The Writer and the World: Essays

  On the Saturday before the convention opened, no less a person than Carol Morrow, vice-president of Morrow’s Nut House (“over 260 nationwide outlets”), was pushing a trolley with the shuttle mix (and the press kits) somewhere near the press entrance. It was extraordinary—so casual the meeting, so grand the lady. It was like running into the owner of Dunkin’ Donuts (if such a person does exist) carrying sample bags of his doughnuts.

  The man who gave me my accreditation cards (to be hung around the neck: everybody in the convention hall and press areas had things around their necks) said, in response to an inquiry, “Upstairs there’s more information than you can carry away.” And indeed, in the Media Operations Center there must have been tons of paper on narrow long tables: biographies about everybody who was anybody, stories about everything, and, starting on the Monday, copies of convention speeches that hadn’t yet been delivered. On the television monitors you could see what was going on in the convention hall itself: there was no need to witness the actual event. The energetic reporter, with his ready-written information and the AT&T facilities, could telephone back stories to his paper all day.

  But neither photographs nor television screen could give a true feel of the convention hall. The scale was staggering. The deep crisscrossings of the steel girders of the ceiling made me think of the iron-framed railway stations of London, Paddington and Waterloo (and somewhere in Dallas, beside a highway, someone was building a replica of the 1851 Crystal Palace). But the scale was too big: I couldn’t trust my sense of size.

  The figure on the podium was small. But above the podium, and at the back of the hall, was a big screen; and on this screen there was a cropped or partial image (head and shoulders, perhaps), many times larger than life, of the figure on the podium. Smaller screens attached to the steel girders of the ceiling frame multiplied this image; loudspeakers amplified the voice. To enter the hall for the first time was to have one’s sense of actuality unsettled; it was to be in the middle of a scene replicating and magnifying itself, making itself very important: as though here time, the passing moment, could be stretched.

  The invocation was being spoken by a rabbi; and the piety seemed correct. The occasion, with its magnification of man, had a feel of religion. Not religion as contemplation or a private experience of divinity; but religion as the essence of a culture, the binding, brotherhood-transcending material need. That, rather than political debate, was what people had come to Dallas for. The scale and the mood, and the surreal setting, made me think of a Muslim missionary gathering I had seen five years before in a vast canopied settlement of bamboo and cotton in the Pakistan Punjab. And I felt it would not have been surprising, in Dallas, to see busy, pious helpers going around giving out sweets or some kind of symbolic sacramental food.

  TELEVISION by itself wasn’t true to the occasion. But when you were in the hall it was necessary to look, as it were, at the movie, because a certain amount of what was going on went on only on the screen. Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s speech was preceded by a short film about Jeanne Kirk-patrick. Mr. Reagan himself, in this film, introduced her to us as a woman of the stature of Golda Meir and Mrs. Thatcher. And that feminist angle was not unexpected: the press had been reporting, dutifully, that the Republicans intended to do something that evening about the “gender gap.”

  The film ended; the live band played; the delegates shouted and applauded. The applause was rhythmical and ecstatic, as at a revivalist gathering. The placards—WE MEAN JEANNE, WE LOVE JEANNE, painted by volunteers and placed by other volunteers on the floor, below the delegates’ seats—were hoisted and jigged about for the television cameras: the confusing interplay continuing between film and actuality, the experienced real occasion and its magnified film record.

  The text of the speech was available; but the Kirkpatrick speech was considerably more than the text. It was delivered by someone with a feeling for language; it was the only speech at the convention which, even with its simplifications, permitted one to see a real intelligence, a more than political intelligence, at work. Its theme was the need for firmness with the Russians and their allies. This was wickedly knitted into a taunting of Americans of the other party: “But then, they always blame America first”—a refrain which, as it was repeated, acquired the effectiveness (as well as the rhythms) of Mark Antony’s “But Brutus is an honourable man.” The speech was rapturously received; a wonderful photograph the next day in the New York Times showed Mrs. Kirkpatrick radiant and uplifted in her moment of success.

