“But the whole funeral of our thirty-seventh
president was barely endurable. The Marine Band and Chorus performing all the
songs designed to shut down people’s thinking and produce a trance state:
‘Hail to the Chief,’ ‘America, ‘You’re a Grand Old Flag,” ‘The
Battle Hymn of the Republic,’ and, to be sure, that most rousing of all
those drugs that make everybody momentarily forget everything, the national
narcotic, ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’...
Then the realists take command, the connoisseurs of deal making and
deal breaking, masters of the most shameless ways of undoing an opponent,
those for whom moral concerns must always come last, uttering all the
well-known, unreal, sham-ridden cant about everything but the dead man’s
real passions. Clinton exalting Nixon for his ‘remarkable journey’ and,
under the spell of his own sincerity, expressing hushed gratitude for all the
‘wise counsel’ Nixon had given him. Governor Pete Wilson assuring everyone
that when most people think of Richard Nixon, they think of his ‘towering
intellect.’ Dole and his flood of towering clichés. ‘Doctor’ Kissinger,
high-minded, profound, speaking in his most puffed-up unegotistical mode–and
with all the cold authority of that voice dipped in sludge–quotes no less
prestigious a tribute than Hamlet’s for his murdered father to describe
‘our gallant friend.’ ‘He was a man, take him for all and all, I shall
not look upon his like again.
Literature is not a primary reality but a kind of
expensive upholstery to a sage himself so plumply upholstered, and so he has
no idea of the equivocating context in which Hamlet speaks of the unequaled
king. But then who, sitting there under the tremendous pressure of keeping a
straight face while watching the enactment of the Final Cover–up, is going
to catch the court Jew in a cultural gaffe when he invokes an inappropriate
masterpiece?
Who? Gerald Ford? Gerald Ford. I don’t ever remember seeing Gerald
Ford looking so focused before, so charged with intelligence as he clearly was
on that hallowed ground. Ronald Reagan snapping the uniformed honor guard his
famous salute, that salute of his that was always half meshugeh, Bob
Hope seated next to James Baker. The Iran-Contra arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi
seated next to Donald Nixon. The burglar G. Gordon Liddy there with arrogant
shaved head. The most disgraced of vice-presidents, Spiro Agnew, there with
his conscienceless Mob face. The most winning of vice-presidents, Dan Quayle,
looking as lucid as a button. The heroic effort made by the poor fellow:
always staging intelligence and always failing All of them mourning
platitudinously together in the California sunshine and the lovely breeze: the
indicted and unindicted, the convicted and the unconvicted, and, his towering
intellect at last at rest in a star-spangled coffin, no longer grappling and
questing for no-holds-barred power, the man who turned a whole country’s
morale inside out, the generator of an enormous national disaster, the first
and only president to have gained from a hand-picked successor a full and
unconditional pardon for all the breaking and entering he committed while in
office.”