Standing Firm.

Like anyone with an ounce of self-awareness who writes about politics for a living, I have a lot on my conscience. No other area of mainstream journalism offers such freedom to savage reputations with clever adjectives, adroit put-downs, blind quotes, armchair psychiatry, artfully telling anecdotes, and the mindless (often consciously cruel) pursuit of the trivial.

In January, while covering Bill Clinton's trip to Russia, I stumbled across a sad-eyed Gary Hart in the lobby of Moscow's Metropol Hotel looking like Banquo's ghost. As I heard myself call out, "Excuse me, Senator Hart," I felt a twinge of guilt over all the ridicule I had heaped on him in the wake of Donna Rice. Back in 1987, I was covering presidential politics for Time magazine and I believed that Hart was too weird, too much of a loner, and too impressed with his own intellect to serve as an effective president. The Bimini twist on the good ship Monkey Business provided the frame to turn Hart's bent for self-destructive behavior into a tabloid tragedy. So I joined the media lynch mob, gleefully shouting, "Let's string him up ourselves, his kind ain't worth a fair trial." Looking back on it, I cringe over my complicity in driving this capable, albeit deeply flawed, amn completely out of public life. Why must Hart remain forever stigmatized in an amnesiac political culture that could so easily rehabilitate Richard Nixon?

Reading Dan Quayle's inadvertently revealing autobiography reminds me that there remain savage journalistic moments that I do not recant. Just staring at him on the cover in a frat-boy sweater, radiating bland good looks under the title, Standing Firm, made me want to giggle.

I was in New Orleans for the 1988 Republican National Convention, and afterward I wrote the Time cover story on Quayle's near-miraculous elevation. Six years later my attitude regarding Quayle is straight Edith Piaf: "Non, je ne regrette rien." Then as now, I take pride in having gotten away with snide sentences like, "Quayle radiates the same bumptious enthusiasm, the same uncritical loyalty, the same palpable gratitude, and the same malleable mind-set that George Bush brought to the GOP ticket in 1980." Why do I shed a belated tear over Hart, while the plight of this oft-derided, out-of-power Hoosier second banana leaves me completely dry-eyed?

That question--writ large for the entire national media--is at the core of Quayle's seemingly ghostwritten book. Like Charlie Brown of the 1950s rock song, the former vice president seems to be constantly asking, "Why is everybody always picking on me?" All I can give is my own personal answer.

Quayle, by chance, had come to a breakfast interview with Time on the morning of his 1988 selection; with embarrassingly maladroit news judgment--augmented by the after-effects of a night on the town in New Orleans--I overslept and missed the breakfast. Listening to the interview tape afterward, I discovered Quayle's answers were a nonstop string of banalities, even in light of his awkward position as a vice-presidential wannabe still waiting for the word from Bush. Quayle's new book makes clear what happened next: "On the night of August 16, hundreds of newspeople in New Orleans were asking any acquaintance of mine they could find, 'Tell me about Dan Quayle.'" What Quayle fails to understand is that what destroyed his that what destroyed his reputation permanently wer the answers that my fellow reporters and I received. I remember a Republican operative, who had worked closely with Quayle on the Job Training Partnership Act--the nominee's lone legislative achievement--telling me, "He's blond and dumb. His only saving grace is that he knows he's dumb, so he hires good staff." The shock of Quayle's selection was so intense--and so many Republicans in Congress were rightly asking themselves, "Why him, and not me?"--that reporters were treated to the rarest commodity at a political convention: total candor rather than authorized spin.

If only the conventions of quasi-objective journalism allowed my colleagues and I to tell our readers the truth as we heard it. But there was no way The Washington Post would run a banner headline that read, "Bush Lights on Dim Bulb." Blind quotes--and no Republican was self-destructive enough to tell the truth on the record--can only carry you so far. Crucial issues like Quayle's basic intelligence are deemed far too subjective for standard news coverage. Frustrated by the constraints of its profession, the press pack reacted in time-honored fashion--Quayle's initial press conference was a feeding frenzy waiting to happen. All it took was one callow answer about his National Guard service ("I did not know in 1969 that I would be in this room today, I'll confess") and the witch-hunt was on. Instead of tricky interpretive questions (Quayle's fitness for high office), the media mob was back in its comfort zone of trying to ferret out objective facts (how Quayle wangled a wartime billet writing press releases in the Indiana National Guard). Quayle, with his contradictory answers and his stubborn insistence that guarding Indiana from the Viet Cong was a solemn patriotic duty, became the perfect media foil. His apparent use of family connections to get into the National Guard (Quayle's grandfather owned the largest newspaper in the state) played right into the larger unspoken issue: How did someone as callow as Quayle win the Senate seat that positioned him to become Bush's running mate?

