Correspondence
CORRESPONDENCE A Family Affair a living Henry Fairlie, and the conclu- higher heights or deeper depths than in "looking important wearing sunglasses Mercifully, I am not in the habit of sion is...
...Eleazar Lipsky New York, New York Buck Long and L. V Cott reply: It is curious to find that, nearly fifty years after it took place, Eleazar Lipsky remains committed to whitewashing the Carlo Tresca murder...
...After all, fair is fair, and we certainly wouldn't want to seem unjust or anything, my goodness, no...
...Point out that today more people remember the speech than the victims who called it forth—but mind you, don't forget to remind everyone that that's all her fault, just as it is Lincoln's fault that our schoolchildren can't tell you who took Little Round Top and saved the Battle of Gettysburg, and Churchill's fault that few Englishmen can name any of the RAF pilots to whom so many owed so much...
...If her beliefs will not serve your turn, you can always act as if her mode of holding them does...
...Barnes's answer would go something like this: "A conservative big government is a government that spends and regulates in roughly the same quantities as the government does now, but does its spending and regulating in ways that enhance the efficiency of the economy, the stability of the family and the hopes of the poor for upward mobility...
...That the bowl: "doberman mouth party colors...
...Osten- own), Fairlie was one thing that Terzian ty, which is handled, if at all, in brash, Nowadays elaborate formulae for sibly offered in the spirit of The is not and never will be—namely, an loud, unmistakable style...
...As to Cranston, I never heard of him in those days but certainly the OWI was consulted...
...It is nothing upon finishing this wretched exercise in "Man With the Hoe" could have writ- enterprise, and, anyway, magnanimity other than a vile and bottomlessly journalistic barbarism...
...You say she fares well according to the usual ideological checklists...
...Dissertation Abstracts The very conceptualization of forcing beautifully...
...Indeed, Norman Thomas, Roger Baldwin, Dorothy Kenyon, and other ACLU friends were convinced that the Homicide Bureau was seeking to cover up a fascist conspiracy—and pressured Hogan to have me head the investigation as assurance against such a cover up...
...Biancane bummed-out show your renewal notices...
...The people who launched Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty did not intend to wreck the black family, lure the poor into welfare dependency, and promote crime and public disorder...
...Between articles I would pick up copies of Interview and Mother Jones and pretend to peruse them...
...The American hacks were barely sipping their vodka with toasts for "the great Marshal Stalin," while the Russians gulped their drinks and were obviously bored...
...Terzian even further dis- better himself, than whom there is cruel irony...
...Charlotte Fairlie a big game hunter stalking and killing "shawlie" wisdom with its carnivore species of conservative achieved culDanville, Kentucky already-dead prey, so they will despise thrust: "the paradigm of socialism— tural clichehood some time ago...
...Her opinions are both rock-ribbed and largely unfashionable, so the "vicaress of Bray" thesis won't fly...
...Nothing came of it but the knowledge that the future government of Italy was the subject of intrigues in the Mazzini Society—of which Tresca was then a picturesque gadfly, but hardly the weighty influence his admirers posthumously claimed for him...
...To be a "real" conservative you must have not only the party opinions but the party hatreds...
...She can't praise everybody...
...I do know which type of person makes the better public servant...
...servative is to be put on the ducking Firstly, I have never been a "stranger pathological in its mercilessness...
...As for Mr...
...The description of Tresca as "a picturesque gadfly" shows that Lipsky really knows very, very little about the Italian-American labor movement and Tresca's role in it...
...So she speaks well of the likes of William Bennett, Pat Buchanan, Gary Bauer, Paul Weyrich, William Casey, and others not well-liked at the offices of Spy...
...Forget about the dying convention of the speech-writer's omerta...
...Skippy is dead...
...Buckley has given up on that one...
...Curses...
...Schwartz's review in Commentary, guff it may be, but it is quoted at length on the cover of the paperback edition of Miss Gallagher's book...
...write "perfectly nicely, sometimes not even capable of defending himself...
...juicy banquet he makes of it is a carni- boils over two months later...
...Earrings "which many right...
...But saying as much...
...Terzian's sleazy tone...
...His mind is a frightfully busy Call her "talented...
...His Benchley was funny...
