Crazy Rhythm
Garment, Leonard
The Brooklyn Take on Watergate and Beyond Crazy Rhythm: My Journey from Brooklyn, Jazz, and Wall Street to Nixon's White House, Watergate, and Beyond... Leonard Garment Times Books / 418 pages...
...He seems not to hold unreasonably high expectations for life on this orb...
...Garment's escape was jazz: "I loved everything about the jazz culture...
...He lied to them...
...It appeared on page two...
...Policy discussions during the Nixon years were also vastly more sophisticated than today...
...Bravo...
...It is amusing to recall today, five years into the Clinton Glory, that for years after Watergate the conventional wisdom wafting through the Kultursmog was "Nixon lost his presidency because he committed that one wrong that the American people will never forgive a president...
...Ethnic thumping has become one of the least pleasant aspects of life in the melting pot, but Garment's thumping is always charming and occasionally informative...
...In reading his chronicle of Nixon's political rebirth and 1968 presidential campaign one is struck by the large number of viable presidential candidates in both parties compared to the present...
...Extremists advocating extravagant policies insured their leadership among minorities and the poor by the very extravagance of their policy recommendations —the poor and the wretched be damned...
...I look forward to his continued researches as I looked forward to every chapter of Crazy Rhythm until there were no more...
...Clinton is attempting a half dozen...
...Without these two absorptions there probably never would have been a Watergate...
...In discussing both he manages a rare trick: he makes the law sound interesting and psychiatry dull...
...His youth and marriage are but the warm-ups for the main event of Garment's public life, his years with Nixon...
...He is surrounded by a pleasant family...
...Given the various investigations swirling around the present White House, Garment's section on Watergate may serve as a helpful guide to the months ahead with their promised congressional investigations, indictments and possibly even impeachment procedures...
...Of course one of the reasons that the mountebanks could take over in these areas is that Nixon had great difficulty saying no to the extremists...
...Garment is an amused and amusing writer...
...The Nixon comeback, the 1968 campaign, the administration, Watergate, the exile years and the resurrection — Leonard Garment has it all down with precision, amusement, and sound insight...
...she eventually finished herself off and in a particularly grisly manner...
...In his youth Garment seems never to have been far removed from poverty, though his gloomy father was a relatively successful businessman...
...The press eventually became enous for Watergate stories, and then there was that unfortunate little detail of the tapes...
...Of course, he is right...
...For another those probes produced a "string of shocking news stories that would produce a continuous flow of political adrenaline...
...1) investigators outnumbered the White House hugely, and could instigate probes into a bewilderingly wide array of White House and Nixon activities...
...It has even been noble work...
...Serving on the team of lawyers and policy advisers who were attempting to defend Nixon, Garment discovered that the endeavor was ultimately futile...
...I think the law degree and the clarinet worked miracles, and the cheerfully pensive memoirist seems to agree...
...Such was our generalstate of affairs when Richard Nixon appeared on the scene in 1963 and, like the deus ex machina he would later prove to be in world affairs, transformed our lives...
...His marriage proves to be as grim as life in the old neighborhood...
...In the end arts policy, poverty politics, and minority relations were recognized by most Americans as the hustle they turned out to be—though with the rise of a black middle class there is at least hope for racial harmony...
...Surely the Red Indian movement of the 1960's could have been put down with salutary force...
...In fact there was not a lot of joy in Garment's old neighborhood...
...But do continue to write...
...There was too much hard work and insecurity about being newly arrived from faraway places like Russia and Central Europe...
...Nixon would not have aroused so 80 April 19 9 7 • The American Spectator virulent a hatred among his opponents, and his aides never would have attempted the folly of the illegal break-in that necessitated the Watergate cover-up...
...The cover-up, so misconceived and badly executed, cost Nixon his presidency and—more tragically—multitudes of Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians their lives...
...So why the depression...
...Yet in the end I am still struck by his bouts of depression...
...My guess is that Garment has more to say about the Nixon years—for instance, as to the identity of Deep Throat and some enemies of Nixon in government who have yet to identify themselves...
