Eminentoes/All the Duke's Men
Gold, Victor
All the Duke's Men by Victor Gold The ferocity of Hitler's Ku Klux Klan cannot be exaggerated, but the fact remains that the bravest people in Germany are excluded from the gang. It takes very...
...and pondering, in their thumb-sucker moments, the deeper meaning of his candidacy...
...No doubt the answer lies in the tensile nature of what his biographer, Finis Farr, called his "personality of warring opposites...
...And you, George Will...
...He would go to Washington and announce for President...
...but for all their footwork, not laying a glove on the target...
...It follows that, having created David Duke, the nabobs, in the godlike mode they relish in election years, feel obligated to destroy him...
...Intense, yes, but the definition of an irrelevant candidacy in this context is one which, but for the attention of the press, wouldn't exist...
...He was progenitor of a breed best represented in today's market by the heartland vaudevillian Mike Royko...
...He'd be peglerized...
...The addiction is mutual...
...in due time his attorneys notify the attorneys for the insurance company that he has suffered great pain and will have to go on crutches the rest of his life, in addition to which his little woman has suffered his loss of services, the whole bill amounting to $100,000...
...Some, I know, have been pontificating for twenty years and have come to regard themselves as intellectual landmarks and American institutions as permanent as Baseball...
...ers, like the public office he purports to want in any given election year, Duke can take or leave...
...Once Pegler picked a target, he was relentless in pursuit, deadly in aim, with no verbal weapons barred...
...and vote they did, in record numbers, giving Edwards 61 percent, Duke 39 percent...
...So they set him up for interviews-in-depthKoppel vs...
...nor is it the true-believing dunderheads outside the state who sent money to his campaign...
...though Royko, to be sure, is more the barroom word-jouster, not the kind ofreportorial pit bull who could earn a Pulitzer by busting a union racketeer who, on being led off to prison, immortalized his nemesis with the cry, "I been peglerized...
...It is at times like these that I wish Pegler were still around...
...On the contrary, Duke is one of those candidates made large by the opprobrium heaped on his coiffed head by the nattering nabobs: they give him the traction he needs to keep running...
...Pegler wrote in an era when there were a relative handful of nationally syndicated columnists, most of whom worked out of New York, not Washington...
...The same isn't true of Buchanan, who entered the presidential race as designated hitter for a disgruntled Republican faction...
...Add three zeroes and has anything changed...
...He is addicted to it...
...From his early days as a wartime correspondent for Scripps Howard's United Press, "Peg" had that gift in abundance—what Farr described as "an ear for speech that touched the inner ear of the reader with the rhythms of ordinary conversation...
...Here is that Pegler?Peg" to his intimates in the newsroom—writing of his trade and fellow tradesmen: "Of all the fantastic fog-shapes that have risen off the swamp of confusion since the big war, the most futile and, at the same time, the most pretentious, is the deep-thinking, hair-trigger columnist or commentator who knows all the answers offhand and can settle great affairs with absolute finality three days or even six days a week...
...Tom Wicker, Richard Cohen, Abe Rosenthal, Krauthammer, Kinsley, Tyrrell...
...A man crosses a street against a traffic light, leaps to avoid a car, barks his shin against a curb, yells murder with great presence of mind, demands an ambulance and...
...who presciently wrote of the Nazis in 1935 that "they are coming to the point where they will put it up to the humane nations of the world to rescue the Jews from Germany, leaving all their possessions behind, unless they want to witness the spectacle of the slow massacre of six hundred thousand people...
...It takes very little courage to join a racket whose members enjoy the right to cheat and rob the nonmembers, but the man who defies the Nazi mob does so knowing that the Nazis will break him, persecute him and his family, and perhaps kill him...
...Exactly where he was when he ran for President four years ago: bringing up the rear, behind Lyndon LaRouche...
...What led Pegler down the twisting road of anti-Semitism in his last days, I'll never know...
...His political protégé went down in one of the most massive landslides in modern Louisiana history...
...Pat Buchanan...
...The phrase was apt...
...Or they rage about him, And what he represents, in their op-ed columns: Wicker, Lewis, Kinsley, et al.—the elite writing for the elite, blaming his rise on Reagan and Bush...
...He doesn't fit the job description...
...You would think, given today's inflation in columnists/commentators/investigative reporters/analysts/talk show gabblers, and assorted other media mavens, that someone could come up with a line that good, if only on special occasions...
...Being one of these myself, I have been trying to figure out how we came to be...
...C3 The American Spectator February 1992 37...
...VOTE FOR THE CROOK, urged the pro-Edwards bumper stickers seen on the streets of New Orleans as Louisianians went to the polls...