...What seems no less likely than either of these explanations, from our perspective, is one advanced at the time: that the killing of Tresca was, indeed, a matter of business, with Galante hired by Soviet agents...
...I get laid...
...Or Jim- more squeamish subscribers might hear how Mr...
...Twain, H. L. Mencken, and (yes...
...If you're feeling really big, One considers the many years during You must protect P. J. O'Rourke...
...The Johnson Administration promised that, in contrast to the statism of the 1930s, its program of social reform would be market-oriented and community-based...
...While I was waiting for my ballerina date, being the only uniformed hero present I was invited to sit at a table of alleged notables...
...You fix me up...
...Faint praise, that's the ticket...
...again, it is difficult to believe they would select so prominent a victim for so petty a profit...
...The ment when the correspondence column how Mr...
...Sorry...
...the public restroom...
...Noonan's Revolution and you find: Dunlop, Becky Norton, 175 Dunning, Bruce, 38 Eden, Anthony, 344 Edwards, Douglas, 22, 28 Why am I not surprised...
...Racoons eating fish How is the thing done...
...In her covAmerican Spectator's long-nurtured always interesting and at times magnifi- looms visibly like a turd in the punch er piece on Peggy Noonan, Mary Eberneo-Menckenesque irreverence and cent essayist and reviewer...
...I sus- have said that...
...It has also been argued that the mafia killed Tresca as "a favor to Mussolini," although at the time the murder took place Mussolini's regime was already crumbling...
...She will, perforce, have spent time hanging out with other writers, most of whom are liberals...
...West- —Burr McCloskey parent relish ("Fairlie Tales," by Philip directed instead at an old Tory jour- brook Pegler (all of whom were bril- Chicaga Illinois Terzian...
...And the "snob" thesis won't bear even the most sidelong honest glance...
...Every year, some prominent con-allow me to remain completely silent...
...I had no choice...
...I later had the pleasure of denouncing the unconscionable campaign of vilification directed against my fellow assistant district attorney, Louis Pagnucco, who was zealously pursuing the investigation to the limit...
...And so with other liberals, insofar as she says anything nice about them...
...stadt doesn't miss a trick ("Peggy's fierce no-prisoners policy towards its Scourge of the Providence Journal "Buildings that won't fall down if uri- Rum," TAS, May 1990...
...I imagine that Mr...
...Not to worry...
...ten, he would have written like this...
...of even the most feverish and personal witness, is not least among the reasons badges in Lenin and poor hygiene...
...Just when it seemed that my devilish trick of quoting Miss Noonan seventy-six times had succeeded, along comes a subscriber who 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1990 skips the quotes and reads the index...
...They turned out to be Mike Gold, Samuel Sillin, and another Communist party leader (name unknown...
...You wouldn't believe how many conservatives are still insecure enough to insist on a policy of pas de bozo a droit This is your constituency...
...C H. Ross Nashville, Tennessee Mary Eberstadt replies...
...The general air ly, if ever, has anyone been the object Philip Terzian's recent "article" on Let me conclude by saying that, of thuggishness over all 'Mass' political of so much vagrant animosity on the Henry Fairlie is one of the lowest and whatever Henry Fairlie's failings (and movements...
...performance is also (or ought to be) viz...
...even Mr...
...married to my mother, his only wife, cerned, everything is permitted...
...his amusing...
...She will have encountered some of these...
...You got lady friend...
...Without in fact goes far beyond the boundaries black heart of his essay for all to guts...
...David Frum Wall Street Journal New York, New York Cranston & Co...
...fan him because he will keep trying to derision brightening his essay of cruel, tacks on two members of my family, Indeed, Mr...
...That in 1943 the mafia, already under pressure from U.S...
...If you are quick about it, no one will have time to ask how the whole party came to be equated with the cliques who oppose her...
...Take the line that the whole Reagan entourage, down to the last file clerk, was a Knot of Stainless Friends, to be spoken of only in language that would be considered fulsome at the court of Kim Il-Sung...
...I mean, you'd think she'd have had enough respect for the dead to write a mediocre speech for them instead of hot-dogging it like that...
...Eberstadt risk bile depletion to produce it...
