world discriminating individuals of reasonable disposition extol it...
...If you don't mind, please, Rt...
...44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1984...
...Some consider it glamorous, and some resort to it when the spirit seems to flag...
...I hope my friend never lost his charm and his laughter, but I know better...
...I n late December one of the most gifted men I have ever known died tragically and mysteriously in California...
...Chef Kroc entitled his autobiography Grinding It Out...
...Even in Paris his McDonald's hamburgers are on duty to serve hurried gastronomes, who gobble them up as gratefully as do the hamburger lovers of Bull Snort, Georgia or historic Des Plaines, Illinois, where the first of his McDonald's hamburger production lines was established in 1955...
...His description comports with the dozing lumps of blissful stupidity so clearly observable among today's habitues of cocaine and all t h e other less celebrated drugs...
...In light of our experience, it was as though Marx were to appear on television live from the Gulag sanguinely prophesying the dictatorship of the proletariat...
...The business prodigy usually confuses mastery of the what for mastery of the why...
...Today our celebrities sell their names, their misadventures, anything that will enrich them...
...We do, however, generally loathe squalor...
...We do not have a proper hatred of illusion...
...As a Washington Post editorial candidly warned on Day One, "Nothing about this transfer is likely to be tranquil...
...CHEF KROC Ray Kroc is gone...
...Both writers are moralists in the modern manner, which is to say they exhibit no set of principles or virtues that any moral philosopher ever heard of would describe as a moral system...
...Gandhi, for all his charismatic qualities, remained (at least as l knew him in our early Congress apprenticeship in India) " a chuckling saint...
...And, in his awakening, Irving celebrates the return of the practical man...
...Perhaps God giggles at prophets, Washington Irving seems to say, because their followers will always...
...The American business prodigy is often a sad case...
...Why can we not deal as rigorously with narcotics as we did with cyclamates and such other allegedly insalubrious items...
...The Justice Department has been and has largely remained under Mr...
...On Day One I read, also in the Washington Post, that Smith "has been praised by many in the administration and in Congress for his stewardship- of day-to-day operations...
...When his friends and relatives paid their last respects they kept repeating "He had everything...
...Rip Van Winkle is the American male seen from abroad, an overgrown child, jolly, comic, likable, essentially immature, through the tragedy of a life slept away, ignorant of wife and the adult world...
...In the opinion of Richard Grenier, the novelist and sage who championed Hersh for this award, Hersh is bullying, unscrupulous, vindictive, self-serving, and hypocritical...
...Nancy Reagan and other worthies campaign against drugs...
...So many of our public values are based on it...
...and they grow more celebrated...
...Of course today in the halcyon days of the Reagan Renaissance these complaints stand exposed for the sour fanaticisms t h a t they are, and the aforementioned senator has been sentenced to three years in the hoosegow for unrelated low deeds...
...He wrote it for the ages...
...And a startlingly revelatory account of both the author and the Art of Bookmaking: Thus, also, do authors beget authors, and having produced a good progeny, in a good old age they sleep with their fathers, that is to say, with the authors who preceded them--and from whom they have stolen...
...More horrible still, Ephron might renounce her vow against trans-New York males and mark me down as her next target for marriage...
...Sleepy Hollow Restorations, Inc., and the Tarrytown Hilton hosted a Bicentennial conference on "Washington Irving, Sunnyside and American Romanticism," including " t h e romantic g a r d e n , " " t h e decorated interior," "romantic villas and cottages"--all heralded by a warning poster that the Headless Horseman Rides Again...
...EDITORIAL (continued from page 7) tain route to illusion and squalor...
...In days of yore some people sold their bodies and were scorned...
...Nonetheless they are avid to condemn their victims for being so shockingly naughty and worthy of contempt...
...Information Agency...
...damn them...
...In these books both authors exhibit such a formidable capacity for rage that I am not about to raise their hackles...
...He died January 14...
