The White House Mess
Buckley, Christopher
THE WHITE HOUSE MESS Christopher Buckley/Alfred A. Knopf/$16.95 R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. HOME VIDEO believes, it should be necessary or desirable to impose on it the marriage bond. Nor does his...
...Herbert Wadlough, accountant, factotum to the governor of the great state of Idaho, and finally deputy chief of staff to President Thomas N. Tucker, Ronald Reagan's successor (if Christopher Buckley has anything to say about it...
...Then they pass on...
...36 minutes.injury on numerous occasions for his devotion to the commonweal and to the Tucker legend...
...And their personalities are revealed in all their attributes, both bodily and mental...
...When someone up there whispers `be careful' to a convict, or a member of a jury, this is not the same as when your mom says `be careful.' " No, College Hill was not Federal Hill, and never for long are those particular twain going to intertwine...
...Wadlough is confined to hospital with "contusions of the forehead, a fractured clavicle and a ruptured plantaris...
...However: today's paper—March 13, 1986—reports that some Brown coeds have been busted as part of a prostitution ring, which strikes me as the closest amalgamation of town ethos and gown ethos I've ever heard of, considerably more realistic than the schemes of "community involvement" Brown students used to talk about in the early seventies...
...as when Mrs...
...Flight attendants bat-ter him mercilessly...
...About the Providence we Brownies went into a couple of times a year...
...Before, that is, they blew off the rest of the semester: Cambodia, Kent State—the Strike...
...This tells you something about the difference between Yale and Brown in those days...
...Some of them put up Panther sup-porters in their dorm rooms...
...as ill-fated gridiron star George Gipp, whom Rockne quotes, UNCUT, in Gipp's famous farewell, "WIN JUST ONE FOR THE GIPPER" © 1940 Warner Bros...
...Larry McMurtry...
...I slavedaway on that project for several hours of a summer afternoon...
...Then there is the time when the President telephoned whilst Wadlough was showering...
...The Backer presidency was not a success...
...He attempted all the wimp gimmicks of the New Age Progressive, and he was rendered absurd and futile...
...He is discussed brilliantly in John Bayley's The Characters of Love, which does not appear in Scruton's lengthy and exotic bibliography...
...Here then is a love that is wholly a decision, and wholly real, because its object is neither a projection of the lover's imagination nor a temporarily imprisoned spirit but a distinct, unique, existing personality...
...Why the young man kneed him in-advertently I cannot fathom...
...Yet that regard for individuality is associated with a rejection of the belief that human beings have a divided nature, and with—what is an implication of that belief—an insistence that sexual behavior is necessarily part of moral conduct...
...This was indeed a low point, but there are so many others, my favorite being when, to mollify a world-wide outcry against President Backer's use of harmless sleep-inducing gas against Bermudian revolutionaries, Wadlough is gassed on the "Today Show" to demonstrate Yale University alumni between 34 and 38 will remember the spring of 1970 for the trial of Bobby Seale in downtown New Haven...
...But Scruton's idea of a civil society is nothing more than an ex-tended tribe, with "the state" its chieftain issuing commands to regulate the lives of his subjects...
...No longer are they the celebrated figures on the Washington cocktail circuit...
...Some are indicted...
...started going there, before Amy Carter started sitting in in the ad-ministration building against apartheid...
...That tradition emphatically rejects the view that he attributes to both conservatives and Aristotle, that the polls is founded upon "a perception of the nature of domestic relations and of the erotic bond which underlies them...
...In short, the reader in search of an answer to permissiveness that shows proper regard for individuality would do much better to read Jane Austen or Anthony Trollope than Roger Scruton...
...At best, he offers a sado-masochistic solution to the mind-body problem...
...There is the time the President's young son inadvertently knees him in his private parts...
...Wad-lough is a man who has suffered bodily R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Seizing the moment, Tucker's PR experts turn the fall into a feat of Backerian heroism and announce that it was Backer who saved Wad-lough...
...Nothing could be further from either Aristotle's polis or the British constitution...
...They fret over corner offices, parking spaces for themselves and their staffs, White House mess permits, and other such immensities...
...This English view of love is minutely explored, though in different ways, by both Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope, among others...
...he's talking about...
...Our own Ronald Reagan has employed them, and recently he has suffered on account of their petty shenanigans...
...A philosophical exploration of this tradition would be able to show how sexuality can be reconciled with morality...
...Backer's seaside fall takes place during his idiotic reelection campaign, a campaign that put me in mind of Jimmy Carter's last great venture into mass seduction...
...For the immortal Wadlough there are only discomfitures and misadventures...
...Had Scruton taken a more serious interest in religion he might have noticed that the Christian idea of love has suggested the pattern of a genuine reconciliation of sexuality with morality...
...Running time 1 hour...