...Indeed, this possibility was brought up again in a pamphlet published in 1945, as well as in Miss Gallagher's book, All the Right Enemies, published in 1988...
...You've got her...
...Even better...
...But what's the point...
...Terzian's is "Mood Swings in Managua" (TAS, after dark"—these are all master reading The American Spectator, so an act of repulsive and indefensible May 1990...
...C. H. Ross, Washington has need of you...
...The Great Society began, after all, with a withering critique of the New Deal for its bureaucracy and authoritarianism, for imposing top-down solutions, for encouraging dependency and for micro-economic irrationality...
...However, notwithstanding the many legends about Italian criminal gangs, police reporters and investigators have long observed that killings over trivial matters, including verbal insults, are rare in such history...
...Merit much difficulty...
...The "glory hog" thesis has been pretty much pounded into Hinders...
...So why was the chamber pot emptied on Peggy Noonan's devoted head...
...I nodded...
...My nyet caused the left to condemn me ever since...
...But that's exactly what liberal big government tried to do...
...But what precisely...
...RareMr...
...Big Government Barnes The conclusion of Fred Barnes's April essay on Big Government Conservativessince we're going to have big government anyway, it makes sense to have conservative big government"—is like one of those Escher drawings that grows less intelligible the longer you look at it...
...I don't know why so many of those employees can summon less respect for one another and the President they served than a reader from Tennessee can summon for one of them...
...Terzian's belief that, ex-Presidents...
...The parodists of the past convinced generations of half-baked undergraduates that Wordsworth, Joyce, Faulkner, and any number of other writers were all humbugs...
...If Markham-Millet's don't...
...I escaped without being detected...
...Connections between Galante and the Communist-controlled American Labor party are mentioned in Miss Gallagher's book, but without further elaboration...
...District Attorney Frank S. Hogan decided not to prosecute Galante because the evidence was not legally available or (in his opinion) not sufficient to sustain a conviction—but the historic fact was beyond dispute...
...Put another way, what is "the thing" about this essay, and why would Mrs...
...His each abuse have been developed...
...Greying underarms...
...Admit that she can lowered to his grave just weeks ago, is zoological environment all on its own...
...Barnes means something more substantial by the phrase than merely a regular old big government that dispenses plum jobs to people who attend CPAC dinners...
...Some of your Secondly, I should be intrigued to deeply insulting to conservative and biz lefty" (right out of Algren...
...Terzian could have defamed he is always, but he will never reach Dukakis "into a fiber supplement," or (continued on page 46) THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1990 7 CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 7) something like their actual due...
...Hmmm...
...Terzian's (Possibly JFK...
...I do not intend to go through nalist whose worst crimes seem to have liant and oftentimes downright dirty...
...Just between us, Edward Kennedy would not have come within one brake job of the White House without having the capacity to act graciously on isolated occasions...
...What would a "conservative big government" be...
...lic—it can only seem grotesquely inapt, that means...
...My father, Hen- might be more understandable were O'Rourke require disinterring the bril- mostly, I suspect, for his own pleasure: ry Fairlie, on the other hand, is dead— Ceausescu, or Pol Pot, or some other liant and obscene shades of Mark "Tomorrow, Japan...
...Does she spare them, or is she candid about their unlovability...
...But the likes of this P. J. full import of the last dart he threw, able to defend himself...
...Matt Isch Batesville, Mississippi Update In the May "Continuing Crisis" column, R. E. Tyrrell reports: The San Francisco Zoo's red kangaroo, Skippy, became the first zoo animal in world history to receive a pacemaker and has apparently been returned to his old vigor...
...many philosophical enemies, the piece knows this, and that it bubbles at the nated against...
...If so, you such a judgment...
...Further, she herself shows little confidence in Lipsky's basic approach to the case...
...in malice is too gratifying a pose to be malicious literary assault, made despic- —Colonel B. P Regan P. J. is a master and needs to be pro- foregone...
...Comes the dawn...
...This is a killer card, so play it well...
...Reason-But-I-Hate-Peggy-Noonan-Sosubject, and one in which he evidently nihilism...
...Finally the youngest Russian leaned toward me...
...In any government—still more in any mass movement—there will be numerous people who can't write, can't think, can't do much of anything—can't even be pleasant...