...Troubled Americans will have to find a less facile route to ruin, and rogues like the doddering Timothy Leafy will no longer be appearing on national television as he did on the "Today Show" some months ago, laboriously pontificating about his narcoticized utopia...
...Food fanatics denounced the Big Mac in terms more vituperative than they could ever summon against narcotics, and a United States Senator even linked him to the perfidies of the Watergate era...
...Irving's Mahomet was meant to be a general reader, he says...
...The answer is to be found in politics...
...community as the American equivalent of a knighthood...
...Philippics were written about Chef Kroc in the left-wing gazettes, and two of the most singleminded critics even ambushed him with a book, Big Mac: The Unauthorized Story o f McDonaM's...
...Precocity and intelligence had been with him from grade school through college and his early days in business...
...Our Coogler laureates are, then, the authors of celebrated books deemed by our distinguished panel of critics to be least worthy of celebration...
...One also thinks, for example, of his appointment of Charles Wick to head the U.S...
...Why they get so hot under the collar I have no idea...
...Yet his range is very narrow...
...It was not a judgment but a question...
...One wonders, what did this visionary make of the hostility that fizzled and popped against him...
...The drug laws are erratically enforced, and some are not very stringent...
...This was the precise political equivalent of the "bottom line" of profit and loss that the chairman of the board would be worrying about in the corporate sector...
...6 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1984 DOPED A decade or so ago all the progressive cognoscenti were in the ardors for idealizing various drugs: marijuana for the small fry, LSD and the like for the Big Leaguers...
...Yet the immortal J. Gordon Coogler in whose memory our awards are made was probably never the worst poet in America, not even at his most absurd...
...I personally have observed sophisticated British journalists dining in the most venerable of London's gentlemen's clubs and reminiscing wistfully about esurient encounters with Kroc's masterpieces, with Colonel Sanders' poulets, and with other such incomparable viands...
...Two of the four American themes are from German folklore, and two indulge in sepulchral ancestor worship of the Mana-hatta...
...guardians of truth is to be trifled with...
...He was in fact so bad that the Republic's wags celebrated him for just that, and he never caught on...
...Let it be stated before the celebrations begin that in 1983 there probably were worse books published than those we are about to honor...
...Yet you have to be somewhat of a fool not to notice that it is also a cer(continued on page 44) C A P I T O L I D E A S . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . _9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . _9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ed Meese is once again in the news, having been nominated to replace William French Smith as attorney general...
...as though he had no idea there is a war in progress--an ideological one...
...For anyor~e busier than, say, a death row inmate I do not recommend it...
...All were left pondering how and why so gorgeous a life could end so tragically...
...This year The American Spectator is presenting its ninth annual J. Gordon Coogler Awards to Nora Ephron for her novel Heartburn,' and to Seymour M. Hersh for his scholarly study, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House.2 As the latter book has been widely adjudged a piece of fiction and as Ephron's novel is so obviously based on her own life, our laureates might want to exchange awards...
...It has been one of Ronald Reagan's most serious weaknesses as President that he has appointed a number of such people to important jobs in his administration...
...Occasionally he is farseeing, and more often than not he is decent...
...In his Autobiography, Gandhi says that Irving's Mahomet raised "Muhammed in my estimation...
...If ever one of the elite interest groups of the Republic makes the elimination of drugs an issue on its national agenda, drugs and all ambivalent references to them will be gone...
...Recalling the widespread drug addiction that he witnessed at the Egyptian University in the late 1920s, the illustrious English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge writes in his memoirs of "the stupefied faces and inert minds...
...If he fancies himself progressive he merely opens his pocketbook to the ritualistic liberal...
...Why yes, an important one: the reelection of the President...
...At this very moment hundreds of thousands of his toothsome brown patties are hygienically en route from the griddle to the open mouths of expectant customers...
...Yet, as with so many crucial matters about which Americans should be in accord and resolute, we remain ambivalent about eliminating drugs...
