Mackerel by Moonlight
Weld, William
A Bill Weld Even Jesse Helms Could Love Mackerel by Moonlight William Weld Simon & Schuster / 238 pages / $23 REVIEWED BY Geoffrey Norman T here are politicians who like to moonlight as...
...He grew bored with the governor's job and ran against John Kerry for the Senate...
...I wasn't watching out, and I began accepting too many invitations from an uncharacteristically fawning media corps...
...Johnson's crack about women preachers and dogs that walk on their hind legs) and unfair...
...The question for us is what are Channels Four, Five, and Seven going to show on the noon news...
...Chicago would be third, by the way...
...Weld has followed the ancient wisdom and written about what he knows...
...The campaign is full of moments that are pure Boston politics and which the author loves like Wordsworth loved daffodils and Fitzgerald loved Daisy...
...More precisely: Boston politics...
...I will admit, it didn't take much getting used to...
...Terry Mullally, Jr...
...I saw him greet a voter at the door, and he said, 'How do you do...
...Weld was a free-enterprise Republican who made enemies within his own party because of his positions on the social issues, positions that were essentially libertarian...
...A perfectly adequate assassination attempt is followed by a sermon on the importance of the balance of powers, say, or an explanation of the Taft-Hartley act, or a sermon on how the quest for ratings and sensationalism is poisoning political coverage, especially on television...
...And, finally, a dark secret which it would be unfair to reveal...
...a good read," in publishing parlance...
...This is a very good book...
...Someone you can roll over on, at the first sign of rain, in exchange for immunity for yourself...
...The question for us is not what is true...
...Boston politics are corrupt, parochial, tough, cynical, and humorous...
...Weld went to the knife fight undressed and unarmed and Helms handed him his head...
...I'm all in favor of the death penalty," he answers, "three chairs no waiting, pull the switch myself, lots of walking advertisements out there for capital punishment...
...It is this GEOFFREY NORMAN is editor-at-large for Forbes FYI...
...What do you do?' And the lieutenant governor replied, `I just did it.— Weld never lapses into solemnity...
...He has no illusions, especially not about himself, and he tells his story tartly and without cant: If I do say so myself, I was a good slime-ball defense lawyer....As soon as I saw that the government housing inspector had criminal exposure...I took my guys straight to the feds...
...Follow this simple rule, and you will never go to jail...
...he is asked...
...If he is more than marginally interested in politics, he will inevitably wonder about the author and whether the book reveals, in some candid way, his feelings—and fitness —for "the art of the possible...
...their sights set squarely on the best seller lists, not the admiration of book critics...
...I never had a client go to jail, though I had sent plenty of guys there...
...last quality that sets them apart...
...Now comes a new novel by another politician...
...Monica Lewinsky...
...When you don't have to pay to fly first class, it gets harder to see the argument against it...
...He is now in private life, writing novels and practicing law, and you wonder if that isn't where he wanted to be all along...
...The book is Mackerel by Moonlight and the author is the former two-term governor of Massachusetts, William Weld...
...He passes this initial test and runs...
...And they also tend to be humorless, especially about what they do for a living...
...And the answer is, whatever you say, as long as you back up their version of events...
...Mullally's sense of impiety does not desert him when he is approached to be a candidate for district attorney...
...So he starts with good material...
...But he lets one of his characters—a streetwise consultant—do his pontificating for him: Larry stubbed out his cigarette and exhaled slowly...
...Especially when it comes to characterizations...
...Weld captures the ritual of an early morning political breakfast and roast, fueled by gin and malice, exquisitely...
...This is, typically, the curse of the politician turned fiction writer...
...The courts will sort that out in the fullness of time, through criminal trials and procedures too numberless for me even to contemplate, not that I would want to...
...If I had wanted to, I would have gone to law school...
...To say that it is a good book for one that was written by a politician would be to damn it with faint praise (one thinks of Dr...
...He lost and then waged a quixotic war in the press to be Bill Clinton's ambassador to Mexico...
...Perhaps he just went into politics to gather material...
...Politics, that is...
...I'm the lieutenant governor.' And the fellow said, 'Well, nice to meet you...
...Someone should have read that passage to William Ginsberg, early in his stint as counselor to Ms...
...How are you on the death penalty...
...When Weld does lecture, he does it with fetching cynicism and merciful brevity: In the fall of '97, I was invited on every TV talk show in the country, not once, not twice, but as often as I'd come...
...National columnists, not high school kids, wanted to shadow me for a day...
...Boston makes the best setting in America for a novel about politics, except for Louisiana, which is in a class, mercifully, by itself...
...The American Spectator - October 1998 85...
...Having learned to put criminals away, he now turns that experience to the more remunerative task of getting them off...
...Publishers wanted to fly me to conference centers to talk to their advertisers...
...Weld's antagonist in this struggle was Jesse Helms...
...His tale opens when he moves to Boston from New York, where he has worked as a federal prosecutor...
...A Bill Weld Even Jesse Helms Could Love Mackerel by Moonlight William Weld Simon & Schuster / 238 pages / $23 REVIEWED BY Geoffrey Norman T here are politicians who like to moonlight as writers of fat, commercial novels...
...Politicians do not do well with individuals since they tend to regard people as votes and not much more...
...And more...
...Newt Gingrich, William Cohen, and Gary Hart have all written books of this sort and they have all been pretty bad...
...Plus he provides a woman character—the love interest—who is not merely plausible but also strong, appealing, and eccentric...
...One hopes that he got plenty and that there will be more where this one came from...
...So their novels tend to be full of cardboard characters making wooden speeches to advance plots in which the fate of the world hangs, not very convincingly, in the balance...
...is blessed with the gift...
...The best advice I could ever give a client is if you're going to break the law, make sure you do it in partnership with somebody more important and famous than you...
...And it's great to see the lieutenant governor, too," O'Reilly went on, hitting the adjective so hard everyone forgot this was the second-ranking office in all of state government...
...The book moves briskly and the language pops and if the reader has even a marginal interest in politics, he will probably finish it in one sitting...
...84 October 19 9 8 • The American Spectator Weld is not merely deft with the patois of modern politics...
...A good Boston pol must possess the ability not merely to function in a sea of corruption and human failure but to relish it and laugh about it...
...he is also novelist enough to give his readers a suspenseful plot—will Terry win...
...Nobody does this better than a Boston Irish pol...
...Terry, let me break this down...
...They also tend to go unread...
...Okay...
...Weld, who has been in the pit, knows something about this and no doubt has opinions...
...The point of one of these exercises is to cut your opponent to ribbons while you—and he—are both still smiling and hying to hold your guts in your stomach with both hands...
Vol. 31 • October 1998 • No. 10