I opened Standing Firm with such low expectations that I cannot say that I was surprised that Quayle does not make a single reflective comment on his Vietnam-era service and the media frenzy it spawned. About the closest he comes to honest revisionism is his grudging onesentence admission that "Yes, I knew like everyone else that by joining the National Guard I was less likely to go to Vietnam." But the rest is disingenuous muddle. Take his statement that "in 1969 almost nobody supported the war, myself included." His reason: "Like many in my generation, I supported the goal of preventing a communist military takeover in Southeast Asia, but I became opposed to the way the war was being conducted by the Johnson Administration." Earth to Dan Quayle: Richard Nixon, whom you claim to revere, was president for all but 19 and a half days in 1969, not Lyndon Johnson.

Nor does Quayle ever come clean about the financial cushion and political power bequeathed to him by his maternal grandfather, the right-wing newspaper publisher Eugene Pulliam. Instead, we get the Quayle version of "I was born in a log cabin that I helped my father build." Again and again, he depicts the Quayles as a hardscrabble family just barely making ends meet on his salary as a senator and Marilyn's earnings as a lawyer. One story in the book has Marilyn asking one of her husband's handlers for money to pay for a babysitter so that she could attend a campaign event on Ellis Island, and there is also Quayle's self-pitying revelation that he has no pictures of Election Night 1988 because the chintzy Bush campaign would not pick up the tab for a photographer.

A gullible reader would be sobbing by the time Quayle confesses his financial difficulties during the Reagan-Bush transition, having already resigned his Senate seat to give his successor more seniority. "I was not the $600-million man," Quayle writes, referring to the common media estimate of the Pulliam family's net worth. "I was a senator living off my salary, and I had a mortgage payment to make. So I asked the president-elect if I could go onto the transition office's payroll for a few weeks. After all, I was working every day to get my part of the new administration ready for its duties." What Quayle sees as a noble sacrifice was, in truth, a neo-Dan Rostenkowski penny-ante hustle. For elsewhere in the book--in a swipe at the media for not writing about Lloyd Bentsen's wealth--Quayle reveals that his own "net worth in 1988, including my house, was $854,000." Maybe that's not Pulliam rich, but it should be enough to cover babysitters, photographers, and a few mortgage payments during the transition.

Okay, I'm being mean, but Quayle provokes it. The book's tone is a relentlessly chatty, friendly, wide-eyed view of the world as seen through Dan Quayle's eyes. Try as he might, he can't escape the petulant small child's anger that everybody else is getting away with things and he's not. Describing the maddening constraints of by-the-book Secret Service protection, Quayle notes, "I was never permitted to resume my old habit of jogging on the Washington Mall"--and then adds--"something I see Bill Clinton has managed to do!"

Quayle, I suppose, deserves credit for the cheerful fashion in which he tries to tell the full story of each of the verbal miscues of his vice presidential tenure. But this near-encyclopedic recital ended up reminding me of near-forgotten Quaylisms like the speech in American Samoa where he told the crowd that they looked like "happy campers." Sure, some of these press flaps were unfair and Quayle has a right to wail, "Do you know how many favorable stories it takes to overcome one zinger by Johnny Carson?" But the non-stop Quayle gaffe watch was the media's only way of sending a coded message: "Hey, folks, he's now a heartbeat away from the Oval Office--and he's not getting any smarter."

Quayle tries to remedy his personal gravitas gap--a chasm roughly the size of the Grand Canyon--by offering up a breathless chapter about how he singlehandedly saved Cory Aquino from a 1989 coup. Because George Bush and Jim Baker were on Air Force One en route to the Malta Summit when the reports of a military revolt in the Philippines arrived, it was Quayle (yikes!) who got to play Al Haig in the Situation Room. The vice president had the good sense to follow the prudent advice of Colin Powell to permit the U.S. Air Force to show the flag in support of Aquino but to avoid actual combat with the rebels. All in all, a seemingly competent performance. Still, it is painful to read Quayle's self-congratulatory assessment: "I think everyone who was in the Situation Room that night would agree that they have rarely done more concentrated and effective work."

But one little-noted section of the book actually made me pause and wonder if my glib image of Quayle the Lightweight wasn't a bit of a caricature. The chapter was certainly not inserted to boost sales since it concerns the vice president's statutory role as the chairman of the White House Space Council. I must confess a small deviation from neoliberal orthodoxy: I have a sneaky love of manned space travel and can't understand why America has not returned to the moon in a quarter century and why we may not get to Mars in my lifetime. A 1950s childhood spent reading science fiction makes strange bedfellows, so Quayle and I are in celestial harmony when he writes, "I knew the only thing that would again excite the American public... was a revival of wonder in the idea of sending people to explore space, not just orbit around and around in it."

