Books in Brief: I Don’t Need You When I’m Right

I Don’t Need You When I’m Right: The Confessions of a Washington PR Man, by Vic Gold (Morrow, 218 pp., $6.95).

The title comes from an exchange between Earl Long and an aide. “I’m with you when you’re right, Governor,” said the aide, “but not when you’re wrong.” “You stupid sonofabitch,” retorted Long. “I don’t need you when I’m right.” A Jew whose early experience in politics was in the Deep South, Vic Gold long ago developed an immunity to the kind of cant that a sometime boss of his, Spiro Agnew, dubbed “the post-Watergate morality.” The result is a memoir that is both hilarious and disturbing. Do you laugh or cry, for instance, when you learn that your President used to be known among his frustrated speechwriters as “short-sentence Jerry”? The book is a feather-light, laugh-a-minute sort of thing, but no reader’s view of politics can be quite the same afterward.

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Joseph Sobran

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I Don’t Need You When I’m Right: The Confessions of a Washington PR Man, by Vic Gold (Morrow, 218 pp., $6.95).

The title comes from an exchange between Earl Long and an aide. “I’m with you when you’re right, Governor,” said the aide, “but not when you’re wrong.” “You stupid sonofabitch,” retorted Long. “I don’t need you when I’m right.” A Jew whose early experience in politics was in the Deep South, Vic Gold long ago developed an immunity to the kind of cant that a sometime boss of his, Spiro Agnew, dubbed “the post-Watergate morality.” The result is a memoir that is both hilarious and disturbing. Do you laugh or cry, for instance, when you learn that your President used to be known among his frustrated speechwriters as “short-sentence Jerry”? The book is a feather-light, laugh-a-minute sort of thing, but no reader’s view of politics can be quite the same afterward.