But Enough About You: Essays

by Christopher Buckley

  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

  LANGELLA/NIXON

  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

  TRUMP: THE INAUGURAL

  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 trillio
ns 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.

  So what do you think of your new first lady? I picked Moronia—what’s your name, honey? Melania, right. Great name. I just picked Melania here from a very wide selection of possibilities—not just because the sex is incredible but because this nation wants and deserves a trophy first lady. When everyone sees our first lady standing next to some other first lady of another country, the wife of a premier or whatever, they’ll want to go to bed with our first lady, not the other one. So the American people no longer have to worry on that score. And if they get tired of her, not a problem, because chances are I’ll be tired of her before they are. And we’ll get a new first lady. Trying to keep North Korea from getting the bomb, maybe that’s a problem. Finding a new first lady? Trust me, not a problem.

  Policy-wise? I’m going to be very hands-on. If a situation comes up, like inflation, or a union beef, or Mike Tyson beats up another motorist, I’m going to be on it. It’s going to be fixed. There was a skating rink in New York City in Central Park. There were problems with it. Then I got involved. Now people can skate on it. Again, it’s not rocket science.

  Foreign-policy-wise? Same. I’m a businessman. Other countries want to do business with us, I’m all for it. Trade, great. I have no problems with people trading with us. But it’s going to be fair trade, by which I mean we come out on top. They have a problem with that, they can sell their TVs and cheese and whatever to someone else. Maybe North Korea. It’s just not complicated. Missiles? Very simple—you aim one at us, I fire a hundred at you. So don’t go there. Turning a country into a radioactive parking lot does not bother me. I sleep fine. Ask Melanomia. And finally on the foreign front, I have something to say to Fidel Castro. Adios, pal. This time, we’re going to nationalize your hotels and casinos.

  That about covers it. I have to go, because important senators and congressmen are giving me a lavish luncheon in the Rotunda behind me here. I understand they’re serving a lot of jumbo shrimp. Basically they’re trying to impress me so I won’t cancel their highway projects and ethanol subsidies. I know how they do things. Now they’re going to find out how I do things.

  By the way, I’ve directed the Treasury to issue a couple billion extra in hundred-dollar chips. Enjoy yourselves. This is the dawn of a great, great era.

  —The Wall Street Journal

  MR. LINCOLN’S WASHINGTON

  On the 137th anniversary of the day Mr. Lincoln was shot, I joined a tour in Lafayette Square, on Pennsylvania Avenue across from the White House, conducted by Anthony Pitch, a spry man wearing a floppy hat and carrying a MiniVox loudspeaker. Pitch is a former British subject, and the author of an informative book, The Burning of Washington, about the British torching of the city on August 24, 1814. Pitch has seen, in the basement of the White House, the scorch marks left over from the incident. But for a thunderstorm that must have seemed heaven-sent, many of the city’s public buildings might have burned completely to the ground. It’s often said the presidential residence was first painted to cover up the charred exterior, but official White House historians say that isn’t so, and point out that the building of pinkish sandstone was first whitewashed in 1798 and was known informally as “the White House” before the British ever set it aflame. Theodore Roosevelt made the name official in 1901 when he put “The White House” on the stationery.

  But today Pitch’s theme is Lincoln. His enthusiasm is little short of idolatrous. “He was one of the most amazing people who ever walked the earth,” he says. “He was self-taught and never took umbrage at insults. That such a man was shot in the back of the head is one of the most monstrous insults that ever happened.”

  We crossed the street and peered through the White House fence at the North Portico. He pointed out the center window on the second floor. (You can see it on a twenty-dollar bill.) On April 11, 1865, he said, Abraham Lincoln appeared there and gave a speech.

  “It was the first time he had said in public that blacks should get the vote,” Pitch explained. A twenty-six-year-old actor named John Wilkes Booth was in the crowd outside, along with a man named Lewis Paine (born Powell). Booth had been stalking Lincoln for weeks. Booth growled, “That means nigger citizenship. That is the last speech he will ever make. . . . By God, I’ll put him through.”

  Another man in the crowd that day was a twenty-three-year-old physician, Charles Leale, who a few days later would be the first to come to the aid of the mortally wounded president. Pitch pointed out another window, three over to the right. “That room was called the Prince of Wales Room. That’s where they did the autopsy and the embalming.”