...others, that he is the logical extension of the Willie Horton spot, i.e., what the power-famished radical left sees as the "racist" politics of the 1980s...
...Westbrook Pegler, c. 1935 FAST FORWARD/The National Press Club, Fall 1991: Enter David Duke, reeling...
...But David Duke...
...reporters who had graduated into what he termed the "vaudeville" of columnizing by virtue of a flair for language...
...Here was the newspaperman—he detested the pompous descriptive "journalist"—who had taken on Hitler, Mussolini, the KKK, the Silver Shirts, the Black Legion, Gerald L. K. Smith, and other native American fascists at a time, the mid-1930s, when it counted...
...Without a hot-eyed press corps tracking his every zag, where would he be...
...They also love Duke because he reaffirms their basic belief that the Americanelectorate—save for a small, enlightened gene pool in the northeast corridor—is given to retrogressive tendencies and has to be saved from itself...
...Pegler was a populist, both in style and outlook...
...He loves it, in the rustic phrase Earl Long used in speaking of an opponent's predilection for graft, "like a hog loves slop...
...David Duke's hard-core constituency, to keep the record straight, isn't the 39 percent of the Louisiana electorate that chose not to vote-for-thecrook...
...Only a month before, he was talking to his interior decorator about the color scheme he had in mind for the Louisiana governor's mansion (Schwarz and Rot...
...Are you listening, Anthony Lewis...
...Take away the cameras and columns, and who is Jesse Jackson...
...According to his senior adviser, John Rarick, Duke was running neck-andneck with Edwin Edwards in the days leading up to their November 16 election runoff...
...Roone Arledge doesn't pay Ted Koppel seven figures a year for putting Paul Tsongas on the air to spell out his healthcare program...
...Some say he has come this far because he strikes a populist chord in middle-class America...
...I'll tell you where...
...There was little else for David Duke to do except respond to the fervent call of his hard-core constituency...
...Here is Westbrook Pegler on the litigious society, circa 1936: In deploring the ethics of the legal profession it is customary to forget that a large proportion of the citizens have become shyster-minded themselves and go through life hoping to be flicked on the flask by a rich man's limousine, disappointed in love, thrown out of a solvent hotel, insulted, libeled, frightened, humiliated or barked at by a dog whose owner lives in a big house...
...With Jesse Jackson out of this year's presidential race, there is desperate need on the part of the media for a high-intensity but essentially irrelevant candidate they can call their own...
...They put him on camera, write him up in their columns, first, because the aberrant sells, and they are, despite their claims of a higher calling, simply peddlers out to make a buck...
...For my part, having cut eye-teeth as a thumb-sucking observer of Louisiana demagogues in the Depression and war years, I see no deeper meaning to what Ted Koppel, indeed, calls "the Duke phenomenon" than its being the latest product of a political media that feeds the public no-brain interviews and empty-calorie sound-bites...
...Have no doubt, the Duke of Hazard would be picked clean, and worse...
...Duke, the eve of the November 16 run-off—and he makes mincemeat of them (Koppel, indeed, not being nearly, indeed, as clever, indeed, as the yahoo he thought to set up...
...What he can't take or leave, however, is the attention of the national media: the lights, the cameras, the action...
...Oh, that my favorite columnist of those early years were on the scene, tracking the Nazi Klansman to his lair or, in lieu thereof, his hair stylist...
...economic experts who can't find the 5:15 on a suburban time-table, much less read a balance sheet, labor experts who never did a lick of work in their lives, pundits on the mechanical age who can't put a fresh ribbon in their own typewriters and resounding authorities on the problem of the farmer who never even grew a geranium in a pot...
...which is why I wish he were around today, to deal with David Duke in his own inimitable way, as he dealt with the riffraff of Baton Rouge in 1936: "They do not permit a house of prostitution to operate within a proscribed distance of Louisiana State University, but exempt the state Capitol from the meaning of the act...
...but in journalism, as in all things contemporary, we have long since learned that more doesn't necessarily mean better...
...We include experts on the budget who can't balance an expense account...
...Not that Duke thrives, as does Jackson, because the national media fawn on him...
...The irony is that Westbrook Pegler in his declining years became a fulminating anti-Semite...
...Thus we see the national press pack, light and sound systems leading the way, in hard pursuit of David Duke...
...But whatever the cause, I prefer to remember the Westbrook Pegler of my formative years, the most readable, quotable, provocative columnist of the 1930s and 36 The American Spectator February 1992 '40s...
...These faithful followVictor Gold is The American Spectator's national correspondent...
...Alas, poor Rarick...
Vol. 25 • February 1992 • No. 2
