But Enough About You: Essays (23 page)

If a newspaper editorial cartoon shouts its opinion at you over the scrambled eggs,
The New Yorker
cartoon hands you a Scotch and nudges you toward whatever truth it has in its sights. A candidate for office sticks his head out the phone booth and tells the line of anxious people waiting to use it:
“I may be awhile. I’m soliciting funds for my re-election campaign.”
While most of the cartoons here are timeless and general, this particular one may require a little context years from now. But for the time being, it’s a nice gloss on Vice President Gore’s violation of the Pendleton Act of 1883. Another cartoon might also require some explaining years from now. A crowd has gathered around an ambulance at the scene of an accident.
“Let me through,”
declares a businesslike-looking man holding a briefcase,
“I’m a compassionate conservative.”
What’s in that briefcase? A health insurance waiver? Or a legally concealed handgun with which to finish off the poor victim?

Which brings us to the critical question: Why do Republican-oriented cartoons here outnumber Democrat ones by five to one? I have a good guess as to the politics of
New Yorker
cartoonists, but somehow it’s hard to think of them as agents of the vast left-wing conspiracy.

I remember two other
New Yorker
cartoons from the Reagan era
that still bring me joy every time I see them. One shows two mild, balding men in suits presenting themselves at the White House gate.
“We’re from the far right. We’re here to be mollified.”
The other is a fierce Mongolian-type warlord sitting on a throne made of human skulls and bones. In the foreground, one courtier is whispering to the other,
“I, too, was alarmed when he took over, but I think events will inevitably push him back into the political mainstream.”
I don’t care how they vote—give those two cartoonists a Pulitzer.

The bottom line is, really, so plain that anyone with a C average from Yale—or Harvard, for that matter—could figure it out. As objects of fun, Republicans make better targets than Democrats; as do conservatives than liberals. What was it Oscar Wilde said about the trouble with socialism? “Takes too many evenings.” Perhaps someday Democrats will be as funny as Republicans.

Meanwhile, it’s the
New Yorker
cartoonists, not the nattering talking heads and pundits and spin doctors, who are the true gnostics of American politics, the keepers and revealers of its deepest truths. To our candidates for office high, middle, and low, I can only say: After your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live. (No, that’s not ungrammatical, it’s
Hamlet
.)

Let us close with a few greatest hits:

The candidate standing at the podium, grinning with open arms:
“People of North Dakota! Or possibly South Dakota!”

The angry congressman standing at his desk in the chamber, replying to his distinguished colleague:
“Listen, pal! I didn’t spend seven million bucks to get here so I could yield the floor to you.”

The two aides looking on in horror as their candidate addresses a large crowd of distinctly displeased-looking people.
“Good God! He’s giving the white-collar voters’ speech to the blue-collars!”

One more for the road: the senator at his desk, scowling at the secretary who is approaching holding a coat:
“No, no, Miss Clark! I asked you to bring in the Mantle of Greatness, not the Cloak of Secrecy.”

Feel better? See, it’s still a great country.

—from the Introduction to
The New Yorker Book of Political Cartoons
, 2000

As vice president, my highest priority would be to:

A. Support the president’s agenda.

B. Quietly leak to leading columnists that I completely disagree with the president’s less popular policies.

C. Attend as many funerals of foreign leaders as possible.

D. Position myself to run for president in four years.

Complete John Nance Gardner’s famous sentence: “The vice presidency is not worth . . .”

A. A bucket of warm piss.

B. A bucket of warm spit.

C. A bucket of live worms.

D. A bucket of dead tarantulas.

The quality I most admire in the presidential nominee is his:

A. Vision for America’s future.

B. Willingness to work across party lines for the common good.

C. Personal hygiene.

D. Willingness to reverse his long-held positions on fundamental issues for the sake of marginal electoral votes.

If the president were incapacitated and I had to assume executive responsibility under the provisions of the 25th Amendment, the first thing I would do is:

A. Emphasize “continuity.”

B. Party down!

C. Have the president declared legally dead and quietly bury him at Arlington.

D. Redecorate the Oval Office to match my coloring.

In my capacity as president of the Senate, in the event of a tie vote, I would:

A. Seek instructions from the president.

B. Announce that the issue will be decided by a coin toss.

C. Dress in tights and recite Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy from the rostrum.

D. Quietly put out word to the interested competing lobbies that my vacation home is in need of extensive renovation.

The vice president I most identify with is:

A. Dan Quayle.

B. Dick Cheney.

C. Andrew Johnson.

D. Hillary Clinton.

In my acceptance speech at the convention, I would pledge to:

A. Restore dignity to the office of the vice presidency.

B. Work tirelessly to advance the president’s agenda.

C. Have lunch every Wednesday with the president.

D. Not tell Senator Leahy to go f— himself.

E. Tell Senator Leahy to go f— himself every chance I get.

As vice president, I would see my role primarily as:

A. A member of the team.

B. Next in line.

C. Eddie Haskell.

D. Iago.

If the president said to me, “I need you to take the fall for the administration on this one,” I would tell him:

A. “Of course, sir. That’s what I’m here for.”

B. “You said that last week.”

C. “You give and you give and it’s take, take, take.”

D. “For this I went to law school?”

In the event my chief of staff leaked to the media sensitive national security information in an attempt to make me look good, I would immediately:

A. Express outrage.

B. Tearfully announce that “he was like a son to me” and throw him under the bus.

C. Make damn well sure I was protected.

D. Start searching for a new chief of staff just like the old one.

If it were leaked that my name is on the short list of vice-presidential possibilities, I would issue a statement saying that I am:

A. Not worthy to fasten the sandal strap of the presidential nominee.

B. Not worthy to touch the hem of the garment of the presidential nominee.

C. Twice the man the presidential nominee is.

D. Kind of busy right now, but might be able to find a hole in my fall schedule.

—
National Review
, August 2008

It seems somehow logical that an actor who became famous for playing Dracula should have his greatest success playing Richard Nixon—no disrespect to Dracula intended.

Frank Langella has been on stage and screen now for almost a
half century. He has taken on roles from Antonio Salieri to Sherlock Holmes, the
Daily Planet
editor Perry White, the Lolita-loving Clare Quilty, the CBS chief executive William Paley in
Good Night, and Good Luck
, Cyrano de Bergerac, and a White House chief of staff in Ivan Reitman’s
Dave
. Moving laterally—and vertically—from one room in the West Wing to the Oval Office, he has now received an Oscar nomination for best actor in
Frost/Nixon
.

Watching Langella become Richard Nixon during the course of Ron Howard’s movie adaptation of the Peter Morgan play, I thought it fitting that this performance should come at this late stage in his career. As Langella has remarked, his leading-man days are over; he’s a character actor now, and Nixon is, you might say, the ultimate character.

I saw
Frost/Nixon
on Broadway, with Langella as Nixon, and admired it greatly, but onstage, Langella’s Nixon was half the show, along with Michael Sheen’s David Frost. With all due kudos to Sheen, this is Langella’s movie. When he’s not onscreen, you’re waiting for him to come back on. I reflect that I spent a good part of my youth wanting Richard Nixon to go away. Langella has managed to make me want more of him.

He told Charlie Rose, “I just didn’t think it was in my bag of tricks,” but he threw himself into the research as he never had before. He visited Nixon’s boyhood home in Yorba Linda, California, and spent an entire hour in the tiny bedroom Nixon shared with his brothers, soaking up the humiliation and inadequacy that Nixon grew up with. He talked to everyone, watched the tapes, and “then flung it all away and said, it has to be my Nixon. It has to be the essence of the man rather than an imitation.”

Several scenes into the movie, I thought,
Incredible—he’s playing it as comedy.

Explaining who Irving Lazar is to his aide Jack Brennan: “This is my literary agent from Hollywood. Hygiene-obsessed.”

Coyly admiring Frost’s Italian loafers: “You don’t find them too effeminate? I guess someone in your field can get away with it.”

More:

“I wouldn’t want to be a Russian leader. They never know when they’re being taped.”

“You’re probably aware of my history with perspiration.”

“Two million?” he says when Frost tells him what the production is costing. “I didn’t realize we were making
Ben-Hur
.”