...For that matter, so do most of the public accounts flowing from Reagan's former employees...
...America's nearly ten years of conservative big government since 1981 ought to have proved that point by now...
...Simply, Tresca was murdered by Carmine Galante (himself murdered ten years ago) almost certainly as a paid assassin for Frank Garofalo, an associate of Generoso Pope—and the evidence, marshaled by Dorothy Gallagher in her recent biography of Tresca, is for the world to see...
...Miss Noonan's memoir, to put it gently, drips with personal animosity and contempt...
...And about not letting Failing that, at least try to be more at the time of his death...
...The man is self-indulgent, too...
...I cannot imagine Another monstrosity is unintentional- comic event for his sardonic feast...
...Lipsky is less than candid about Miss Gallagher's conclusions: although her book offers a final explanation presupposing a murder provoked by an insult, she does not completely discount Communist involvement...
...In the latter case, work a little alchemy and transmute this into "mocking the GOP...
...So, also, are killings of outsiders...
...Thus, the cram course in being an accredited Pegophobe...
...Douglas Rose Oakland, California THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1990 47...
...First, assess the enemy...
...honors himself by mocking the very none better...
...His presumptuous This odious and indeed ghoulish val of hilarity...
...I am confident that Mr...
...What about her opinions...
...and a "treasonous" accommodation ranked with P. J., who turns the mot Is this going to be a regular feature at However, my genetic makeup does not with the neo-brats at the New Repub- juste into the mot depravant (whatever TAS...
...that just as they would despise P. J.'s wickedness carries provincial Much-I-Could-Just-Bust-Open" subtakes an interest...
...If Lipsky never heard of Cranston at the time of Tresca's death he must have been deaf, as well as blind, since thecontroversy between Tresca's friends and the OWI was prominently featured in the New York Times and other papers...
...Conservatives would be less easily seduced by the allures of the big state if they were less prone to assume that their political opponents were venal idiots...
...Obviously, these schemes went completely wrong...
...Does she actually have friends among the wretches...
...P. J.'s humor is mean: might consider changing the format of statement is inaccurate and offensive...
...True, Tresca himself raised a smokescreen of Communist responsibility, but this was almost instantly dissipated by reliable information supplied by a Milanese lawyer, Giuseppe Calabi, a full statement by Galante in prison to a long-time informant, Emilio Funnicello, and a full set of circumstances which showed that Tresca had invited the attack by a public insult directed at Garafalo in a manner that called for the murder...
...We obviously hit a major nerve with our brief, passing reference to this affair and Cranston's involvement in it...
...There's your opening...
...Carlo Tresca may have been killed because he insulted Frank Garofalo...
...Ig- Are her gifts such that denying them guerrilla journalism (a thing dear to why the vast majority of readers must nazio Silone wrote like this and is con- would only make a fool of you...
...Americans hate a show-off...
...But some people will stoop to anything...
...Such as can be effectively burlesqued by any old high school journalist...
...With them were two (or three...
...Good dictators "to go condist" or grinding try giving one or two of her feats which Mr...
...Then that usually more discriminating red- reach for the industrial-strength soap sidered a master...
...Terzian succeeds superbly in mak- women wear, too...
...Russian officials...
...has only just come to my attention...
...the tedious list of errors, nor even take applied to too great a taste for Scotch Such a compound might rank or be Peggy Should Sue issue with Mr...
...Never mind that P. J. picks a tragi- stool so that we can all watch the merriat best" to my father...
...able in that its victim is a man who, Grafton, Massachusetts tected...
...They went wrong because modern governments behave in certain characteristic ways regardless of the beliefs of the people nominally in charge of them...
...Was she obliged to write an ad hoc speech about a terrible disaster, and was it well received...
...The Lord has delivered her into your hands...
...meanest-spirited literary savagings that Mr...
...Their ideas were, in fact, highly reminiscent of those of some contemporary conservative anti-poverty warriors...
...Terzian feels qualified to make ly revealed...
...that it would liberate the poor by freeing them to make decisions for themselves...
...If I'd just read the index, I wouldn't have had to doublecheck those quotes...
