A Colossal Wreck (7 page)

Beatrice was a stringent supervisor. As a child I used to listen to Malcolm Muggeridge, a close friend of my father, describe his visits to the Webb household, where he was courting Beatrice’s niece, Kitty. Beatrice would order Sydney to go for a jog before lunch. The wretched man would trot off down the driveway, with Malcolm lumbering after him. No longer under the scrutiny of Beatrice, he would dodge in behind the barn, invite Malcolm to recline on a bale of hay and spend the next hour talking about the future of the world.

Then they would have to sprint back up the driveway to where Beatrice would lay her hand on Sydney’s brow, ascertaining from the perspiration that improvement—in this case physical—had indeed taken place.

Time and again, reading Hillary Rodham Clinton’s
It Takes a Village
, I was reminded of Beatrice Webb. There’s the same imperious gleam, the same lust to improve the human condition until it conforms to the wretchedly constricted vision of freedom which gave us social-worker liberalism, otherwise known as therapeutic policing.

The Clintonite passion for talking about children as “investments” tells the whole story. Managed capitalism (progressivism’s ideal, minted in the Teddy Roosevelt era) needs regulation, and just as the stock market requires—somewhat theoretically these days—the Securities and Exchange Commission, so too does the social investment (a child) require social workers, shrinks, guidance counselors and the whole vast army of the helping professions, to make sure the investment yields a respectable rate of return.

The do-good progressives at the start of the century saw the family—particularly the immigrant family—as a conservative institution, obstructive to the progressive goals of society and the state. So, they attacked it. Then their preferred economic system—consumer capitalism—began to sunder the social fabric, and so today’s
do-gooders say that the family and the children, our “investment,” must be saved by any means necessary. When the FBI was getting ready to incinerate the Branch Davidians they told Janet Reno the group’s children were being abused. Save them, she cried. They went at it and all, including the children, were burned alive.

January 25

The best review of HRC’s book is written by a man now dead, Christopher Lasch, in his
Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged
, published in 1977.

The lesson Lasch draws in all his books is that radicalism did triumph in the United States. But it was not the radicalism of Marx or any kind of socialism. Instead, what triumphed was the radicalism of the helping professions, transforming the state into the engine of therapy “because the no longer surprising fact is that therapy and bureaucracy have considerable affinity; each seeks rationalization, each is hierarchical and, above all, each is authoritarian.”

Hillary the helper: self-disclosure is anathema to her. The reticence that has landed her in the present troubles with the special prosecutor may well stem as much from childhood as from the prudence of a power broker from Arkansas. Early in her book she writes with elegiac warmth about playing softball and kindred sports, “all under the watchful eyes of parents.” Then, a couple of pages later, she remarks sharply that “in reality, our past was not so picture-perfect … Ask those who grew up in the picture-perfect houses about the secrets and desperation they sometimes concealed.” That’s as near as she gets to saying anything interesting about herself.

January 31

Lady Olga Maitland, member of parliament for Sutton and Cheam, visits the proud nation of Turkey. She and her husband are sitting at a sumptuous outdoor banquet when the Turk next to her unzips his trousers. “Robin,” she hisses to her husband, a phlegmatic barrister, “He’s produced Mr. Mouse.” Robin motions for her to be quiet
and—the Englishman’s great fear—to avoid making a scene. “But Robin,” Lady Olga whispers, “Mr. Mouse is standing at attention!” “Just ignore it, dear,” her husband advises, “and it will go away.” “And do you know,” Lady Olga later reports to her friends with great excitement, “When we finished lunch two hours later, Mr. Mouse was still standing at attention!”

February 7

Suddenly it’s the “trust” crisis. Important national institutions like Harvard, the
Washington Post
and the Kaiser Family Foundation began collectively sinking their teeth into the matter sometime last year and at the end of January the
Post
fired off a six-part series decked out with doleful front-page headlines such as “In America, Loss of Confidence Seeps into All Institutions” and graphs about “public trust” with the trend lines all pointing down.