  My mind went back twenty years, when I was a speech writer for then Vice President George H. W. Bush, to a night I dined in that room seated at a small table with President Reagan and two authentic royal princesses, both of them daughters of American actresses (Rita Hayworth and Grace Kelly). I mention this for a reason. At one point during the meal, President Reagan turned to one of the princesses and remarked that his Cavalier King Charles spaniel, Rex, would always start to bark whenever he came into this room. There was no explaining it, Reagan said. Then he told about Lincoln being embalmed here, and suddenly the president of the United States and the two princesses were swapping personal ghost stories.

  For two years, I had a White House pass that allowed me to wander about freely. One day I heard that Jimmy Cagney was about to get the Medal of Freedom in the East Room, where Abigail Adams once hung out her wash to dry and where Lincoln’s body lay in state. Another time, I sat in that room behind Joan Collins of Dynasty fame as she and her husband (number four, I think it was) groped each other voraciously while Andy Williams crooned “Moon River.” I rushed over from my office in the Old Executive Office Building just in time to see President Reagan pin the medal on the man who had tap-danced “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Mr. Cagney was now a crumpled, speechless figure in a wheelchair. Reagan put his hand on Cagney’s shoulder and said how generous he had been “many years ago to a young contract player on the Warner Brothers lot.”

  During the administration of George H. W. Bush, I was invited to the State Dining Room for a talk about Lincoln’s time at the White House by Professor David Herbert Donald, author of a much-praised biography Lincoln. I sat directly behind Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and remember that for an hour General Powell did not move one centimeter. What I also remember of the evening was Professor Donald’s stories about Mary Todd Lincoln’s extravagances. Mrs. Lincoln was the Imelda Marcos of her day. This woman shopped. Among her purchases was the enormous rosewood bed known as the Lincoln Bed, even though her husband never spent a night in it. By 1864, Mary Todd Lincoln had run up a monumental bill. While Civil War commanders were shouting “Charge!” Mrs. Lincoln was saying, “Charge it!”

  Professor Donald ended his quite riveting talk by looking rather wistfully at the front door. He noted that Mr. Lincoln hadn’t wanted to go to the theater that night, but the newspaper had said he would, so he felt he had to attend Our American Cousin.

 
; “And so,” said Professor Donald, “they left the White House together for the last time.”

  We’re standing in Lafayette Square in front of a red brick building, 712 Jackson Place. The plaque notes that it’s now the President’s Commission on White House Fellowships, the one-year government internship program. But in April 1865 it was the residence of a young Army major named Henry Rathbone, who was engaged to his stepsister Clara, daughter of a New York senator.

  As Professor Donald recounts in his biography, April 14, 1865, was Good Friday, not a big night to go out, traditionally. It’s hard to imagine today, when an invitation from the president of the United States is tantamount to a subpoena, but the Lincolns had a hard time finding anyone to join them at the theater that night.

  His own secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, declined. (Mrs. Stanton couldn’t stand Mrs. Lincoln.) General Grant also begged off. (Mrs. Grant couldn’t stand Mrs. Lincoln, either.) Lincoln was subsequently turned down by a governor, another general, the Detroit postmaster, another governor (of the Idaho Territory), and the chief of the telegraph bureau at the War Department, an Army major named Thomas Eckert.

  Finally the president turned to another Army major, Henry Rathbone, who accepted. The image of the president pleading with an Army major to sit in the president’s box is perhaps the final tragicomic vignette we have of Lincoln, of a piece with his humanity and humility.

  After Booth shot Lincoln, Rathbone lunged for Booth. Booth sank a viciously sharp seven-inch blade into his arm, opening a wound from elbow to shoulder. Rathbone survived, but the emotional wound went deeper. One day eighteen years later, now U.S. consul general in Hanover, Germany, he shot his wife dead. Rathbone himself died in 1911 in an asylum for the criminally insane. “He was one of the many people,” Pitch said, “whose lives were broken that night.”

  I’d last been to Ford’s Theatre two decades before, to see a play. It was a comedy, but even as I chuckled, I kept looking up at Lincoln’s box. I don’t know how any actor can manage to get through a play here. The negative energy didn’t end with April 14, 1865. Ford’s Theater later became a government office building, and one day in 1893, all three floors collapsed, killing twenty-two people.