...Perhaps that is because he was raised in the Depression as the child of immigrants...
...From Watergate Garment went on to a curious career aiding the victims of the Kultursmog, for instance Bud McFarlane and Bob Bork...
...Its headline read, "Watergate: Not Exactly High Drama...
...is editor-in-chief ofThe American Spectator and the author of Boy Clinton (Regnery...
...At middle age in the early 1960's Garment and his unhappy wife "were rising economically and falling psychologically...
...Garment became a top Nixon aide in the area of the arts, minorities, and the poor...
...Repeatedly Garment depicts himself as slightly odd to his colleagues, a "strange soul" and so forth...
...His wife's episodes sound unbearable, as indeed they were...
...It has been useful work...
...His is a restless urban soul brought up in one of the neighborhoods that was to make a unique impression on late twentieth century America, the Jewish section of Brooklyn...
...Garment can make his bouts of depression sound at least a little comic...
...A musing and poignant, Crazy Rhythm is either the memoir of an insane man in an insane world or the memoir of a sane man in an insane world...
...For one thing the congressional 44 Ethnic thumping has become one of the least pleasant aspects of life in the melting pot, but Garment's thumping is always charming...
...Yet Nixon attempted just one cover-up...
...Garment met Nixon when the latter joined his Wall Street law firm, and remained loyal for the next three decades...
...Sometimes his tolerance, particularly of demonstrators, becomes a bit hard to stick...
...The other great claim Garment can make on our interest is that he was an early aide to the New Nixon of the early 1960's...
...discourses on Jewishness with elements of humor, irony, and pathos...
...At any rate Garment learned things about the poor that more prosperous Americans might not know...
...While researching his book Garment came across a May 18,1973 Washington Post report on the first day of the Senate Watergate hearings...
...Well, ha, ha, ha...
...Memoirist Leonard Garment is a Quixote with a law degree, a clarinet, and a knack for friendship...
...We shall see...
...Garment can make two other claims on our interest...
...For instance in the 1930's abortion — illegal abortion—was the most common form of birth control among the poor, and it was not a joyous proceeding...
...Hence his early association with rastaquoueres and the Benzedrine and marijuana that he took to when playing with some first-rate jazz groups...
...Some think Quixote sane...
...Throughout this memoir Garment has hardly an unkind thing to say about anyone, not his angry father, not even the fraud Archibald Cox...
...Somehow he has also become a superb writer, despite years spent in the practice of law and the process of psychoanalysis—two institutions as destructive to the English language as rap music...
...Call a swine a swine...
...Nonetheless this book reveals him also to be quite astute and prudent in assessing the great political controversies of the past four decades...
...Mountebanks rose up to cadge monies for the arts...
...Dislodging Nixon from the presidency would be a very hard job," Garment notes in a line sure to be read with pleasure in the White House But then the bad news...
...Enjoy the exhilaration of coming right out and abominating a bounder...
...4/4 ray81 The American Spectato...
...Unspoken is the fact that he is a very good jazz musician and excellent lawyer, a man of high integrity, all in all an unlikely fellow in the phony world of politics...
...Being a nice person is a pain in the psyche...
...Now commences one of the most perceptive accounts of the Nixon legend yet to be written...
...Let me prescribe a remedy for Garment's depression...
...Eventually he quit playing professionally and took to the study of law and the spiritual refurbishment offered by psychoanalysis...
...He infuses his R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR...
...If Clinton can keep the press muzzled and suffers no act of God such as the exposure of a White House taping system he might make it into the twenty-first century...
...What wasting disease has been afflicting the body politic to leave us with the depressing talent now whining and posturing among the Republicans and the Democrats...
...I n all three areas of his jurisdiction Garment seems to think matters are worse today than in Nixon's time...
...Leonard Garment Times Books / 418 pages /$2750 REVIEWED BY R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...His attentions were fully engaged in foreign policy, to wit, the Cold War and the Vietnam War...
Vol. 30 • April 1997 • No. 4
