LAST CALL: At Otto's
Kaplan, Roger
98 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 OB TYRRELLWASWAITING FORUS at the bar at Otto’s, a saloon just outside the city limits of Oak Park, which is dry. He was a very fit, very...
...Tyrrell was an Oak Park boy and a Chicago boy who talked about Indiana University and Bob Knight and the Chicago White Sox and Joe McCarthy and the governor of Georgia who was about to challenge the sitting president and Richard Nixon whom Bob referred to as “the President” and then he made jokes about the pack of jackals who had destroyed a presidency and betrayed a brave little country and were going to get their comeuppance, but it was going to take a fight and he relished it...
...Your side was the side you were on...
...I lived on Sheridan Road, and Sheridan Road had not been gentrified yet, far from it...
...They were loyal...
...The first was when Adam Meyerson came to the University of Chicago Press, where I was a lowly filing clerk, a couple of hours earlier and introduced himself...
...L A S T C A L L At Otto’s B by Roger Kaplan...
...he said, talking about an article he’d commissioned...
...There was no reason to regard them well...
...They were humorous...
...When Tyrrell talked about Nixon and Knight and his own crew at his magazine and the men and women he knew and was learning to know better and would work with in the years to come, what struck you was the enthusiasm with which he spoke of them...
...Bob knew his politics...
...They will sneer...
...I was just awake enough to recognize this conclusion depended not only on evidence, but on a certain attitude...
...When I got home very late that night, I checked on my sleeping family, a young wife and a baby boy, and muttered to myself that of course McCarthy was right...
...They will sneer that it may do for frat houses and Indiana basketball and neighborhoods in Belfast and Chicago...
...This was the second time I had seen someone wearing a bow tie...
...I say it’s class...
...Bob had been listening to some Beethoven quartets that afternoon, then played a hard and rewarding hour of handball...
...98 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 OB TYRRELLWASWAITING FORUS at the bar at Otto’s, a saloon just outside the city limits of Oak Park, which is dry...
...By God, I knew it...
...They were conservative and Republican, American and patriotic...
...Joe McCarthy was right...
...We understand you are moving,” Adam had said on the phone...
...toward the Republican Party,” Adam finished his sentence, with just enough inflection to leave a trace of doubt whether it was a statement or a question...
...You recognized a clever move, the way you said “good shot” to your opponent in tennis, but you did not love them or regard them well...
...But he had Joe McCarthy on his mind, not hysterical reactions to reds and spies, but to doing something about them...
...Oh, well, some will disagree with this approach to life...
...Often I’ve looked back on that evening near Oak Park, the example of fidelity, loyalty...
...However, Bob’s idea was that you were on your side...
...He did not have to reappraise...
...It was not that Bob was “ahead” of us in reappraising what had happened in recent American history...
...They will say it’s intellectually primitive...
...Adam too had a bow tie, with a blazer under his flannel-lined raincoat topped by a very English-looking bowler...
...He was a very fit, very alert young man in a navy blue suit with faint pinstripes over light blue shirt with French cuffs that he decorated with a bow tie...
...They were deeply held...
...But that afternoon, as we made our way out of the city on the elevated train, he asked about Hyde Park and we talked about books we liked and the newspapers we read...
...I was surprised to find such ayoung man was the owner of the gravelly, meticulous, voice informing me on the wire a week earlier that he and R. Emmett Tyrrell wanted to have a word with me when they were in the city...
...Against the other side you played fair, but you beat the hell out of them...
...Gradually I came to agree with much of what Bob defended, though if anyone else I knew then had said it I’d have laughed...
...In the circles I grew up in, the idea of saying something nice about even your pals was viewed with something very close to aversion...
...I was not going anywhere that I knew of, though I wanted to...
Vol. 40 • January 2008 • No. 10