...I never saw him blow any challenge...
...The gamble paid...
...The victims of the socalled victimless crimes pile up, but our attempts to eliminate the drug culture are rendered futile by the same people who liberalized our views on drugs years ago...
...Smithwick is too busy for such details...
...He devotes his life to improving and sellisg the widget...
...Few writers have successfully stretched a small talent farther than Washington Irving," a 65-cent pamphlet from the 1970s by a professor of English at Columbia (the university which bestowed on him its first Honorary Master of Arts) states in its opening sentence...
...With prodding from Scott, the leading publishing house of John Murray then issued it in two lush volumes, and edition after edition raked a profit of more than s in one year...
...Rather he was the worst of the Republic's celebrated poets...
...Ephron sets out to portray l~er second husband as a jackass, and it is suggestive of her prodigious tastelessness that though she succeeds she makes herself look worse...
...Ephron's artistry is different...
...Neither of these fierce 'Alfred A. Knopf, $11.95...
...The phrase italicized by Irving is the only one thus highlighted in this work of a historian as a Haft, or pilgrim...
...Working solo or in alliance with scientists he has done more to improve American life than the politician, the professor, or practically any other species of working American...
...Therapy centers are established to rehabilitate the basket cases...
...What is more, he could orchestrate brilliant moments of hilarity, for his sense "of humor, too, was uncommon...
...Grenier estimates that he should have charged $200 per hour just for reading the book...
...He vigilantly patrolled what became a string of 7,500 outlets, claiming annual sales of over eight billion dollars and employing well over 130,000 people by the early 1980s...
...Even academics treated his mammoth work, which went into forty editions, with a bemused spooky disdain...
...One of the cant terms used to sanitize the drug issue was "victimless crime...
...She is a celebrity who dips into the heroic moments of her life and merchants them for all her fans...
...There were grumbles, always from those ideological opportunists who claim to speak for the consumer and the common man even as they advance a dozen other of their left-wing panaceas...
...though often even these sources rebel, as did former U.S...
...In everything he was a success, and he was rarely frivolous, for under his charm and All-American good looks there was grit...
...It was completed in 1849, before he devoted himself solely to the five-volume Life o f Washington, finished in 1859...
...His controversial golden arches, however, endure from sea to shining sea and in nearly a dozen foreign countries...
...and the journey is being expedited every step of the way by smiling young people freshly turned out in colorful McDonald's livery...
...Nonetheless drugs are used widely and with a certain social cachet...
...Ambassador to Chile Edward Korry, who calls Hersh " a consistent liar" and more...
...The ardors have now been spent...
...What is it that both these books lack...
...In artsy craftsy communitieshis golden arches were deemed as abhorrent as nuclear power plants, though the white walls, the plate glass, and the pipe railings of Richard Meier raise few mutters...
...Certainly, it is his most polemical work, unusual for a writer given l o elegant ambiguities, and totally devoid of humor...
...Hersh accuses Kissinger of most of the very same low deeds that he himself commits...
...but my guess is that to the very end this notable entrepreneur was without a clue as to the nature of the assault upon him...
...In fine and in sum it is dignity, which, I suppose, explains why they were so celebrated to begin with...
...This is still only Day Two, as I write, but one senses a hostile media swarm shaping up in the coming weeks...
...At the beginning, charm was one of his calamities...
...These people in turn understood that this meant they would have a deferential retinue and a limousine, and photographers from the society pages would take pictures of them as they set off for the theater in the evening...
...Hersh's idea of reliable sources on Kissinger are those who have gone on record as loathing him...
...That was Mary Thornton's way of telling us that Smith, his cronyship notwithstanding, had been considered Hive-harmless...
...Gandhi had also read another Scottish writer, Thomas Carlyle, on the "Hero as Prophet...
...Fpr all it is a sweet escape...
