Morrie Ryskind, RIP.

IN 1960, Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon was the ne plus ultra liberal in Washington. He announced that he was a candidate for his party's presidential nomination. The big question--could Morse win?--was to be settled in an all-important primary on May 3. NATIONAL REVIEW asked Morrie Ryskind to cover the campaign and the contest.

His article began with an extensive account of the Morse platform, which incorporated every policy plank opposed by Morrie Ryskind. He went on to recount his heightened tension as primary day approached:

The night of May 3, as I sat in my living room nervously twisting both radio and TV dials while awaiting news of the returns of the Washington primary, I was well fortified with jars of vitamins, aspirin, Bufferin, anti-acids, tranquilizers, and smelling-salts. I hadn't shaved because my wife had apparently mislaid my razor blades in her weekly clean-up, so I was slightly embarrased when two strangers, in white uniforms, came in. My wife explained that they were new members of her PTA board and she had asked them over for a cup of coffee. Why they carried that straitjacket I'll never know, but then I don't try to keep up with all my wife's committees My doctor, passing by, happened to drop in time for coffee: He had apparently just operated on somebody in the neighborhood, because he was still toting some chloroform and a jar of blood plasma. Luckily he knew the men in white, so I didn't have to waste any time in social chit-chat and could stay with the dials.

As the returns began to come in, I unbelievingly kept switching knobs from station to station: but one and all carried the same blessed story. Not only was Humphrey bashing Morse's brains out, but even Adlai, unlisted on the ballot, was pulling a bigger vote. I remember the rest of that night only vaguely: I know only that I chased the PTA boys out of the house, hurling Morsian epithets and all my vitamins, tranquilizers, etc., after them; I hazily recall that there were several bottles of Scotch and bourbon, and, when they ran out, the doc graciously donated his chloroform; and that, since then, my ulcer is gone.

That was the same man who wrote Animal Crackers for the Marx Brothers, and A Night at the Opera, and who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for Of Three I sing. His picture appeared last week on the front page of the New York Times, whose account of Morrie Ryskind's life noted that after the Second World War he stopped writing comedies and screenplays and devoted himself substantially to politics and political writing. It was not widely known (although Morrie Ryskind often recited it as a fact) that after the war the Left was in such through control of Hollywood that an anti-Communist activist had trouble finding work. One of the great superstitions of the century is that there was only the one, anti-Communist blacklist during the Forties and Fifties. There were two: and the anti-anti-Communist blacklist was by far the more pervasive.

It is in one sense good that Morrie Ryskind was otherwise unengaged during 1954 and 1955, because without him it is doubtful that this journal would ever have been launched. Morrie and Mary Rysking gave not less than twenty receptions for the young man from the East Coast who was trying to raise the capital necessary to found the journal. They came, a half-dozen or a dozen potential stockholders, largely because Morrie asked them to: He was difficult to turn down, because of his humor, the frantic intensity of his opinions, his universal kindness. He would then write or call his guests, and wrest from them pledges that, dollar by dollar, crawled up toward the magic figure that brought life to NATIONAL REVIEW in November of 1955. Morrie Ryskind wrote a piece for the first issue. He was a director of NR from the first day. We mourn him as a friend, are bereft as fellow Americans, and wish for his wife and children the consolation they must feel in having known so long and been loved so much by so good and talented an American