...On Capitol Hill and in each presidential administration such amusing stoneheads are plentiful...
...This is an extraordinary reading of Aristotle, who unmistakably defines the polls as a form of association distinct from and independent of the relationships of family and tribe...
...Knightley insists on teaching Emma to correct her faults just because he loves her...
...In an agelastic city Buckley has written a very amusing book about the misogelastic toadies...
...They are not the victims of their bodies because they necessarily choose how to interpret and respond to whatever sensations they experience...
...Nor does his eulogy of marriage take account of the exchange of vows and the idea of a contract that is central in the traditional marriage ceremonies...
...A dutiful maid thrust the telephone into the shower, nearly electrocuting him and leaving him sprawled across the bathroom floor bruised, bleeding, and, of course, bereft of his glasses...
...Finally there is the time that the wretch—dubbed "Auntie Herbert" by the White House staff—is summoned to accompany President Backer on one of his seaside walks...
...Castro befools him, and the revolutionary leader of Bermuda creates a genuine threat to national security...
...Wad-lough deserved it...
...A lover of this sort is to be found throughout English literature, from Chaucer on...
...Geoffrey Wolff is best known for his biographies of the wacked-out poet Harry Crosby (Black Sun) and his own philandering dad (The Duke of Deception), but from PROVIDENCE Geoffrey Wolff/Viking-Elisabeth Sifton Books/$16.95 Thomas Mallon 48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1986...
...Read it and you will recognize some of the giants of recent times...
...We never, so far as I remember, went to Federal Hill, which Geoffrey Wolff knows about and which was populated by the ethnic group from which the Governor of New York State descends...
...Professor Scruton misleads the reader not only about sex and morality but also about politics...
...Pictures: 1966 United Artists Corporation, all rights reserved...
...It was cool...
...Big of the whole New England Mafia, a guy to whom Skull and Bones meant skulls and bones, not some club...
...Following in the hoof prints of thousands of other would-be Harry Hopkinses and Harold Ickeses, this Wadlough has come to Washington to serve his master and his cartoon vision of history...
...no restoratives were allowed me until the last word of the last page of the last preposterous book...
...Of course his glasses fell off...
...This one takes place along slippery rocks beside raging waters and ends with the President falling head first to certain death were his fall not broken by the hapless Wadlough crawling beneath him...
...That quotation is from Geoffrey Wolff, who's just written the great Providence novel—not about "rich-bitch Brownies" on Thayer Street, but about the rest of that "runt town of 156,000," that tight little gear box of hoods and lawyers and judges and small-timers that's still not so different from the way it was in 1970...
...Boston...
...For he is not, as he claims to be, a conservative, certainly not a conservative of the English sort...
...Once on the ground he is arrested and reluctant White House personnel have to go down to the lock-up to spring him...
...The violence occurred in the executive quarters of the White House itself, and there the First Lady bashed him to the floor, pinned him behind a door ("I could hear her exertions on the other side as she leaned against the door, at-tempting, I would guess, to inhibit the flow of oxygen into my lungs"), and belabored him about the calves and shins with her shoes ("I was grateful she was not wearing high heels...
...Name Address City State Zip Telephone Please specify: VHS Beta Check one: Payment enclosed...
...Anyway, Geoffrey Wolff has dropped me off on memory lane...
...Wolff describes things a little differently than we would have"The bakery was within handgun range of Atwells Avenue"—but he makes me remember a lot of the streets Thomas Mallon teaches English at Vassar College and is the author of A Book of One's Own...
...Ronald Reagan's most famous role...
...Christopher Buckley has created a comic figure comparable in grandeur to the Ignatius Reilly of John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces...
...the benign nature of the vapors...
...But let me tell you: if WJAR, and the Bark's Head Building, and Almacs super-markets and dee-jay "Salty" Brine (all in this novel) set off not one bell, nor crumble for you a single Proustian cookie, you should still buy this novel because it's probably the best one that's going to come out in America in 1986...
...On the Eastern shuttle he hears that his President has been shot, begs to use the plane's radio, and is immediately identified as a crank...
...In-to every award banquet the presidential aides roll Wadlough, now con-fined to a wheelchair...
...I was a freshman at Brown that year...
...He relies on his glasses, thick ones, ------------------------Only $ 39.95 ORDER NOW...
...VISA ^ Mastercard ^ American Express Asst 1 Sup f)ate Signature ASP JSE Classics THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1986 47 which fog up in time of strenuous exertion and fall off in time of danger...
...IL 60007 See the "Gipper" in Knute Rockne - All American Starring Ronald Reagan as George Gipp and Pat O'Brien as Knute Rockne...
...We had our strike, of course, but we had a trial, too...
...The love that ties God and man in the Christian picture does not rest on any unity or identity between them since God is a wholly different kind of being from man...