...If you tell him that Aristotle or the Founding Fathers had a sounder grasp on matters he impatiently turns away and builds a million dollar institute to refine and popularize his personal monomania...
...Yet he remains unloved and generally unlovable...
...Today his family is baffled and grieving...
...Ultimately he became the greatest springboard diver in the world...
...Hersh's idea of o r*l~~ source on the Paris neg s ending the war in Vietnam is t-~ ~,ve "~ government crowd in Hanoi, wh~ he went in August 1979 and reporteu 'there is no gap in Vietnam between the life of the people and the life of the officials...
...I personally recall a distinguished professor--so distinguished in fact that Playboy magazine quoted him regularly--who pontificated to his students on the benign qualities of LSD...
...In the end he had lost practically everything but the fidelity of his family...
...Ephron's very bad book was inspired by the infidelities Of her second husband...
...I doubt that the charm and humor were there in the end...
...Reagan seemed to regard the filling of such important posts as nothing more than a chance by Tom Bethell to reward some of his rich California friends...
...If he fancies himself a patriot he goes off on his own, writing doggerel to free enterprise or confecting some simple-minded theory for explaining the pathway to the American Dream...
...Okay, but were there no actual policy goals to aim for--government programs to be developed, changed, or abolished...
...Was there no political goal to be attained, in the mind of his Cronyship, Lord Smithwick, you may wonder...
...So they will attack, unless I am much mistaken...
...J THE J. GORDON COOGLER AWARDS Heartburn L.6b 9 by Nora Ephron The Price o f Power: ~/) ~ Kissinger in the Nixon White House b y Seymour M. Hersh with the show horses, and if other judges have failed to note their pathetic condition here is but another manifestation of the hard times into which American letters have fallen since the great days of Coogler...
...I t might yet, in retrospect, be one of Irving's later biographies, Mahomet and his Successors, a two-volume narrative of "the life and founder of the Islam faith," which will remain his most intriguing work...
...He, too, believed in only one god...
...Of course the salary wasn't so hot, but they already had more than enough money, most of them...
...In fine, as with So many other progressive enthusiasms that came out of the 1960s, though we have learned from experience the progressives are still around to prevent us from acting upon our bitter knowledge...
...He died eight months afterwards, on November 28...
...It was this least known of his works, however, which Gandhi (who probably read not more than a dozen books in his life) was attracted by during his early days of political organization in South Africa...
...he, too, was deeply aware that it is our humanity, our mortality, that consecrates our faith...
...Once again George Nathan's maxim is vindicated: "Whom the gods would destroy they first make famous...
...He and they are just so many more victims of the last decade's victimless crimes: Cocaine had been one of the small congeries of calamities associated with his name toward the end of his life...
...E D I T O R I A L S WORST BOOKS OF THE YEAR b y R. Emmett T y r r e l l , J r . As years go, 1983 is now a ghost, which means that it is again my privilege to announce the J. Gordon Coogler Awards given annually by The American Spectator in recognition of the year's worst books of fiction and nonfiction...
...As a nation we are not serious about drugs...
...Smith's tenure a strategic cell of the Hive, and the bees certainly don't want it to be occupied by someone who "sends the wrong signals...
...Hersh's was inspired by infidelities committed by Henry Kissinger when he was in cahoots with Richard Milhous Nixon of baleful memory...
...May they Rest in Peace...
...Nonetheless he was not unanimously honored in his lifetime...
...What is worse, he is a composer of tedious prose...
...Yet Chef Kroc was the most innovative of all fast food tycoons, and he demanded quality at reasonable prices...
...Usually he has no sense of the larger forces shaping his life and little inclination to affect them...
...Hersh might uncover evidence of my involvement in some nefarious plot against progress, say complicity in the doom of the sainted Salvador Allende, or he might expose one of my tragic flaws after sifting through the contents of my garbage cans...
...Ed Meese, don your beekeeper's mask...
Vol. 17 • March 1984 • No. 3
