Not to Be Taken Lightly
GEWEN, BARRY
Not to Be Taken Lightly The Man Who Would Be President: Dan Quayle By David S. Broder and Bob Woodward Simon and Schuster. 207 pp. $18.00. Reviewed by Barry Gewen New York "Times Book Review,"...
...In other words, the sophisticates who dismiss Dan Quayle are wrong to do so, and the paranoid who are worried about the possibility of a Quayle Presidency have something to worry about...
...If there were nothing more here, there would be no reason for this book, or the series, or the Beltway stir...
...Quayle is tough, smart, hard-edged, disciplined...
...If they lose, you can ignore everything that you have just read...
...his past is littered with the political corpses of those who have...
...One state chairwoman "has a whole wall filled with pictures of the Vice President...
...Almost immediately he began planning a race against the three-term Democratic Senator, Birch Bayh...
...Her office is right across the hall from his, and the Quayles consult three to four times a day...
...A nose-counter told Broder and Woodward that of the 50 party chairmen, 10-15 are "fall-on-your-sword Dan Quayle people" and about another 20 will be loyal simply to the office of the Vice President...
...They interviewed over 200 people, including the Vice President and his wife, Marilyn...
...Although the book has grievous flaws...
...The pieces caused something of a stir inside the Beltway, particularly among those who prefer to get their information about the Vice President from political cartoonists and late-night comedians...
...If the Republicans recapture the White House, Quayle, it would seem, instantly becomes the frontrunner for 1996...
...To be sure, the TV one-liners are not really off the mark...
...The authors have no doubt that Quayle wants to be President, and based on his history that aspiration should not be minimized...
...The continuous joking about Quayle has obscured his shrewdness, and also such other formidable political gifts as his warm, gregarious personality...
...For all his faults, the Vice President is not a man to be taken lightly...
...His rise, they tell us, was due not simply to luck or friends in high places, but to his own political skills and driving ambition...
...If she is not the brains behind Quayle, she is clearly his closest confidant and chief political adviser...
...He befriended the Vice President's aides...
...But the greatest challenge to his aspirations and his career is unquestionably the November election...
...But Broder and Woodward have a point to make that forces us to look again at J. Dan-forth Quayle...
...These are the folks who bring out the troops for the primaries, and in 1996 they are sure to remember who was with them at the local fundraiser, shaking the hands and eating the overcooked chicken...
...At Republican Senate meetings he made a point of speaking up whenever Bush was present, and he publicly sided with Bush on a defense budget bill that had divided the Reagan White House...
...The portrait of Marilyn Quayle will not surprise, either...
...Broder and Woodward say that Quayle's immediate tests are his acceptance speech to the Republican Party Convention this August and his performance in the debate with the Democratic Vice Presidential candidate later this year...
...Broder and Woodward spent six months on the project...
...The result, in 1980, was a second upset for Quayle, and in 1986, when other Republican candidates around the country were going down to defeat in a Democratic year, Quayle was reelected by the largest margin in Indiana history...
...Heand Marilyn may have been just about the only people in the country who were not surprised when Bush announced his choice...
...It is a widespread belief among the couple's associates that "if he ever became President, she could be the most influential First Lady in American history...
...When asked what, exactly, impressed him, he replied: "It is a very good historical book about history...
...many others admire her obvious abilities (in a nonpartisan world she would be a feminist hero...
...The Vice Presidency was a similar story...
...They conducted a guerrilla campaign to win George Bush's heart and mind that would have done credit to Che Guevara...
...it has one undeniable and outstanding virtue: It provides us with the first serious, sustained look at the man who occupies an office that, in modern times, has become the single most important stepping-stone to the Presidency...
...Two years later, despite the skepticism of his own party, he challenged and upset the Democratic Congressman who had represented the district for 16 years...
...The Vice President is no laughing matter...
...A second professional says Quayle's support among party officials may be even deeper...
...It is more detailed than most treatments of the Second Lady, but it tends to support the going cliches...
...They liked the odds," Broder and Woodward report...
...Now the series has been reproduced in hardback under the title The Man Who Would Be President...
...After graduating from law school in 1974, he carefully chose Huntington, Indiana, as his hometown because of the opportunities it offered him for elective office...
...Quayle told the authors that he was particularly taken with Paul John-son's Modern Times...
...What everyone describes as his "basic decency" may not play well in cynical New York or glitzy Los Angeles, but it wows them on Main Street, and Quayle has become the second most popular speaker on the Republican circuit, with a constituency of his own among the party faithful...
...He has little dimension, certainly no sense of tragedy, maybe not even of disappointment...
...From the present vantage point, a President Quayle in 1996 is as easy to imagine as a President Kemp or a President Baker or a President Gore or a President Gephardt, perhaps even easier...
...From the start of his career, Broder and Woodward explain, Quayle has always demonstrated unusually astute political judgment...
...Broder and Woodward indeed reconfirm our suspicions that much of Quayle's deepest thinking is reserved for the golf course...
...Reviewed by Barry Gewen New York "Times Book Review," preview editor In January of this year the Washington Post published a series of articles on Dan Quayle by the veteran journalists David S. Broder and Bob Woodward...
...Practically no one took the Senator's chances to be selected for the second spot on the Republican ticket seriously, except Dan Quayle and his wife...
...Many who work for the Vice President fear her...
...Of course, anything can happen between now and then...
...There is something callow and childlike, almost goofy, about our Vice President...
...And the important thing to be said about their findings is that there is more substance to Dan Quayle than meets Jay Leno's eye...
...Raised in an upper-middle class Midwestern cocoon, he lacks the breadth of experience we hope to see in our leaders...
...the most grievous being a lack of analytical depth...
...I knew what the competition was," Quayle told them, "and I always thought I was pretty good...
...As Dan Coats, his successor in the Senate, observed of him: "It's possible to grow up and even be a United States Senator or Vice President, and not really be exposed to, or plunged into, some of the tougher questions of life...
...His attention span is, to put it kindly, limited, and his reading skills are so underdeveloped that some of his aides wonder if he suffers from an impediment...
...All the while, Quayle and his wife kept a scorecard on the other Vice Presidential possibilities, such as Jack Kemp and Bob Dole, figuring the pluses and minuses...
...Quayle delivered speeches, issued press releases, wrote op-ed pieces (or, given what we now know, had his staff write them for him...
Vol. 75 • June 1992 • No. 7
