THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 17, 1994 TAG: 9407130399
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY ROSS C. REEVES
LENGTH: Medium: 89 lines
STANDING FIRM
A Vice-Presidential Memoir
DAN QUAYLE
HarperCollins/Zondervan. 402 pp. $25.
DAN QUAYLE WROTE Standing Firm to vindicate his often quixotic career as vice president and to position himself for future political adventures. Quayle's supporters will be reinforced in their negative views of the media, and his detractors will remain unpersuaded that he has slain the dragon of his public image.
On its own merits, Standing Firm is a sketchy contemporary history of the Bush administration and the 1988 and 1992 campaigns that bracketed it. Although it lacks the intimacy of most ``insider'' accounts of politics and government, it propels itself as a competent narrative of domestic and world events from the coup against Corazon Aquino to the Clarence Thomas hearings. Quayle's colloquial, almost folksy, style is laced with self-deprecating humor, occasionally shrewd insights into campaign politics and amusing retellings of media frenzy over the innocent gaffes that became Quayle's hallmark and curse.
Quayle makes a good case that the press initially misperceived him and then stubbornly clung to its caricature. But if Standing Firm fails to overcome his image problem, it is largely because he discounts the possibility that his bad press arose from more than simple prejudice against a youthful, conservative success story. Attributing media excesses to meanness only serves to portray Quayle in the uninspiring role of victim: Nixon's ``I am not a crook'' resonates pitiably into ``I am not a dunderhead.''
Standing Firm itself suggests that the Quayle saga is less a media phenomenon than a Quayle phenomenon. The perception of Quayle's vapidity appears in retrospect to be a clumsy metaphor for the sense that, as Dorothy Parker would say, ``there is no `there' there.''
Quayle describes a life that could be titled ``The Beave Goes to Washington.'' He tells us that he had a pleasant but not privileged childhood, went to college, worked for the Indiana attorney general, graduated from law school, briefly served as publisher of a family-owned newspaper, ran successfully for the House of Representatives against great odds, ran successfully for the Senate against great odds, and became vice president. While he is quick to point out that he made many personal friends while serving in Congress, his account of these years suggests that, like Gilbert and Sullivan's Ruler of the Queen's Navy, ``he always voted at his party's call and never thought of thinking for himself at all.''
Quayle's attempt to wrestle with his image problem reveals, as much as anything else, the difficulty that a new generation of politicians faces in trying to justify itself to the electorate. Like the current president, Quayle was not forged in the crucible of the Depression, world war and the New Deal - events that tried the soul and shaped the persona of every president from Theodore Roosevelt to George Bush.
President Clinton validates himself by calling up, often to wretched excess, his background of rural poverty in a dysfunctional family. Quayle's problem is that he led the good and prosperous life of the post-war American Dream. And while this happy circumstance does not connote a character failure, much less disqualify Quayle from public office, it necessarily raises the question of what alternative experience - other than winning elections - demonstrates that he has what Tom Wolfe describes as the ``right stuff.''
The public has wondered this from the beginning. After the 1988 vice presidential debate, George Will described Quayle's conservatism as ``less a creed than an absorbed climate of opinion,'' likening his beliefs to lint clinging to his exterior. At the same time, Meg Greenfield, remarking on Quayle's reaction to Lloyd Bentsen's ``you're no Jack Kennedy'' crack, described Quayle as being ``like a deer caught in the headlights.'' It is this haunting metaphor of Quayle as a man without personal reservoirs of strength and belief that, more than anything else, encapsulates the Quayle image.
To his credit Quayle acknowledges the sting of these and other criticisms, responding merely that his public relations advisers did a poor job of depicting his strong beliefs and independent mind. But strongly held opinions characterize rock stars as well as statesmen, and tenacity is a hallmark of veterans and rookies alike. And so with Quayle the question is not whether he is ``standing firm,'' but rather whether he has developed within himself anything firm to stand upon, a question this book does little to resolve. MEMO: Ross C. Reeves is a corporate lawyer in Norfolk. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
LYNN GOLDSMITH
In ``Standing Firm,'' Dan Quayle fights to overcome his image as a
lightweight.
by CNB