...But no such new moral understanding, nor indeed any coherent understanding, is to be found in Scruton's book...
...It postulates that human beings are not, as Scruton believes, divided selves or at most spiritualized animals, but wholly unified intelligent beings whose rational experience includes a variety of kinds of perceptions...
...There was a big one that went on in the courthouse down the hill...
...is editor-in-chief of The American Spectator...
...Thomas N. Tucker assaulted him while wielding a chintz pillow with "surprising force...
...The object of God's love is not any part of any man, nor the species as a whole, but each person, in all his individuality, as an independent substance...
...Now, with education reigning over us like an established church, our society is suffused with stupidity and mediocrity unimaginable a few decades ago, even in jerkwater...
...In The House of Intellect Jacques Barzun, writing in the late 1950s, warned of the dangers that modern education posed to the mind...
...Upon retreating from her enraged presence, Wadlough is summoned downstairs to the Oval Office, and there he promptly impales himself on one of his President's favorite objets d'art, Frederick Hart's "Javelin...
...But those places are out, and Providence is in...
...Black and white...
...My friends and I once or twice forayed into Manny Almeida's Ringside lounge ("Where You Meet the Leading Sports Figures of the World," the sign said, meaning, I think, guys who used to wrestle in South Attleboro...
...It is true that conservatives emphasize that we must draw on the re-sources of civilization in order to cultivate and appreciate individuality, and that these resources are made avail-able to us by the traditions and institutions of our communal life...
...I prefer to charge this purchase to...
...Before Brown stopped being the backwater of the Ivy League and got chic, which is to say before Cosima von Billow started going there, which is to say years before her father (allegedly) sent her mommy on "that long journey to napland...
...More intelligent readers will only note that Wadlough bled a lot, while we laughed...
...Wadlough is afflicted by allergies, a weak constitution (he prefers a steaming cup of hot water to strong matutinal coffees or teas), and dim vision...
...In reducing human individuality to an illusion arising out of social life and resting ultimately on the force exercised by the state, Scruton is at odds with the distinctive moral and political tradition of England...
...Add $4 III) shipping and handling California residents add !r :"L Sales Tax JSE Classics 700 Chase Elk Grove...
...West Texas...
...Manny's had a separate ladies' entrance, and we thought Diane Johnson was a great girl to put up with that in 1972...
...For conservatives, his book may serve as a test of their ability to recognize and resist siren voices...
...Scruton has no sympathy for the importance attached to human individuality in British political practice and philosophical thought...
...Through the pages of this splendid tome walk many of the greatest figures of our capital city, a city that is proud to call itself "The Most Important City in the World...
...The President is presented with scores of good samaritan awards from the Republic's scores of do-gooder organizations...
...Now, as an amused Tacitus, he returns, and in creating the memoir of Wadlough he has written one of the most hilarious books on Washington ever to come to my attention, and I once read every memoir written by the immortal memoirists of the Carter administration...
...It is rather an appreciation of a distinct kind of being, which rests not on approval or admiration but on a will to love...
...I never went to Yale...
...He is therefore nothing like Scruton's obsessively possessive lover—Jane Austen's Mr...
...Priscilla will be proud...
...Readers of refined sensibility will find his suffering sycophantic and repellent...
...This was Brown before JFK, Jr...
...Since the object of their love is a real person, not an illusion, and since this sort of lover is the maker of his love, not a victim of it, he can choose to take into account moral as well as other considerations without destroying his love...
...Of course, vows are not easily exchanged between metaphysical illusions...
...Similarly, the idea that runs through all of British political practice, as well as philosophy, is that civil association is distinguished by its ability, which is in-deed its justification, to contain within itself a variety of other forms of association...
...But Scruton is saying something very different, that the "human person" is an "artefact" of "collective endeavour," that is to say, not a reality resident in every human being...
...In this view, if men behave like beasts it is not because their bodies have taken over but because they have chosen to adopt the behavior of beasts...
...You want Baltimore, go to Anne Tyler...
...Ours wasn't for a Panther, it was for Raymond Patriarca, the Mr...
...This is the memoir of the unfortunate Mr...
...When Christopher Buckley, Priscilla Buckley's nephew, served as speech-writer to Vice President George Bush he collected every telling detail of high political life, carefully pasting them in-to his notebooks...
...They are, while they last, renowned Machiavels, held in awe by the pols and the journalists alike...
...Now begins what Wadlough himself calls his time of "public humiliation...
...Federal Hill...
...James Carroll...
...Herbert Wadlough is the kind of precious boob whose eminence would never take him beyond jerkwater in any age but our own gorgeous era, an era when mass education puffs up mil-lions, educating them beyond their means and booting them up with a software of high-flown patois to conceal their essential oafishness...
Vol. 19 • June 1986 • No. 6