  AFTER that it was downhill all the way in the convention hall. A famous black football player came on and introduced some Olympic athletes. This was not in the official order of business; it was an afterthought; the player was introduced with a reference to his great height (6′ 5″) and his corresponding weight (which I failed to note). After that came the politicians, famous names. But they all—in spite of the music and the applause and the placards—seemed to make the same speech, in the same tone, and in the same dead words.

  Howard Baker: The Carter-Mondale team gave us double-digit inflation; 21-per cent interest rates; a punching bag for a foreign policy, and the misery index.

  Katherine Ortega: Think how far we have come since the Carter-Mondale years of double-digit inflation, 21-per cent interest rates, and economic misery.

  Margaret Heckler: We are now at a great crossroads. We have a choice between stagnation and growth, a choice between the rhetoric of promise and the record of accomplishment.

  Baker: America’s choice this year is not just between Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale. It’s between a team that has proven it can succeed, and a team that has proven it can’t.

  Heckler: It is an easy choice for me to make. In Ronald Reagan I see the special American spirit under God that drew my Irish parents to these shores.

  Ortega: My fellow Americans, on the minted dollar of the United States is the face of Liberty, the profile of the woman of that great statue whose centennial we celebrate in 1986, the mid-term year of the second Reagan administration.

  Perhaps, the occasion being what it was—celebratory, tribal-religious—it didn’t matter what was said. (Just as it is often enough for a Hindu holy man simply to give darshan, to offer a sight of himself.) But these speeches, so impersonal, so alike, did little for the speakers. English, like other living literary languages, is constantly enriching itself by internal references. It is hard to use it without being allusive, without knowingly or unknowingly making some reference to a phrase from Shakespeare or the King James Bible or any one of a number of poets or comedians or film-makers or historians or statesmen. In a speech during the war Churchill used a line from the early Victorian poet Clough: “But westward look, the land is bright.” Clough was soon lost in Churchill; and the words, now Churchillian and famous, can be used or twisted in many (now perhaps mainly ironical) ways. Even Mrs. Thatcher can make a telling point by adapting the title of a play by Christopher Fry (famous in her youth): “The lady’s not for turning.”

  There was nothing like this in the language of Baker, Heckler, or Ortega. The same speech (or very nearly), the same tone, the same personality (or absence of it), the same language: unallusive, cleansed, sterile; nerveless and dead; computer language, programmed sometimes to rise to passion, but getting no higher than copywriter’s glib. As though, at the heart of this great, man-magnifying occasion, there was a hollow, a vacancy.

  I heard a little more about the black football player who had appeared on the podium after Mrs. Kirkpatrick. His name was Roosevelt Grier. He was a “television character,” a “celebrity character.” He had taken up needlework, of all things, after his football. But politically he had been on the other side. I was told that he had been with Robert Kennedy when Robert Kennedy was killed. So his appearance on the Republican podium was sensational; it explained, I thought, the awkwardness with which he had begun.

  After the politicians’ speeches, I thought I would like to look at the football player’s words again. A
nd (not having made notes, having been made lazy by the information facilities) I went afterwards to the Media Operations Center, as to some heaven where everything was recorded.

  The girl said with a smile, “What speech?”

  There were stacks and stacks (of varying heights) of all the other speeches. But there was nothing about Grier or from him. He had been an afterthought.

  I said, “I suppose there’ll be a text in the papers tomorrow.”

  She said, “I doubt it.”

  And there wasn’t—I saw a reference to Grier in one of the Dallas papers, but I found no text of his speech. The journalists, busy and obedient, knew what to leave out.

  GERALD FORD, the thirty-eighth president of the United States, was coming to the convention the next day. The newspapers were full of half-admiring, half-curmudgeonly stories about the great sums he was earning at the age of seventy-one, over and above his $100,000 presidential pension. But Mr. Ford was out of favor with the right, and that was why (according to another newspaper story) NCPAC, the National Conservative Political Action Committee, as part of their American Heroes for Reagan project, had chosen that very day for their big fund-raising Texas Gala. The gala, a $1,000-a-plate affair (but media people, if admitted, fed free), was to be at the Circle T ranch of Nelson Bunker Hunt, twenty-nine miles out of Dallas.

