Editorials/Cheers!/Woodward Unveiled/A Grand Lady
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
WOODWARD UNVEILED After sober reflection, I think we can all agree that there is something obsessive about a reporter who would inveigle his way into the hospital room of a terminally ill patient,...
...At Princeton University on September 29, Robert Gates, deputy director of Central Intelligence, confirmed "we had several security officers looking after Mr...
...Surely Newsweek would not apply wimp to a New Age helpmate, a maker of fresh breads, a warm, sensitive male willing to show his emotions when the going gets tough...
...The Mass was that beautiful...
...Luce was beautiful...
...That so few Washington commentators have expressed repugnance at Bob Wood-ward's boast of having stolen into Central Intelligence Director William J. Casey's hospital room as the old man went through his last agonies testifies to the stunted moral sense of most of my colleagues...
...It would have been hilarious, but perhaps not quite proper for a woman of 83 to be teasing the stuffed shirts of our foreign-policy establishment...
...He has spent two decades in public life...
...She was art, and the art endured through eight decades as her wisdom and sense of the absurd grew with her...
...She was constructed of tougher stuff.sidering the pressure Woodward was under, I am sure any competent therapist would say, "It's true for you, Bob...
...The months had worn on, but Clare never flagged in her devotion...
...At the time, Washington's current wisdom had it that Casey knew the details of the diversion...
...What he may be is a man fully equipped to step in where Clare Boothe Luce's generation left off...
...Casey twenty-four hours a day every day that he was in the hospital...
...He was indeed in a hell of a mess...
...With her death following so soon upon the death of her great friend Bill Casey, it is every day apparent that the conservatives are losing the illustrious generation that emerged from World War II ardent to confront the perils of the postwar period and to create the movement in defense of liberty that elected a President in 1980...
...With his usual mix of audacity and zealousness, he had expendedyears gathering up word of every secret operation undertaken during Casey's tenure...
...Casey's room at all times, and that the room was close to the nurses' pool in easy view of the staff...
...The man who has studied this lifelong anti-Communist for years asks him why he aided the contras...
...The leadership of this generation has now devolved to those in their sixties...
...There were her stories about the years with Henry Luce, the years as American ambassador to Italy, the later years when along with Bill Buckley she was a major conservative voice and strategist...
...Woodward asks the first question...
...Woodward simply did not have the story...
...I personally know that his speech by then was more often a pathetic gurgling than diction...
...Yet despite all these improbabilities, Bob Wood(continued on page 106) EDITORIALS (continued from page 11) ward insists that the story is true...
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...Over espresso, she laid out her closely argued positions on present dangers...
...Before Meese's press conference there was never a word of the diversion in the Washington Post...
...ConA GRAND LADY New York In St...
...One of these officers stood by his door, and the other stood near his room with a view of the door and of adjacent hallways...
...He tells us with no trace of shame that some time toward the end of last January, six or so weeks after a cancerous tumor was removed from Casey's brain and as word circulated through Washington that Casey was in a hell of a state, he conspired to enter the man's hospital room for one last interview...
...The tests ahead will tell all...
...Most normal people would be afraid of the harm they might do, for instance, disrupting a life support system or bringing such alarm to the patient as to cause pain or even death...
...And what does one make of his next question...
...So Newsweek applies the term to Bush for no better reason than he is a gentleman...
...Based on whatever account one reads, by late January Casey was speaking with enormous difficulty, if at all...
...But Newsweek magazine on its cover of October 19 worries that George Bush might be a wimp...
...Men and women half her age were sorely pressed to keep up with her, and in the most demanding departments of life they usually had to concede...
...But then Clare...
...Anyone who would claim it had to be obsessed...
...And then over brandy she concocted a stupendous practical joke to be played out at the expense of a renowned foreign-policy institution whose politics are not hers but whose officers would gladly accept a gigantic bequest from the estate of Clare Boothe Luce...
...All Woodward would say was that to describe Casey's position would reveal the identity of his coconspirator...
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...Casey's wife says that either she or her 10 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 daughter were in Mr...
...On "Nightline' lbd Koppel asked him...
...Luncheons: $45...
...Woodward insists that he overcame all these barriers...
...Those are the facts...
