Books in Brief: Old Faces of 1976

Old Faces of 1976, by Richard Reeves (Harper, 228 pp., $10). Perhaps you are of that disappearing species that loves and reveres politicians. If so, you will loathe Reeves’s collection of essays on such “old faces” as Ford, Wallace, Reagan, Muskie, and Humphrey. However, not many of us love politicians any more, and Reeves is a cheeky and engaging observer of the passing political show. I do not myself think Reeves, the celebrated freelance reporter, is the super-pundit that so many make him out to be. But how deftly he shoves in the stiletto! As a presidential candidate in.1972, Scoop Jackson was “as dull as most people thought he was…” Jerry Ford talks of “ ‘that great Russian writer’ because he can’t pronounce Solzhenitsyn—he has trouble pronouncing or defining anything or anybody east of Portland, Maine, or west of Portland, Oregon.” The book has no overall theme save, perhaps, that politicians ought to go away and leave us alone—which, damn their eyes, they won’t do. With fine impartiality Reeves doles out his strictures to liberals and conservatives alike. Interestingly, Senator James L. Buckley emerges in better shape than almost anyone; “an honest man,” Reeves calls him, though far too keen on conservative principle to succeed. Reeves is not a thorough-going cynic. He maintains that “people are not as stupid as politicians think they are.” Well, that’s a relief, anyway.