  Bunker Hunt—how could one resist that name? The man who had tried to corner the silver market; the man who had bought, on an astronomical scale, into soybeans and racehorses; the man who had inherited a billion of his father’s oil money and turned it into two; the man whose wealth—like the wealth of his brothers and sister—couldn’t really be comprehended.

  I had been befriended by Andrew, a young writer from New Jersey.

  Andrew had driven down to Dallas in an old car he had bought for $650; and it was in this car, without air-conditioning, that we drove west out of Dallas, at about six-thirty, into a flaming sun, in a highway temperature of over one hundred degrees. We were driving with many others into Dallas’s suburban countryside. It wasn’t countryside really. The Dallas–Fort Worth airport is one of the biggest in the world; and regularly, one behind the other, in perhaps two lines, the aeroplanes, trailing black fumes, came down into visibility from the hot ochre sky and their lights suddenly glittered. The highway hissed with commuter traffic; and all around, the sky roared.

  Andrew, with his Northerner’s excitement, had said that the Hunt ranch had its own exit. That would have been grand indeed. But it wasn’t like that; you simply turned left off the highway, a traffic policeman staying traffic in the opposing lane. The grass was bright green, surprising in the heat; the post-and-rail fence was painted white. Just inside were the first helpers (and the first line of security men): young men in black trousers and white shirts, and some with black or white baseball caps.

  In the distance there was a big white tent. Towards that we drove. The low, regularly spaced trees suggested a fruit farm rather than a landscaped park. We stopped not far from the tent and got out of the car. There was “valet parking” at this gala—at $1,000 a plate there could be no less. Black-trousered, white-shirted young men were taking the visitors’ cars to the far-off car park; and they were running back—running, as though that was part of the courtesy.

  We were checked. We hung our press passes around our necks; young NCPAC stewards (their own badges of authority, on a kind of sticky paper, fixed to their shirt pockets) eyed us constantly. The gala—what was it? A cowboy on a white horse smiled and smiled at no one in particular and kept on spinning a little lasso, which now rose and now fell. A cowgirl sat astride another horse. “Western” saloon-girls and gun-slingers moved among the guests. People sat on a tame longhorn steer and were photographed. There was music and singing from an open tent, country-and-western pieces. There were food stalls with Texan and Mexican food. Out in the open a side of beef was being barbecued, dropping fat into a long black pan on the green grass. There was a stagecoach, in which some people took little rides; it was a reconstruction, the stagecoach, not real, not an antique. Elsewhere, at rest, horseless, there was a covered wagon, apparently old and genuine. And among the gala guests were three or four Indians in full feathered costumes, waiting to be photographed.

  WE WERE IN TEXAS, in temperatures and a landscape that awakened admiration for the first settlers. What was the average speed of a stagecoach? Six miles, eight miles? The railway came in the 1870s—did that do fifteen miles an hour? But the West of this gala was not a celebration of the past. It was more like a “production”; and so indeed—according to the inevitable NCPAC press hand-out—it was; it had been mounted by a specialist and immensely successful company (the subject of another very full hand-out). Cinema and television had swallowed up the past; this gala was for people who perhaps liked—as much as westerns—the idea that, as patriots, they liked westerns. And this cinematic version of the West was itself now being filmed for television somewhere: show within show. A red crane with a television camera from time to time unfolded and rose above us all, against a glorious sunset. There were light aeroplanes in the sky: somebody said they might have been gala guests, dropping in.

