Letter from Washington

We have, these past six months, been fascinated by John B. Anderson, for reasons altogether different from those that recommend him so persuasively to the Volvo set. You see, we knew him, as Oscar Levant once said of Doris Day, before he became a virgin. We knew him as a pompous fellow from the boondocks who learned to make himself heard . . . by shouting at people. He shouted about deficits and big spenders and environmental crazies and all the other good grey Republican demons. Shouting, always shouting, in the manner of an American industrialist trying to make himself clear to a bunch of uncomprehending Parisian bumpkins. It would be less than objective to say that he was boring. He was impossible. One could imagine him delivering a breakfast table lecture to his children on the eight different kinds of tooth decay and how he had managed, after studying dental hygiene at night school, to defeat each and every one of them in his own mouth—right here, in the back, I introduced a five-point program against plaque . . .

Then of a sudden, that slow-news day last winter, some media pixie returned to the office from a luncheon of controlled substances and conceived what became known as the Anderson for President campaign. At first, indeed for many months, the campaign was ideologically hermaphroditic. There were senior people (one avoids the phrase, high officials) around Anderson who contend that The Option was preserved until Labor Day; that is to say, that Anderson had been tap-dancing his way into our hearts for almost a year before the media demanded that he face up to the first political question: would he choose to run to the left or to the right? Driven from the Republican Party by an uninterrupted series of primary losses, Anderson went along with the media game and shuffled off to the left, ridiculing the positions he had taken in the well of the House. He now finds laughable—ha, ha, ha, as Tom Snyder might put it those top-of-the-lungs speeches he made for twenty years. At least he and his former friends in the House agree on something. (One pauses to acknowledge a differing opinion. With reference to the Anthony Lewis Standard of Weights and Measures, one actually grows in office when one moves right to left. Movement in the opposite direction, as is well known, is accompanied by physical breakdown, severe loss of IQ, and bad breath. This has been a year of extraordinary growth for Anderson. He’s become, well, different.)

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We have, these past six months, been fascinated by John B. Anderson, for reasons altogether different from those that recommend him so persuasively to the Volvo set. You see, we knew him, as Oscar Levant once said of Doris Day, before he became a virgin. We knew him as a pompous fellow from the boondocks who learned to make himself heard . . . by shouting at people. He shouted about deficits and big spenders and environmental crazies and all the other good grey Republican demons. Shouting, always shouting, in the manner of an American industrialist trying to make himself clear to a bunch of uncomprehending Parisian bumpkins. It would be less than objective to say that he was boring. He was impossible. One could imagine him delivering a breakfast table lecture to his children on the eight different kinds of tooth decay and how he had managed, after studying dental hygiene at night school, to defeat each and every one of them in his own mouth—right here, in the back, I introduced a five-point program against plaque . . .

Then of a sudden, that slow-news day last winter, some media pixie returned to the office from a luncheon of controlled substances and conceived what became known as the Anderson for President campaign. At first, indeed for many months, the campaign was ideologically hermaphroditic. There were senior people (one avoids the phrase, high officials) around Anderson who contend that The Option was preserved until Labor Day; that is to say, that Anderson had been tap-dancing his way into our hearts for almost a year before the media demanded that he face up to the first political question: would he choose to run to the left or to the right? Driven from the Republican Party by an uninterrupted series of primary losses, Anderson went along with the media game and shuffled off to the left, ridiculing the positions he had taken in the well of the House. He now finds laughable—ha, ha, ha, as Tom Snyder might put it those top-of-the-lungs speeches he made for twenty years. At least he and his former friends in the House agree on something. (One pauses to acknowledge a differing opinion. With reference to the Anthony Lewis Standard of Weights and Measures, one actually grows in office when one moves right to left. Movement in the opposite direction, as is well known, is accompanied by physical breakdown, severe loss of IQ, and bad breath. This has been a year of extraordinary growth for Anderson. He’s become, well, different.)