What makes these lines so desperately funny is that they’re spoken by one of the twentieth century’s most tragic figures. As another president might put it, you feel the man’s pain. But then—
finita la commedia
, in the (entirely fictional) scene in which a tipsy Nixon phones Frost to rage at the people who have looked down on him all his life and to tell him that in the final interview, he’s going to come after him with everything he’s got, and only one of them will survive.

In the movie’s climactic scene, the April 22, 1977, interview, Frost nails Nixon to his own, handmade cross and extracts the famous apologia. “I gave them a sword, and they stuck it in and twisted it with relish.” Nixon is as helpless, pathetic, and broken as Bogart’s Captain Queeg, unraveling under José Ferrer’s cross-examination.

There is an almost Pinocchio effect, as some have observed: Nixon’s ski-jump nose seems to grow during the movie. In interviews, Langella has refuted the suggestion that his prosthetic proboscis increases over the course of the drama. It just seems that way, which in itself is proxy tribute to the inner transformation that Langella is illuminating.

Nixon has been played by a number of actors over the years. Anthony Hopkins earned an Oscar nomination for his Nixon in 1995, and Lane Smith turned in a memorable Nixon in
The Final Days
, alongside Theodore Bikel’s Henry Kissinger. But Frank Langella now owns Nixon, as surely as Gielgud, whose Shakespeare recordings Langella listened to as a young actor in order to shed his Bayonne, New Jersey, accent, owned Hamlet for a time.

In the movie, Frost decides, as a gamble, to start off the first of the four ninety-minute interviews by asking Nixon, “Why didn’t you burn the tapes?” It fails, as a trap. Wily—rather, Tricky Dick—Nixon ties him up in videotape by prattling on endlessly about how all the presidents before him taped, and how essential it was to have accurate recordings of high-level blah, blah, blah. We never get the answer.

I met Nixon only once, about a year after the “Nixon-Frost” (as they were then called) interviews were shown on TV. I asked him that same question.

Nixon paused, nodded pensively, averting his eyes, then said, slowly, “Well . . . there were those at the time who said that would be . . .”—I thought,
Is he actually going to say “wrong”?
—“. . . for the best. But we didn’t and . . .”—a rueful, pained smile played across his face—“here we are.”

That moment has stuck vividly in my mind for more than thirty years. But now, as I summon it from memory, it’s Frank Langella sitting in that armchair in a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria, smiling at me sadly, wishing it had been otherwise.

—
The New York Times
, February 2009

Donald Trump says he is seriously thinking about a presidential bid.

—THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

My fellow Americans,

This is a great day for me personally. You’re very smart to have voted for me because I’m going to do positive things for this country, starting with this mall I’m looking out over.

For starters, I don’t know why this is called a “mall.” Where I come from, New York City—which happens to be the greatest city in the world, and the reason I say that is that I built most of it, and I
only build quality, so I think I know what I’m talking about—a mall doesn’t look like this. Where are the shops? I see grass, ponds—and what’s that, an obelisk? This is not Cairo. I don’t know how much the government paid for the Washington Monument—and I have no problem with George Washington, but he wasn’t a businessman—they overpaid. You’ve got a 560-foot-tall structure sitting on some of the most prime real estate in the country, incredible views, including of my new home. People would pay a lot for a duplex co-op in a building like that. I would charge $1,500 to $2,000 a square foot, and I’d get it. No wonder this government is trillions in debt.

Everywhere I look I see wasted opportunities, and I’ve only been president for five minutes. At the end of this so-called mall is the Lincoln Memorial. Lincoln was an okay president, but I would have freed the slaves, too. And I would have given them something more useful than forty acres and a mule, incidentally. But if you want to make a statement about Lincoln, you could do much better than this. White marble? Columns? This is not Greece. And that statue, he looks like he’s having a difficult bowel movement. This is no way to say thank you for saving the Union. And I know about unions, believe me. Ask around. Don’t try offering
them
forty acres and a mule. So with respect to Lincoln, I would make a statement: pink marble, gold, mirrors, maybe some hanging gardens, fountains with water coming out the breasts. People love that stuff. A restaurant on the roof that would serve first-rate food, because that’s the only kind of food I’m interested in. Mediocre food does not interest me. You know what people like? Jumbo shrimp. It’s not rocket science.