Cut your way through the thick underbrush of graphs and pizza-slice graphics in the
Post
’s series (Harvard and Kaiser will be firing off their independent summaries later on) and you find something simple: It’s as if P. T. Barnum set forth across the country to see if one was still being born each minute, got to the edge of the Midwest, looked around and then muttered to himself with drawn features, “No suckers!”

The
Post
rests its whole “waning trust” thesis on a couple of vignettes in part one of its series. In the opening paragraph Janice Drake, mother of three in Detroit, doesn’t trust the neighborhood teenager who fails to pull his pants up properly. In paragraph two, eighteen-year-old Lori Miller of Madison, Wisconsin, says she never knows who the next Jeffrey Dahmer might turn out to be.

Drawing on this database, paragraph three says we’ve become “a nation of suspicious strangers” and this is why we’ve lost confidence in the federal government.

If Janice Drake had told the
Post
she puts in three hours a week running errands for old folk and young Lori said she relied on her friends for emotional back-up we wouldn’t have had a crisis.

The one thing the
Post
, Harvard, the Kaiser Family Foundation
and all the hired professors can’t face is that the correct premise for an independent citizenry is
not
to trust government—not Pericles in ancient Athens, not Bill Clinton now. And, across the last thirty years, government has willfully forfeited such scant reservoirs of trust as might have remained.

During the Civil War thirteen states announced drastic “no confidence” in federal government. The people in these thirteen states simultaneously exhibited great trust and confidence in each other.

There is one group the American people most definitely don’t trust: namely the people who survey them, usually at 6.30 p.m. when they’re sitting down to eat. People perform for surveys. They pretend to be Roseanne, or Archie Bunker or Eddie Murphy or Beavis and Butthead. They don’t trust professors and pundits, who repay them by claiming they trust no one.

February 12

To: Daisy Cockburn; Chloe Cockburn; Patrick Cockburn; Olivia Ruspoli Wilde; Andrew

Subject: Dr. William Cockburn

Bill Cockburn seems to have had a sound view on causes of scurvy. The citrus fruit “cure” was obviously a cover story put out by Seamen’s Union.

From a book about the search for a cure for scurvy by David Harvie: “Cockburn, who trained at Edinburgh and Leyden, was a very influential, conservative snob who had been physician to the fleet and who had made a great deal of money in private practice, largely by promoting his ‘Electuary’—a doubtful cure for dysentery. This potion, which he kept secret, had been obtained in Italy. He claimed it had been used to cure Pope Clement XI in 1731, and despite complaints from Admiralty Commissioners, his patron, Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell promoted its widespread use in the Navy. Despite his influence, his dull, inflexible approach resulted in a lack of conspicuous medical progress during his career. He was described as ‘an old, very rich quack’ and is ironically the only naval physician to be buried in
Westminster Abbey. Cockburn’s big contribution to the processional discussion of scurvy was that it was caused by congenital laziness among the sailors. He did admit that fresh vegetables might help those already sick, and had even witnessed the efficacy of lemons, but on serious preventative measures he had nothing new to say.”

February 14

Here’s a little parable from Oregon about the Lesser-of-Two-Evils. At one point in the US Senate race between Ron Wyden and Gordon Smith, there was a Green candidate called Lou Gold. Then, as the race came down to the wire, the green establishment in Oregon told Gold that every vote counted and, if he stayed in, his third-party candidacy could throw the race to the man of darkness, Smith. So Gold stood down.

The Oregon green establishment took out ads saying it was a choice between the Despoilers and Protectors and that a vote for Wyden was a vote for the temple of Nature. Wyden rewarded these expressions of support with stentorian speeches to the effect that the Clinton logging plan—under whose auspices old growth is falling and the spotted owl going to its long home—wasn’t cutting enough. In the end Wyden beat Smith by 1.5 percent. The green vote put him over the top. Now he’s saying that since he represents all the people of Oregon, including the chainsaw faction who voted for Smith, he wants to lay Oregon waste, the same way Smith promised.

