Reagan, McCain, and Sam McGee
FERGUSON, ANDREW
Reagan, McCain, and Sam McGee The unlikely revival of Robert Service, poet of the presidents. BY ANDREW FERGUSON THE GAME OF “GOTCHA,” as we practitioners of gotcha journalism call our craft...
...Okay, the comedians pressed as the cameras rolled, then recite some of his poetry...
...At best our survey was slo-mo gotcha...
...Even for John McCain...
...I reread ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’ so many times that years later, on the occasional nights when I had trouble falling asleep [Reagan...
...The Queen Mother urged him on, saying she was a great fan of the poem’s central character, “the lady that’s known as Lou...
...Eliot, and through a spokesman he said (impishly...
...Can you name the foreign minister of Mexico...
...Auden and T.S...
...As the world knows, Hiller asked Bush to name a number of international personages—the premier of Absurdistan, the president of Fredonia—and predictably enough the governor, having spent most of his political life in Texas, failed to fetch their identities from a memory bank already choked with the names of the Atascosa county commissioners, the fire marshal in Nocogdoches, and the deputy finance director of Jim Hogg county...
...Real gotcha requires the sudden intensity of an ambush, with rolling cameras pushed forward for pore-penetrating close-ups while the subject’s facial muscles go spastic...
...Voters can weigh these selections as they wish...
...When they were finished, according to Reagan’s account anyway, the table erupted in applause—probably excepting Trudeau, that snot...
...You’re in television,” Bush might have said...
...In fact, the injection of any poetry at all, short of Neil Diamond lyrics, would be salutary for a campaign so otherwise lacking in rhetorical zip...
...If I still couldn’t sleep, I’d switch to ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee,’ and that usually did it...
...Bush discovered this when he tried to disarm Hiller in mid-gotcha...
...With their marchbeat rhythms and simple rhyme schemes, his poems were written to be memorized and recited, and as a result Service was second only to Kipling as the poet of choice for at least two generations of American boys...
...Hiller asked him to name the new prime minister of India...
...Reagan was noted among his friends for his tendency to let fly with Service at odd moments...
...Who played the professor on Gilligan’s Island...
...By deadline, only three had chosen to do so...
...Upon hearing this weaselly dodge, which is perfectly in keeping with the spirit of gotcha, Bush should have switched fields, to Hiller’s own area of expertise...
...After a bumpy push-off, by one witness’s account, he ran through all 14 stanzas of “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” Service’s great ballad that deathlessly begins There are strange things done in the midnight sun By the men who moil for gold...
...Insomnia?], I’d remember every word and recite it silently to myself until I bore myself into slumber...
...Royalwatchers, by the way, will be pleased to know that the Queen Mother’s favorite, the lady that’s known as Lou, is a homicidal slut...
...And that’s what McCain did...
...In his autobiography, Ronald Reagan recalls discovering a book of Service poems during his boyhood...
...Crispin’s Day Speech from Henry V. And Orrin Hatch, who as a hobby writes words for country music songs, selected a lyric by his favorite poet, Sara Teasdale...
...In his book he describes a state dinner with the Queen Mother on one side of him and Pierre Trudeau, the insufferable pseud who served interminably as premier of Canada, on the other...
...Gotcha...
...He used to tap it to me on the wall, in Morse Code...
...that his favorite poem was Auden’s “September 1, 1939”—a lamentation on the outbreak of World War II, which Buchanan thinks was unnecessary (the war, not the poem...
...He gotcha...
...Gary Bauer chose Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and the St...
...Not that it made any difference...
...It is of course a cheap trick, this gotcha stuff, an exercise in smugness and condescension to which there is, by definition, no acceptable retort...
...By the yard...
...The guy in the cell next to me,” he said, “it was his favorite poem...
...According to the cosmology of the sophisticates at Comedy Central, politicians are not supposed to have favorite poets...
...Sam McGee,” like his other great ballad, “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” is a celebration of men in extremity, leavened by a black-humor joke at the end...
...Sara Teasdale, not surprisingly, committed suicide...
...As they were breaking down their camera equipment, McCain mentioned offhandedly how he had come to memorize “Sam McGee...
...Who’s your favorite poet...
...they asked McCain...
...Manly, sentimental, easily digestible, Service might be considered a poet of the Reaganite school— not the most crowded school in the world of poetry...
...The Arctic trails have their secret tales That would make your blood run cold . . . Service is best known for his narrative poems set in gold rush-era Yukon, where the poet himself lived for many years at the turn of the century...
...That’s how I memorized it...
...But an ambush would require us to leave the office...
...THE WEEKLY STANDARD therefore canvassed the various presidential campaigns to discover the favorite poet and poem of each of the eight other major candidates: Bush, Gore, Bradley, Buchanan, Forbes, Hatch, Bauer, and Keyes...
...Reagan obliged, unburdening himself of all 11 stanzas, with the Queen Mother chiming in at each mention of Lou...
...The injection into presidential politics of a robust, popular poet—especially an all-but-forgotten poet like Robert Service—can only be a salutary development, notwithstanding that it came through the shenanigans of the poetasters from Comedy Central...
...The turn in the road seems to have come with George W. Bush’s famous interview several weeks ago with Andy Hiller, a “television journalist” (as they call themselves) from a TV station in Boston...
...The restless rumble of the train / The drowsy people in the car / Steel blue twilight in the world / And in my heart a timid star...
...Reagan could recite “Dan McGrew” from memory and challenged him to do so...
...The game remains in play...
...A taste for poetry is surely no prerequisite for high office—indeed, too great a fondness for it could suggest a temperament ill-suited to politics, as the experience of Adlai Stevenson and Eugene McCarthy, both of them published poets, shows...
...But two weekends ago, as he was campaigning across New Hampshire, a team of comics with a camera crew from the cable network Comedy Central clambered aboard his campaign bus to enlist him in their own little game of gotcha...
...Here again, the Comedy Central team revealed their own provincialism...
...Trudeau said he’d heard that Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Pat Buchanan had a tie for his favorite poet, between W.H...
...But I would say I’m not running for president and I don’t write foreign policy...
...They were apparently ignorant of one of the ironclad rules of modern poetry: Anyone who likes Robert Service can recite Robert Service...
...Our survey was undertaken by phone, and the candidates had plenty of time to respond...
...On the bus in New Hampshire, the wise-asses from Comedy Central were apparently impressed with McCain’s performance...
...BY ANDREW FERGUSON THE GAME OF “GOTCHA,” as we practitioners of gotcha journalism call our craft (we call it a “craft” too), is getting way out of hand, people now tend to agree...
...McCain hesitated, and then said, “Robert Service, I guess...
...The new prime minister of India is—no,” Bush said...
...But this is hindsight...
...No, sir,” Hiller replied...
...And besides, beating a gotcha journalist at his own game never makes any difference...
...But the question of how one acquires a poetic taste can be instructive...
...Jimmy Carter too is a poet, though readers of Always a Reckoning, his book of poems published in 1995, may disagree...
...As a former POW and bona fide hero, McCain is generally inoculated against the journalistic heel-snapping that bedevils other presidential candidates...
...THE WEEKLY STANDARD defines “major candidate” generously...
Vol. 5 • December 1999 • No. 14
