Garry Wills and John Wayne and Andrew Greeley and Robert Novak and Newt Gingrich and the Clintons and Paul de Man (who?) and Janet Reno and Cardinal Cody and Gallup and #2 daughter (!) in . . .

. . . Blithe Spirit, No. 58 April 16, 1997, Two Cents and worth it.

Is John Wayne us? . . .

The latest book by Garry Wills, John Wayne's America: The Politics of Celebrity, is said by reviewer Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post to be a departure from Wills's "customary independence of style and thought." Wills, once a Jesuit and Campion High student (Prairie du Chien, Wis.), more recently an adjunct prof at Northwestern, winner of beaucoups de prizes, and prolific writer of books and columns, has done major U.S. historical figures, including Lincoln.

This time he does the movie-mythical Wayne, doing a "not bad" job of describing him but taking an unjustified leap by saying he is the "archetypical American." Not quite, says Yardley. There may be a "John Wayne's America," but is the term interchangeable with "America"?

Wills asks, "What kind of country accepts as its norm an old man whose principal screen activity was shooting other people, or punching them out?" (No country you'd want to live in, is understood, but it's the one we're stuck with.) Yardley asks for "hard evidence" that this is an American norm. If there are millions who admire Wayne's authority-figure model, millions others don't, or don't know or care about it.

Wills has produced an "all-inclusive generalization" popular among today's "'social critics' who crowd the campuses," says Yardley, who asks about other myths and other Americas, from Elvis Presley to Martin Luther King Jr.

Wills vs. Greeley . . .

But this playing to the social critics' crowd fits with Wills' Sun-Times columns. In these he unfortunately plays flack for the Clintons, easily dismissing accusations against them. The sage of Evanston limps, I fear, slipping into a trend. I contrast him with another serious writer who also columnizes, sociologist Andrew Greeley, who often uses scholarship as springboard for commentary.

I would like to see Wills look more like the judicious William Pfaff, who writes from Paris on international matters. And I certainly don't like that leap of faith to easy generalization that characterizes the Michel Foucaults of the world. More later on who in tarnation is Michel Foucault.

Will Wills report? . . .

Typical of Wills efforts on behalf of the Clintons is his 4/14/97 column arguing that no brows need be raised at Webster Hubbell's being offered easy jobs and lots of money on leaving the White House. Happens with any high-influence resigner, says Wills. To bolster his argument, he calls on the authority of Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, because he's a sometime critic of the Clintons.

Contrast this with the column beneath it by Robert Novak reporting the return of Newt Gingrich to his old form as conservative revolutionist, albeit one who requires watching because of backsliding tendencies. Novak writes on his own authority as a reporter, having worked the phones to put his column together, doing what a historian calls primary research.

But Wills reads books and other columnists to decide the matter before him, though he has done the campaign-trail thing -- for Time Magazine. This interfered with his giving the Society of Midland Authors awards dinner speech. He's been there and done that, therefore, but he's not a working journalist like Novak. Secondary sources are OK for his Sun-Times work, apparently.

How can he ever thank them? . . .

Novak is probably glad to see the Newtster back in form. He certainly considers it worth reporting. This is how the media decide things, less in their opinions than in what they report. Novak is not out in left (or right) field with this, however. Even libs will find it interesting about Newt, if only to lose a moment of sleep over it. All sorts of reactions are possible, but Novak produces a flat enough account to be taken seriously. He brings credibility.

So do others, as recently two Wash. Post reporters on Clinton fundraising. Last August, Clinton's deputy campaign manager, Ann Lewis, said to accuse the Clintons of using the Lincoln Bedroom to reward donors was "outrageous, without a shred of evidence." But last month the Clinton press secretary Michael McCurry said the sleepovers were "a special way of saying 'thank you for services rendered,'" contradicting Lewis.

Moreover, at his post-election press conference, Clinton said he would feel responsible for checking on Democratic donors because he was titular head of the Democrats, but emphasized that the party is not the campaign, thus distancing himself. Al Gore made the same point in January: party is not campaign.

But on April 2, McCurry said, "It's long been apparent that [the campaign staff] worked very closely with the DNC [Dem Natl Committee] day in and day out during the '95-'96 campaign cycle. I don't think that would be startling to anybody." Anybody but those who had taken Clinton and Gore seriously months earlier.

Unlimited nonsense . . .

Studying philosophy as a Jesuit, I too often encountered the point in a course when the teacher stopped saying, "As we will see," and started saying, "As we saw," turning my eager anticipation to panic. I knew I had missed something.

So with Bill & Al and their shell game, and Ann Lewis too. She's an old ADA (Americans for Democratic Action) warhorse, just the sort Bill has drawn into the White House to give fits to the FBI-agent author of Unlimited Access, the upstairs-downstairs view of life among America's first dysfunctional family. Not that Dick & Pat were that functional -- but did Pat yell and scream and throw the f-word around?

Unlimited Access has been dismissed as raw data unfiltered by professional news judgment. Aldrich is no Wash. Post reporter, true. But he is an experienced interviewer a la Sgt. Friday who wanted "the facts, ma'am, just the facts." And a raw, unfiltered tale he tells, to be sure, of slobs and incompetents who took hanging loose to new heights and among other things threw security measures out White House windows.

Guilt as memory-free . . .

A new book on Austrians (The Austrians, by Gordon Brook-Shepherd, Carroll & Graf, $28) speaks of "suppressed guilt and failed atonement" for failure to confront their WW2 behavior. The same is true of France, with its many collaborationists. And I suggest also of the draft-age generation from Viet Nam War days in this country, including our best known Rhodes Scholar, now separating himself from his party as noted above.

Among the French one solution was to embrace (and export) a reality-denying philosophy that history is what you want it to be. We may assume it's been consoling to some who played along with the Nazis -- like literary theorist and Yale prof Paul de Man, who wrote in favor of deporting Jews to "a Jewish colony isolated from Europe" but later claimed (falsely) to have been part of the Belgian resistance -- to say history is bunk. All in the mind, something we say to please the ruling [Nazi] elite.

So would such a devil-may-care approach appeal to America's elite who escaped the terrible [V-Nam] war and who stopped protesting once the draft was repealed. They are intellectual adventurers in the sense that cheap novels speak of an "adventuress," a woman-with-a-past ready for whatever the future might bring.

No smoking rules . . .

Atty. Gen. Janet Reno won't ask for independent investigation of Democrat fund raising because there's no clear violation, no smoking gun. But the law speaks of cases where there "may have been" violations. An independent counsel would presumably decide if there had been violations.

It's like a debate among religion writers years back over the Sun-Times series on Cardinal Cody and his woman friend. One said there was no "smoking gun" and so the series should not have run. But smoking guns are for prosecutors and juries to find, not newspapers, whose business it is to lay out pertinent facts. Taking them seriously, of course, which as I say above, is how reporting and editing makes its point, rather than opinions one can pick up at the nearest saloon. Like these, you say? Fie!

About on schedule . . .

By the way, or BTW, as #2 daughter says in e-mail lingo, an (admittedly Republican) poll shows 74% of us taking the fund-raising allegations seriously, compared to 78% who took Watergate seriously as a Gallup poll found in May, 1973 -- 15 months before Nixon resigned. But people had more confidence then in investigations; only 28% thought investigators were out to get Nixon. Now only 28% think they want the facts, ma'am.