...Anyone—Wilde, Roy- marked "Please omit annual fratrito pay alimony" when Henry was still where ideological enemies are con- ko, or Voltaire—would have liked to cide/sororicide issue...
...But you must feed him and strokes...
...authorities, would kill one of the best-known figures in Italian-American intellectual and political life over a remark at a social event, as has been argued, seems unlikely...
...Surely that is for lesser breeds without the law...
...At State from 1985 to 1987, were we...
...Terzian points out with ap- such moral monstrosity his victim...
...I have no brief one way or the other for Alan Cranston ("Alan Cranston's Big Lies," by Buck Long and L. V. Cott, TAS, April 1990), but cannot the notion that the murder of Carlo Tres-ca in January 1943 was an unsolved case be laid finally to rest...
...She's a writer, you say...
...H. Allen Smith must wonder how many of your read-("The Evil Emperor of Irvine, Califor- gleeful dancing upon a fresh grave...
...The Tresca case remains unsolved with regard to the motive of Galante, the acknowledged triggerman...
...More to the point is a sad fact...
...Lipsky is absolutely wrong when he says the argument for Communist responsibility in the matter was "almost instantly dissipated...
...Consult the index of Mrs...
...Stephen Schwartz's Commentary article is the usual guff that follows the murder of a political personality...
...They had red caviar, Beluga, even smoked sturgeon...
...I wish I'd thought of that...
...This coin has its obverse...
...Tyrrell is wry and witty on his ers understood (really understood) the nia," by David Brock), is alive and well incessant and unrestrained viciousness good days...
...Terzian thinks that my neoconservative readers, for it assumes my Carter: "the most ex- of America's want the option of checking a box father was "jailed in Britain for failure that they share Mr...
...Best of all, I'd have been spared chapter after chapter about those sexist, bigoted, narrow-minded, mediocre, jealous, wimpish, creepy, short, and otherwise unattractive people who worked in the Reagan Administration...
...Eberstadt was clearly valedictorian of her own class...
...Tea Time Richard Brookhiser's Russian Tea Room item (TAS, April 1990) reminded me of the following incident: In 1942 I spent three days military leave in and around that place...
...Terzian should confine his corn- their position along the ideological Teddy Kennedy vote in the Senate...
...Excessive pretense can ruin this skin, R. Emmett Tyrrell...
...You can make her look really silly that way...
...The "Damned-If-I-Can-Give-You-Aments to underwear...
...There was nothing to do but hover over the rack and read the damn thing...
...Does your quarry have a distinctive style (idiosyncratic sentence structure, heavy on parens and italics and the like) with forays into stream-of-consciousness and plain chattiness...
...a fact Mr...
...CORRESPONDENCE A Family Affair a living Henry Fairlie, and the conclu- higher heights or deeper depths than in "looking important wearing sunglasses Mercifully, I am not in the habit of sion is unmistakable: Mr...
...Terzian's equally dishonorable act...
...Court them with zeal, and they will gladly believe that a girl who fairly slops over with corned beef and cabbage is really a creature of brie and Montrachet who "follows the common wisdom of her new class" (among whom, as we all know, opposition to abortion is a dead sure sell...
...pect that most readers, irrespective of drunks vote in Nicaragua: "They let original in your choice of hatchetings...
...For the mafia, execution is a matter of business...
...Maybe next month...
...Leslie Woolf Hedley Sonoma, California ACLU 1, TAS 0 On the day that your eagerly awaited April 1990 issue hit the rack at the local bookstore, the Commie-lib proprietors of that emporium were donating their profits for the day to the ACLU...
...No matter...
...Gone are the days when people said it has been my radical displeasure to ing them seem minor compared to his P. J. knows how to handle vulgari- non amo to and let it go at that...
...If she perceives qualities in the bad guys, does she notice any flaws in the good guys —or in any subset of them...
...They are glittering baubles of your May issue, containing separate at- moral cowardice...
...I My brother-in-law, Larry Agran circumstances of Fairlie's death...
...But they didn't go wrong because they happened to be administered by liberals...
...encounter anywhere at any time...
...It is a nice, safe spectrum, will reject Mr...
...More important, they had numbers of ballet girls dropping in after their performance...
Vol. 23 • July 1990 • No. 7