This visionary notion--and here we're veering close to Ronald Reagan territory--meant that Quayle became the bitter adversary of the gang-that-couldn't-launch-straight bureaucrats at NASA, who have turned the agency into an endless subsidy program for the ill-starred space shuttle. Quayle's battles with NASA have a this-is-how-it-is-in-government immediacy that the rest of the book lacks. During one chilling meeting, the NASA team was fighting to ward off much-needed competition from the Defense Department and retain control of the next phase in building a space station. The Pentagon alternative would be ready by 2003, but NASA was prepared to tell Congress that they could do the job themselves by 1999. Congress would, of course, opt for the earlier date, and NASA would win the turf battle. There was only one pesky problem: NASA knew that their target date was as phony as a Dick Darman budget document. So Quayle listened incredulously as William Lenoir, a top administrator at NASA, confided at a meeting, "Well, we could tell Congress 1999 but really plan to launch in 2003. After all, we might blow up an engine. In fact, we could blow up an engine."

The NASA episode illustrates what should be called the Quayle Paradox: How do you react when the wrong person does the right thing in government? Too much praise, and you're elevating Quayle despite your deeply held qualms. Willful silence plays into the self-destructive notion that everything is political--that personalities matter, not issues. I suppose I could wiggle out of this conundrum by pointing out that Quayle, to be sure, does somehow hire good people; his vice presidential chief of staff, Bill Kristol, was--aside from New Paradigm idea maven Jim Pinkerton--about the only creative political thinker in the Bush White House. (I know this sounds like faint praise, akin to calling a legislator "the conscience of the Congress.") Kristol--and, yes, Quayle--deserve lasting credit for the vice president's bold attack on the legal profession before the American Bar Association in 1991. Reading about that speech created in me a troubling bit of cognitive dissonance: What was I doing cheering for Dan Quayle? The truth is, for all his obvious limitations, Quayle does boast excellent big-picture political instincts. He always remembered the Reagan lesson, totally lost on the Bush crowd, that the purpose of governing is to do, not simply to exult in being there. As the book makes clear, he sensed from the outset that the sleepy status-quoplus 1992 Bush campaign was headed for disaster.

The "Murphy Brown" flap underscores the contradictory nature of the Quayle legacy. Yes, the vice president was right to point out the social implications of the alarming explosion of illegitimate births. And Murphy's enceinte state was fair rhetorical game, even though I wonder about Quayle's insistence that "the reference was my idea." When the firestorm erupted, how could you not sympathize with Quayle when White House Chief of Staff Sam Skinner complained to him that everyone was "worried it looks as if you're indirectly criticizing Doro Bush." (Doro Bush's beautiful blonde daughter was used in soft-focus 1988 campaign ads to illustrate Bush's fidelity to family values and ove of his grandchildren. Small wonder mean-spirited Democrats reveled in Doro's subsequent divorce.) Yet there was also something comically, alarmingly out of touch when Bush confessed to Quayle, "The problem I have is that I've never seen 'Murphy Brown.'" You could just hear the gasp on Bush's side of the conversation when Quayle in turn confessed, "Neither have I. I haven't seen the show."

Just when I began to fear that I might, in Margaret Thatcher's phrase, "go wobbly" on Quayle, the lexicographically challenged former vice president obligingly rehashed the "potatoe" episode. About the only revelation is Quayle's claim that afterward Marilyn--supposedly the brains in the family--was "unsure herself (and Marilyn is a good speller) that the word didn't have an e after all." C'mon Dan, you still don't get it. Egregious moments like this become embedded in the national psyche because they illustrate something real--the yawning gaps in your education. (There must be a reason why Quayle has refused to release his college and law-school transcripts.) The press--for all the justifiable hand-wringing over the excesses of pack journalism--does play a valid role in vetting candidates for high office. I, for one, don't want a president who when told about genocide in Rwanda thinks his aides are referring to the girl in the Beach Boys' song who's supposed to "help me get her out of my heart." Even in these latitudinarian times, there are things that a would-be president simply ought to know.

Though Standing Firm is on the best-seller lists, I doubt it will help Quayle save his reputation. In the age of the handlers and non-stop spin cycles, it says something laudable about the good sense of the American voters that Quayle left office much as he arrived--as a national joke. The Hoosier heartthrob does have his virtues, and the NASA story illustrates them. But Standing Firm is too flaccid a book to make me feel that I ever misjudged Dan Quayle.