February 21

For my harsh remarks about Hillary Rodham Clinton’s book
It Takes a Village
I am taken to task by Ruth Rosen, prof of history at UC Davis. According to Rosen, writing angrily in the
Los Angeles Times
, anyone who is publicly savaged by William Safire and yours truly “must be doing something right.”

Rosen thinks that attacks on HRC are not “simply politics as usual” and that HRC “is the kind of strong woman that weak men love to hate, a brilliant woman who makes mediocre men feel incompetent.”
The left’s attacks on HRC “stem from a more visceral misogyny” and that “even today, there are still some liberal men who cannot grasp the radical nature of what they call ‘women’s issues.’ ”

Rosen says that “like Jane Addams and Eleanor Roosevelt, Hillary Clinton believes that a truly humane society places children, not corporations at the center of its economic agenda” and that she’s “the perfect scapegoat because she has a moral compass and is not afraid to follow it.”

The one thing Dr. Rosen couldn’t bring herself to do was read HRC’s book. Admiring Hillary usually depends on such omissions. Look at her book, or her commodity trades, or her membership on the board of an incinerator company or her treatment of the employees of the White House travel office and you like her less.

HRC’s résumé, it seems to me, contains the bankruptcy of a certain strain of feminism, the same way her husband’s résumé, in this single person, encapsulates the bankruptcy of the Democratic Party.

February 22

Last week it was Peter McKay’s turn to be on the losing end of the libel wars. In the London
Evening Standard
he wrote up a much discussed recent event in which Gore Vidal had been lunching at the River Café in Hammersmith. These modish restaurants feature flagons of olive oil. Mistaking such a vessel for a beaker of wine, Vidal took a swig, and then did a predictable amount of spluttering and gasping. Recovering himself, Vidal finally snarled to the wide-eyed company, “You let me do that! You want me to die because then Edmund White will be King Fag!”

White went round Paris and later Key West telling this story with great delight, but Vidal was not pleased with a slightly florid account of the episode that appeared in McKay’s column. He duly instructed his legal representatives in London, Biddle & Co., to threaten savage litigation on the grounds that this defamatory story made him look ridiculous and shamefully rude about the excellent White; that in fact the amount of olive oil had been trifling, the discomfort transitory and the occasion lunch, not dinner, as McKay’s item had inferred.

McKay offered to fly to Ravello and do a long and flattering profile of Vidal, with disclaimers of the episode cunningly inserted into the text. But Vidal declined. He has been holding out for a public retraction in the
Standard
, plus an appropriate sum to mitigate the usual intense pain and suffering, probably around three or four thousand dollars worth.

February 26

Dear Sir,

In a highly misleading piece in the last issue of your review (25.02.96), Gerald Clarke, the biographer of Truman Capote, pays pious homage to the film of
Beat the Devil
as a “small comic masterpiece, as original now as it was in 1953.” In the excerpt you publish from
Capote: The Shooting Script
Clarke gives the impression that the script was all the work of Capote. He graphically describes his hero on the Amalfi coast “wearing an overcoat that fell almost to his ankles, with a long lavender scarf flapping behind it, rushing down to the set every morning with dialogue he had spent the night writing.” In reality
Beat the Devil
, the cast of which included Humphrey Bogart, Gina Lollobrigida, Peter Lorre and Robert Morley, is a faithful rendition of a novel written by my father Claud Cockburn and published in Britain in 1953. I do not know what Capote was doing with his nights but writing an original script for
Beat the Devil
was not one of them. In reality my father had sold the film rights to the book to John Huston, an old friend of his, for sterling 3,000 at a moment when he was living in Ireland and in serious need of money. Claud had been denounced by Senator McCarthy as the 84th most dangerous Red in the world and had therefore considered it prudent to publish his novel under the nom de plume James Helvick.

The credits for the film when it appeared announced that the screenplay was by Truman Capote from a novel by James Helvick. Since nobody had heard of Helvick—and Huston did not want to rush round in the America of the early 1950s publicizing the fact he was in fact the notorious ex-Communist Claud Cockburn—this has led to subsequent confusion.
Beat the Devil
was later republished
twice under my father’s real name but the belief that Capote had written it has never died.