Wills on Bradlee and Safire

As I'm wont to do, I was wandering around some old New York Review of Books reviews, and stumbled on this dissection of Ben Bradlee's and William Safire's memoirs of their time at the Kennedy and Nixon White House respectively. (Conversations with Kennedy by Benjamin C. Bradlee and Before the Fall: An Inside View of the Pre-Watergate White House by William Safire. *

 

Some rather startling and sad insights were revealed.  Remember the horror of the gossip that Trump probably paid someone to take an SAT exam for him?  Well, Ted Kennedy hired a proxy to take one for him at Harvard. When asked how he felt about his brother cheating, Jack said:

“It won’t go over with the WASPs. They take a very dim view of looking over your shoulder at someone else’s exam paper. They go in more for stealing from stockholders and banks.” (Ted Kennedy did not casually look over his shoulder, like any commoner; he paid money out of his own father’s banked and stock-inflated money to have a commoner take the test for him.)

 

Wills has little nice to say of either author, regarding them as courtiers, who groveled at the feet of their boss. It was imperative for both to remain in the good graces of the chief as to say anything negative would lose them access. He finds Safire's book the more trivial, yet perhaps also more honorable in this wonderful passage:

 

Asked to sculpt a new face on Mount Rushmore, he found that his assigned area of cliff was made of mud; and got swept down with it when it crumbled—yet here he is, hip-deep, still trying to sculpt noble features out of the ooze and slime.

 

That's almost as good as George Will's characterization of VP Pence: "an oleaginous sycophant" -- a phrase I will never forget.

 

American politics is not kind to those engaged in it and Wills proposes it turns out similar survivors:

 

It is the likeness between the princes that is most noticeable. American politics is a rigorous process, and it does certain kinds of damage to those who survive the hard struggle to its pinnacle. They are not likely to remain nice people—as all our recent examples prove. The same process leads to similar products, however much we try to glamorize them with separate virtues after their anointment. Nixon and Kennedy may look very different at first glance—but only because it was difficult to invent virtues for Nixon (though Safire is still trying) and unfortunately easy to invent them for Kennedy (Bradlee barely needs to try).

 

Both Nixon and Kenedy were known for their profanity (Bradlee excuses Kennedy's as a product of his military service) but Kennedy whined as well.  Each could be vindictive and cruel

 

Basically, both authors were self described purveyors of chit-chat and gossip -- I admit to a fondness for reading such drivel, so perhaps I will have to get copies of each -- but neither do their subjects.

* https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1975/05/15/backstairs-at-court/