Presswatch/ The Hoagland Affair
Cony, John
PRESSWATCH The Hoagland Affair by John Corry ntil her death last year, Marion U Magid was the managing editor of Commentary magazine, and though we never met, I knew about her in the way that...
...Magid once wrote thoughtful essays about contemporary culture, and was blessed by good taste and high intelligence, two qualities not always joined...
...I've seen her at the Red Lobster pinch men on the ass...
...News & World Report: Above all else, she wanted to get out...
...A few years later, Hoagland met his first Daisy Mae...
...Vietnam was an additional issue...
...Paula Corbin Jones had no use for the rusty trailers and decaying storefronts of Lonoke, Ark., for her Bible-toting mother or the snotty rich kids at the high school or the endless procession of admiring farm boys whose life ambition was a hitch in the Army and a job at the Conoco station off Interstate 40...
...The people his wife forced him to hang out with in New York—pushy Sews, obviously, even if Hoagland does not exactly identify them that way—were a pretty obnoxious bunch...
...Good gosh...
...Gloria Steinem once declared that Jeane Kirkpatrick wasonly masquerading as a woman, and in reality was one of "them," meaning the males in the Reagan White House, even though by all ancient standards, Kirkpatrick, happily married and the mother of children, was much more of a woman than Steinem...
...We were passing the Martinique Hotel, a welfare dumping ground at Thirty-second Street whose haggard beggars this lunchtime had spilled over the curb at the stoplight...
...Mostly he wants us to know that it was political fastidiousness that led to his carrying on with a succession of Daisy Maes in the boondocks...
...Granted that there is nothing new about a middle-aged writer describing his sexual awakening, but the Esquire article does break new ground...
...A woman without the proper convictions is not a real women, and reporters may invade her privacy and write about her as they please...
...Quindlen neglected to mention, however, that Hill waited ten years before she made her charges against Clarence Thomas...
...Eventually the nastiness became too much for the author to bear...
...His tone is at once elegiac, boastful, and patronizing, and while he insists he was always full of love for Magid, he tells us things about her we have no business knowing—that she had trouble reaching an orgasm, for example and really do not want to hear...
...She is, he says, "some sleazy woman with big hair coming out of the trailer parks—I think she's a dubious witness, I really do...
...And here is the breathless lead para50 The American Spectator August 1994 graph on a long story in U.S...
...Here, for instance, is Evan Thomas, Newsweek's Washington bureau chief, describing Jones with elegant contempt on "Inside Washington...
...Moreover, they disparaged Martin Luther King, Jr...
...They thought that "Palestinians weren't quite human beings...
...John Corry is The American Spectator's regular Presswatch columnist and author of the new book, My Times: Adventures in the News Trade (Grosset/G.P...
...PRESSWATCH The Hoagland Affair by John Corry ntil her death last year, Marion U Magid was the managing editor of Commentary magazine, and though we never met, I knew about her in the way that journalists and writers in New York know about others in the trade who share their general interests...
...The idea that womanliness and political convictions are entwined has become encapsulated in media thinking...
...and Gandhi...
...Consequently, I am sure she deserves a better memorial than the one she receives in an Esquire article by Edward Hoagland...
...When he finally left Magid, Hoagland writes, his friends wondered why he had not done it sooner...
...So far, few other journalists seem to agree with Pollitt, though, and given that sensitive mentality, it is unlikely that many will...
...Jones, she declares, is "someone without a job, from Arkansas, whose lawyer says she's not in it for money, but clearly she's in it for something—fame, celebrity, money, something...
...He recalls when he decided enough was enough: I remember a specific moment when it registered on me that I was traveling with the wrong crowd...
...Marion and I had our first fights over the invasion of Cambodia by American troops, because, for her, toughness in Southeast Asia seemed to translate into future support for Israel in the Middle East...
...They were Appalachian-looking whites—bony, vitamin-starved, despairing kids of ten or twelve with faces out of Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange, the product of some social cataclysm in coal country...
...A sensitive liberal mentality can be pure hell on a marriage...
...Hoagland is clear about what happened...
...Years later, it is all still fresh in his mind: Neoconservatism was an embryo at these soirees, and an Israeli visitor might stand up before our seated group and describe with visible relish how abjectly a Palestinian prisoner would break under the beatings administered off-street in a police van...