...Mencken, to appraise the Roman Catholic Church as his favorite religion owing to the beauty of its ceremonies...
...But lucidity suddenly reappears when Woodward delivers the one crucial question that has goaded him to this final ghoulish act...
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...He says that he did, but O offers no evidence...
...But Woodward was in the last stages of a massive book on Casey's role in alleged CIA skullduggery...
...Why did the city'sboldest investigative reporter not ask if the President knew...
...Washington's burning question was did the President know...
...and there are more...
...He feels he is prepared to lead the country and his conservative allies after the manner of those who have gone before him...
...O he r did he...
...Last January I had a small dinner party for her, high in the expectation that she would be heartened by the presence of younger conservatives such as Secretary of the Navy John Lehman and Arms Control Director Kenneth Adelman, members of a generation now in middle-age, who soon will be carrying on the defense of freedom that she and her generation managed so resolutely...
...Now this is bad fiction...
...He turned his back on the comforts of East Coast privilege after the war to become an entrepreneur in the remote towns of West Texas...
...But were this book to have no reference to the fabulous diversions, it might sink from sight...
...The day after Clare was buried George Bush stepped forward, declaring his readiness to run for the presidency and to carry on the conservatives' moment in history...
...Indeed she was the inspiration...
...Reviewers will duly reveal the clunkers in the months ahead...
...Ambassador Vernon Walters, William E Buckley, Jr., and other mourners, listened to the music, and sniffed the incense, he might have forsaken Bach for Rome...
...So how did the conversation go...
...Compassionate readers will forgive Woodward his coarseness...
...It is an improbable story...
...The company that night may have inspired her, but it did not daunt her...
...Reflect on that...
...But he does not tell us what the room was like or Casey's position in it...
...I believed . . . I believed," is the ghostly reply, then sleep comes to the Director...
...WOODWARD UNVEILED After sober reflection, I think we can all agree that there is something obsessive about a reporter who would inveigle his way into the hospital room of a terminally ill patient, hoping against all odds to wrest some momentous corpus delicti from the dying man...
...Woodward...
...Yet according to Woodward's book there was a rather lively conversation, Casey asking how the book was going, Casey pondering the immensities of life or something Woodward's rendering is unclear...
...How helpless was Casey then...
...On the other hand, we know these facts...
...The other day, had he stood with former President Richard Nixon, U.N...
...Yet, return to Mr...
...Clare, though frail with age, flew back and forth to New York to be with her...
...Then, just as he is about to hand his fmdings over to his publisher, Ed Meese pops up before the cameras and microphones and reveals an operation completely missed by Woodward's investigative prodigies: the diverson of profits from arms sales into the coffers of the contras...
...Moreover, Woodward had a terrible problem...
...Surely Woodward realized in those last days that he.was handing his publisher a sausage of a book filled with factual stories and with some very dubious ones...
...A day or so later she decided against it...
...That evening she was carrying an onerous burden, which never showed...
...These last years in Washington were busy with politics and ceremony...
...Certainly Bush has the experience and the manners...
...General registration (seminars only): $25...
...It's true for you...
...Inelaborate detail, suggestive of the accomplished playwright that she was, she outlined our roles in the caper...
...He was the youngest naval aviator in World War II...
...Yes, facts...
...It is also a repellent story...
...At this stage in any literary project obsessions come easily...
...Patrick's Cathedral the friends of Clare Boothe Luce prayed for the repose of her soul at an august service, the kind that in years past moved the venerable agnostic, H.L...
...His engaging new autobiography, Looking Forward, makes that quite clear while retailing all the evidence necessary...
...She was style and substance...
...For months her beloved stepdaughter-in-law, Nancy Luce, had been dying...
...Too hot a question to embellish...
...Then, Nancy Luce died, and the light steadily went out of Clare Boothe Luce's life too...
...Thus, to the bed of a dying man our intrepid reporter does go...
...CTare was a lady in the fullest sense...
...What is that question...
...The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research 1150 17th Street, N .W ., Washington, D.C...
...That is a peculiar word for our dainty media to be applying to anyone, given the fact that many in the media are not all that sure that wimpiness is so bad...
Vol. 20 • December 1987 • No. 12
