The Truth of the Matter

...But the Beats, it turned out, were light cavalry, no match for the ideologists of the coming decade...

...Lance displays the same spirit of understanding that passeth understanding with regard to William Safire...

...Character, not collateral, was his grandfather-inlaw's rule of thumb...

...The note he sent Little Cart trembles with the jocular masochism of water carriers and troubleshooters everywhere: I'm about ready to quit and go back to Calhoun, but if I stay, you're going to have to advise me as to how you want me to communicate with you...

...But like most cynics, he was treated with less regard than his abilities merited...

...To this day," he writes, "I don't know what crime I'm accused of committing...

...She later wrote This, Too, Shall Pass, and it did: she told Little Cart she would always pray for him...

...Eight federal agencies—the FBI, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the SEC, the Federal Election Commission, the IRS, the FDIC, the Federal r nimiarrommierima Anita Hill Report Available David Brock's investigative article "The Real Anita Hill," published in the March issue of The American Spectator, is now available at the following attractive prices: one: $ 5 twenty-five: $ 75 five: $20 fifty: $130 ten: $35 one-hundred: $250 Send for your copies today...

...The Hemingway model was extremely popular: the drinking, the unspoken but deeply felt code, the stoicism, the John R. Coyne, Jr...

...In the end, nobody has any idea what the accused banker did—and nobody cares except the people who despise him on sight...

...He claims that when he confronted Safire in person, the columnist confessed, "We didn't want you to become chairman of the Fed," yet he assures us, "Over the years since, we have become good friends...

...It's a common practice in the media to repeat someone else's allegations and to claim, when they are bound to be false, that the reporter was only repeating what he or she had picked up from someone else's earlier story...

...Lance states vigorously and unequivocally ("It's a damn lie") that he had nothing to do with the BCCI scandal, and anyone who has lived in a girls' dorm tends to believe him...

...Over the last twenty years of feminist ascendancy, the surge of women into previously all-male enclaves has set in motion a kind of Gresham's Law of gender in which male values are driven out...

...Time joined the fray with a story on the "Lance affair...

...Tried on twelve other charges, he was found not guilty of nine...

...Finally, Safire's exasperated editor, A.M...

...It has the ring of truth in light of Clarence Thomas's reference to his "Kafkaesque" troubles, and makes this book, bland as most of it is, a valuable document on the media's increasing propensity for calumny...

...Fitzgerald might just as well have been there...

...Hysterical retractions and clarifications dominate the news, and the obsession with apologies brushes perilously close to, "If you don't take that back, I'll never speak to you again, as long as I live...

...During the Ford administration Lance was investigated by the Justice Department on charges stemming from loans he had made as a Georgia bank president...

...That sounded better in 1967 than it does now...

...We waited for their new books and poems and plays much as we wait today for the Super Bowl or the primaries...

...The ideologists themselves, for two HARLOT'S GHOST Norman Mailer Random House/1,334 pages/ $30 reviewed by JOHN R. COYNE, JR...

...In short, he makes people think of Babbitt, and that's enough for the pseudo-intellectuals of the scribbling classes...

...Address: 1 City: State: Zip Code: AH9204 L J 77 Reserve, and the U.S...

...Do you want me to use personal visits, the telephone, or smoke signals...

...Had he taken himself or his mission more seriously, he could have become a congressional power par excellence...

...He never did look up from that newspaper...

...Florence King is the author, most recently, of With Charity Toward None: A Fond Look at Misanthropy (St...

...My parents saw my birth as an example of the Christian belief that whenever God shuts a door in your life, He opens another one...

...Carter won the governorship in 1970 and appointed Lance state highway director...

...B y the early sixties, Bert was the youngest bank president in America and a pillar of everything ("It was in high school that LaBelle and I formed our habit of becoming involved in community affairs...

...He was voted Most Likely to Succeed, she was crowned "Miss Gordon County...

...Challenging the principle that public figures have not been libeled unless intent can be proved, Lance speaks at last with passionate conviction: Individuals who find themselves attacked by the media, with its growing malice and disregard for the truth, have no redress—unless you'd like to find a lawyer in the yellow pages, hope you can afford his fee, and then try to outspend and outlast Time magazine or "60 Minutes" in a court case...

...78 The American Spectator April 1992...

...The beat goes on...

...On it went...

...Clark Clifford and Robert Altman...

...They were all still with us then, writing and talking—Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, O'Hara, Dos Passos, Farrell...

...The growing feminization of America has turned journalism into a cat fight...

...Thereafter, Safire wrote about "Broken Lanced," the "Lance Cover-Up," and—significantly—"Lancegate...