...Quindlen argued in the New York Times that because Jones waited so long to make her accusations—the disputed afternoon at the Excelsior was all of three years ago—she could not be telling the truth now...
...This was too much for Katha Pollitt, a feminist herself, who wrote in the Nation that while Quindlen's column was "no doubt, enshrined on refrigerator doors nationwide," Jones, in many ways, had made a far stronger case for sexual harassment than had Hill...
...The woman who brought a sexual-harassment suit against Bill Clinton is being portrayed as a Snopes family cousin, who grew up on the set of "Hee Haw...
...One Newsweek story said that if Clinton's attorney wanted to discredit Jones he "need look no further" than her brother-in-law...
...More important, many people seemed to love her, and she was known for the kindness she showed to forlorn writers and other waifs who so often trekked through her life...
...Her mother is fixing to get the shock of her life when Paula's life comes out...
...And so he did, although not before falling in love again, this time with a nurse in Alaska "much younger and more politically radical than me...
...And here is Margaret Carlson, the Time magazine columnist, exercising the same disdain on CNN's "Capital Gang...
...3400 51...
...T he mentality, however, is growing, particularly as it touches on women...
...They weren't blacks on this particular day, so the crux was poverty, not race...
...From this point on, we felt an undertow in our marriage...
...We do not know, of course, what Magid thought...
...The founder of Ms...
...Politics and marital break-ups have been joined in imaginative ways...
...On the other hand, whether, or how, he loved Magid is incidental...
...Magid took him to Commentary parties, and he met some awful people...
...Prominent journalists, upper-middle class and rising, know poor white trash when they see it, and poor white trash are not a protected minority, except when they turn up at the Martinique...
...bility of Anita Hill (Anna Quindlen, most notably...
...There is a direct line between Steinem insulting Kirkpatrick, and the Esquire editors publishing revelations about Magid...
...She went out and had herself a good time...
...Big hair, trailer parks, and clearly she's in it for something...
...In Esquire, however, he confesses that he often shared his, outdoor adventures with women other than Magid, whom he married in 1968 and was divorced from the same year she died...
...Even as a teenager, Jones shunned the nearby Wal-Mart for the upscale Dillard's department store and preferred name labels like Nike and Calvin Klein...
...At last, down in Texas, I fell in love...
...I began to think that neoconservatism, as spearheaded by Commentary in championing the South Vietnamese regime, the Argentinian junta, the Salvadoran dictatorship, was warping our foreign policy away from a Jeffersonian involvement with the Third World, and that her interest had shifted from Isaac Bashevis Singer to Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir...
...He writes about the affairs he had while he and Magid were married...
...His article—"Sex and the Married Man," it says on the Esquire cover—is another skirmish in the cultural wars...
...CALL MR...
...There is linkage, too, with how the press treats Paula Jones...
...This man's father, if I recall, had had a horse and wagon hauling junk in Winnipeg fifty years ago, but when these hungry-looking, country-looking children asked for change for groceries at his window, he was exasperated, rolling it up—that he hadn't clear sailing all the way uptown...
...Newsweek then quoted him gleefully: "Promiscuity...
...It was of a piece with the neocon idea that the problem of homelessness was being exaggerated by liberals, and I made up my mind that I had better cut and run...
...In time, she fell in love with a man who bought her a Gucci bag and a Mercedes...
...Putnam's Sons...
...His marital difficulties began, he writes, the same year he was married...
...We were driving to the Upper East Side with a man The American Spectator August 1994 49 who, with his deep tan and good car, had done pretty well, like so many of her friends, riding the neocon wave...
...magazine was being spiteful, but there was craftiness in her attack...
...The relationship ended when her husband came looking for him with a gun...
...Hoagland, an author of repute, has been known until now mostly for his essays and ruminations on the wilderness and its fauna...
...Infidelity becomes an appropriate response when your wife's friends decry the Palestinian Intifada (which, in a loopy historical parallel, Hoagland compares to the Tet Offensive...
...He had been putting up with so much for so long that they thought he just liked being unhappy...
...and when you see, or imagine you see, some coal-miner's kids outside the Martinique, you know you must get a divorce...
...Other women, however, soon followed, many of them, apparently, from out of state...
...NELSON AT 1800-255-8989 ext...
Vol. 27 • August 1994 • No. 8