  In the other direction, away from the red crane and the television camera, the gala and the white tent, was the ranch house. It was on a slight rise in the ground and it was surrounded by trees. It looked a modest house. From this modest-looking house Nelson Bunker Hunt and his wife were now coming, preceded by a television crew and onlookers—perhaps more than gala guests, perhaps political associates, perhaps people admitted to social intimacy. The television team—cameraman, soundman, and reporter walking backward, like crabs—imposed measure and stateliness on the procession. And when the people at the gala saw what was happening there was an involuntary gasp, as at the appearance of a saint or royalty. And really, his family, his wealth, and his adventures made Nelson Bunker Hunt a figure of fable; there was no one else quite like him in our world. And here he was, in his own setting, for a cause he considered good and pious, half our host.

  It was hard to hear what he was saying to the television reporter. He was speaking softly; he seemed to be chewing up some of his words; I could only catch the word “conservative” two or three times. He seemed to be expressing his pleasure at the spread of the cause.

  In the “Self-Portrait” questionnaire he had answered for the Dallas Morning News that day he had given “overeating” as his worst habit (he adored ice cream, apparently); but he was a good deal less fat than the photographs the London papers had printed of him at the time of his silver “caper.” He had said that blue was his favorite colour; and now indeed he was wearing a pale blue shirt, with a leather-thong tie, no thicker than a shoelace, but at the top button, instead of a knot, the leather thong somehow supported a silver dollar—a joking allusion, perhaps, to the silver caper. He was half smiling while he spoke. His wife, very small beside him, was smiling all the time; she seemed to be smiling out of pure pleasure at the occasion—the gala, the guests, the cause. She wore a diamond horseshoe brooch—just the one little touch of extravagance, almost like a little joke (matching her husband’s silver dollar), and it seemed, with her smile, to be an offering to us, her guests.

  And so they moved on with their media train, past the Oklahoman Indian warriors in their bright feathers (Chief Blue Hail and his band), past the reproduction stagecoach and the tame longhorn: Mr. and Mrs. Bunker Hunt, benign and public-spirited in this manifestation, standing for money and luck and oil and the land and work and reward and God and the old-fashioned way, incarnating and appearing to make very simple the complex American virtue that the barbecue and gala were intended to exalt and defend.

  The call came to dinner. Bells? Whipcracks? I cannot remember: the call was western, unusual, part of the folk theatre of the expensive occasion. The enormous tent with nearly two thousand people was—incredibly—air-conditioned (with the help of five hundred tons of equipment specially brought in by Mobile Air of Houston, coolers of oil r
efineries). The 1,700 or so dinners (“designed by Dallas food stylist Dorothy Berry”) were deftly served.

  THE BENEDICTION was spoken by Jerry Falwell, the fundamentalist Baptist preacher, the religious star of the right, who was to speak the benediction next day at the convention itself, after the introduction of Mrs. Reagan. Earlier in the evening Falwell had sat astride the Texas longhorn for the cameras. Now, with the lights playing on him on the platform in the tent, and with the TV cameras working, he, who had entered into the Americanist spirit of the gala, cast his own religious spirit over the occasion. He addressed God directly: “This evening is dedicated to Thee.” Texan whoops followed the “amens.” No sacrilege was intended by those whoops. These men, with true humility (the grand humility of the achiever, rather than the worthless humility of the defeated) were putting themselves on the side of God, and striking a blow at all that was ungodly, at all that threatened occasions like this one.

  And virtue was its own reward. When Bunker Hunt was given a hand up to the platform it was to announce that the gala had attracted 1,650 paying guests, and not the four hundred or so he and NCPAC had been hoping for in the beginning. After clearing expenses, more than a million dollars had been raised from that tentful of people that evening for NCPAC’s American Heroes for Reagan project.

  It was a staggering figure. A middle-aged photographer at our press table became very excited. He had no friend or colleague with him, and he needed to talk to someone. He said across the dark table, “I got a picture of Jerry Falwell on the longhorn. I never thought I would get a picture like that. Got a picture of Bunker too. Bunker was walking and he saw a fork on the grass. He bent down. He bent down and picked that fork up and put it in his pocket and he said, ‘That’s the way you save money.’”