...Martin's Press...

...His greatest lesson was the difference between country and city banks...

...It was a time when writing and reading fiction was serious business, and what we read directly affected the way we lived our daily lives...

...Box 549 Arlington, Virginia 22216-0549 Enclosed is my check for $ — Please send me — copies of David Brock's "The Real Anita Hill...

...We talked about them endlessly in classrooms, dormitories, bars, coffee houses, diners, and barracks...

...After a lifetime of small-town good fellowship, he's incapable of telling a revealing story without tacking on an upbeat bloviation...

...Instead, he is dimly remembered as a symbol of defiance, and, in Harlem, has had an office building and a thoroughfare named for him...

...Most people tune out immediately...

...Next, Senators Ribicoff and Percy claimed to have "important new information" that Lance might have embezzled from Georgia banks...

...Lance, I brung you your cow...

...Collateral never repaid a loan," said the old banker, and Bert found out how true this was when a farm woman who had borrowed money to buy a cow showed up one day and said, "Mr...

...The new crop of writers was also respected, for the best of them had also won their spurs in war...

...Lance longs for the good old days when reporters were so circumspect that Americans didn't even know FDR was paralyzed, but America operated under a masculine ethos then...

...After five minutes of that nonsense, I steamed out of my boss's office and stormed across the street to my own office...

...He does not give the felon's name, but the man recanted and the senators apologized...

...the hardy few who try to follow it soon grow numb...

...He comes from the town of Calhoun in the North Georgia mountains, where introspection is probably not encouraged...

...He met his wife, LaBelle, in elementary school and never had another girl...

...CI Bert Lance is an amiable big lug out of Central Casting: the Jack Carson part, the Sonny Tufts part, the guy who talks like the toastmaster's handbook...

...ry about you and the BCCI as a result of the Time magazine article...

...Whatever avenue you want me to take, please let me know and I won't waste your time and mine standing in front of your desk...

...The media's favorite buzzword, "mean-spirited," has a definite hiss to it and cannot be uttered without an accompanying sniff...

...Mailer, James Jones, Irwin Shaw, William Styroneach had written his own Farewell to Arms, and each was bidding for the unofficial title held by Hemingway...

...He was also a born lieutenant in search of a captain, and Jimmy Carter was a state senator with his eye on the governor's mansion...

...But we are worried about him now...

...I shuffled my feet...

...What you think of this book will depend upon how much kissy-face Christianity you can stand, but despite his aversion to introspection and kneejerk good cheer, I now find that I like ol' Bert better than I used to...

...Nothing got his nose out of the paper...

...Carter lost to Lester Maddox in his first try but shortly afterwards he was consoled, if you will, by the birth of daughter Amy...

...He went to Emory, she to Agnes Scott...

...He was never found guilty of anything except the appearance of guilt, as in a Los Angeles Times editorial: ". .. we find no blemishes on [his] record...

...The Times, Lance believes, resented the Washington Post's Watergate coup and wanted its own gate story, while the Post jumped on the get-Lance bandwagon because going after a Democrat would stifle criticism of their liberal bias...

...That it was actually a love-hate relationship seems honestly to elude him...

...All referred to past allegations of banking "irregularities" but none mentioned that he had been cleared of them...

...For a time it seemed that the Beats would blow away Mailer and the direct descendants of the Hemingway tradition, just as Hemingway and Fitzgerald had blown away an older tradition that survived only in the novels of John P. Marquand, James Gould Cozzens, and a few fine mannerists like Edwin O'Connor...

...Her grandfather gave Bert a job as teller at Calhoun First National so he could learn banking from the ground up...

...The ubiquitous figure of our time, "a highly placed administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity," suggests a beldame in britches hanging over the back fences of government whispering, "Don't you dare tell a soul...

...I THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER: MY LIFE IN AND OUT OF POLITICS Bert Lance with Bill Gilbert Summit Books/ 256 pages/$20 reviewed by FLORENCE KING 76 The American Spectator April 1992 coughed...

...Name...

...is author of The Kumquat Statement (Coles) and The Impudent Snobs (Arlington House...

...This is the kind of story Southern men tell so well that it's easy to miss the dark vein of existentialism that throbs deep down in the prayer-breakfast brain...

...He was on the football and baseball teams ("I was introduced to sports, and the valuable lessons about life that you can learn from them"), she was a cheerleader...

...the three remaining charges were dropped...

...The main charge against him was conspiracy, which was thrown out...

...Little Cart vowed he would never cave in to the mounting calls for Lance's resignation, then promptly did, whereupon LaBelle phoned the Oval Office and said: "I want to tell you one thing—you can go with the rest of the jackals, and I hope you're happy...

...know a man and his family history well enough, and you know whether or not to lend him money...

...The only way an accused banker can tell his side of the story is to deliver monologues on compound interest and read aloud from balance sheets...

...We can bet he neither steamed nor stormed...

...Life with the man Bella Abzug called "a little fart" was not easy for a big lug: I knocked on the door of the governor's office and Jimmy called out to me to come in...

...He should resign...

...He gave her his Sigma Chi pin and soon they were married...

...Kerouac was their Jeb Stuart, and when Kerouac was unhorsed, there was no one available to lead the charge...

...Lance reasoned that the bank had no use for the cow—meaningless collateral—but the woman did, so he extended her loan on the strength of her demonstrated character and she eventually paid it off...

...Yet one suspects that the major laws would have emerged essentially unchanged had some liberal white Democrat filled the chairman's seat...

...He was reading the paper when I entered the room, and he kept right on reading it...

...I sent him a note telling him that the press was saying he looked like one of the Kennedysand now he appeared to be acting like them," writes Bert...

...He thought it was all in the past when he joined Little Cart's cabinet as director of management and budget, but New York Times columnist William Safire suddenly resurrected the charges in a series of columns based, Lance says, on a whispering campaign of leaks and innuendoes by Treasury Department officials...

...You'll never guess who Lance's lawyers were during his 1977 troubles...

...bourgeois luxury made him immune to the bitterness toward America that has infected so many other black leaders...

...Eugene O'Neill was alive and writing, as were Frost, Eliot, and Pound...

...Other than alluding to bad blood between himself and Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal ("Mike was never secure in his relationship with President Carter, and he felt mine was too secure"), Lance never names the leakers, but he nails Safire with a quotation from the columnist's own book, Safire's WashingThe American Spectator April 1992 ton (1980): "I hung in there . . . encouraging some whistle blowers to do their thing...

...1:3 women . . . in those days everyone had his Lady Brett or Catherine (Norman Mailer still does, and somewhere, I suppose, we all do...

...Code 656—misapplication of bank funds...

...Powell's cynicism and gluttony for B ert Lance has two problems that will never go away...

...He blames it on anti-Southern prejudice among the media elite, but in fact it's an American thing, and Sinclair Lewis would understand it...

...In the course of a power struggle over the agency, Powell thrust aside the respected psychologist, Kenneth Clark, but not before trying to buy him off, telling Clark: "Kenneth, with your brains and my power we could split millions...

...Being despised on sight by those with the power to ruin him is Bert Lance's other problem...

...Rosenthal, lost patience with the fishing expedition and demanded to know what specific law Lance had broken...

...The youngest of four, he was born in 1931, shortly after his seemingly healthy older brother died without warning of a cerebral hemorrhage...

...Meanwhile, Powell was subverting the very programs he helped write, by using a Harlem antipoverty agency as a base for patronage...

...He doesn't say what these three were, or go into much detail about the rest—sensible of him, since few readers would understand it and certainly not this reviewer...

...The truth, of course, is that the tale bearer carries the same responsibility as the tale maker, or should...

...And some of us carried the code to the point of enlisting for the Korean War, in hopes of experiencing first heroism and then disillusion...

...The American Spectator P.O...

...Their informant was a jailed embezzler whom Lance himself had exposed...

...There is, unfortunately, another Powell legacy, epitomized in the career of the disgraced former District of Columbia mayor Marion Barry, who too was once a respected protest leader who ultimately let his people down...

...Senate—conducted investigations of Lance and found nothing...

...Little Cart instantly apologized, illustrating what Lance ingenuously calls "another great stride in our no-holds-barred relationship...

...By then, says Lance, Safire had a ready answer: "18 U.S...

...Girlish double emphasis flies as reporters demand to know what the President really said and what he really meant...

...The trouble he got into involved banking, a subject few people understand, especially the English majors in the media who never miss a feeding frenzy no matter how indigestible the fare...

...I waited, and then I waited some more...

...Well, you know what that means . . . When the BCCI scandal broke in 1991, lime's casually nostalgic and unsubstantiated reference to a "Lance connection" led to the AP's "Banking Scandal Traces Roots to Georgia," which led in turn to an excited call from an Atlanta Constitution reporter: "My editor wants me to do a stoWe didn't know it then, of course, but in the decade or so between the publication of The Naked and the Dead in 1948 and the late fifties we were living through what may have been the last truly literary period of our century...

...Unable to make her payments, she had done the honest thing and wanted to hand over her collateral to the bank: it was tied up outside...