The revelation comes at the funerals. The side-by-side combatants in trying to block the Panama Canal giveaway or the Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers conspicuously miss the sendoff — no time to pause fighting other battles of varying consequence. Movement conservatives discover in the coffin that their life’s purpose gave them not friends but comrades.
The moment in How Do We Get Out of Here?: Half a Century of Laughter and Mayhem at The American Spectator―From Bobby Kennedy to Donald J. Trump that shows memoirist R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., as a friend and not a comrade comes on 9/11.
“Jeanne was preparing provisions,” he recalls of his wife. The friend responsible for introducing them, Barbara Olson, was killed that day when American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon. And Olson’s husband Ted — Tyrrell’s best man at the wedding — needed friends and not comrades that night. Bob and Ellen Bork, Michael and Barbara Ledeen, Clarence and Ginni Thomas, Ken and Alice Starr, Kellyanne Conway, and other prominent conservatives showed up for their friend.
“As I remember the evening of September 11,” Tyrrell writes, “people kept stopping in with food and refreshments, as many as half a dozen at a time. If the Olsons had been liberals, Hollywood would have made a movie about that night.” As it turned out, Hollywood fixated for reasons understandable on that morning.
This regard for fellow conservatives as friends and not mere comrades, i.e., allies of convenience in a cause, explains not just feelings of warmth but ones of heat that underlie the author’s reflections. Betrayals, real and perceived, still burn, the reader senses. One recalls Aristotle’s admonition to love our friends but love truth foremost in perhaps giving a pass to some who found themselves in an intellectual dispute with the author rather than outright perfidy. His heat really raises to a broil when describing any of the efforts to wrest Tyrrell from his magazine. (READ MORE: The Happy and Thoughtful Memoirs of R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.)
“Who do you think you are, Tyrrell?” asked American Spectator board member Robert Novak during one such mutiny. Tyrrell’s best friend — whose reputation for sweetness and not steely pronouncements surely heightened the drama — answered. “I’ll tell you who he is,” wife Jeanne firmly announced. “He is the founder and editor in chief of this magazine, and if he says he’s not going to give it up, he’s not giving it up.”
Such institutional implosions, one of which led to Tyrrell briefly losing control of the magazine, ironically followed its circulation apex during Bill Clinton’s first term. The American Spectator brought about the impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton. William Jefferson Clinton in turn brought about the crash of The American Spectator. That man specialized in unhealthy relationships, and this one proved no different.
Encounters Close, and Otherwise, of the Clinton Kind illustrate why humor beat indignation in American Spectator v. White House. “I never stopped pursuing him and his lovely wife, Bruno,” Tyrrell writes of the First Couple, adding later that Webb Hubbell “spent a stretch in the calaboose for Bill but he was the better man than Bill and also a better man than Hillary.” It beats inveighing against a vast right-wing conspiracy.
Along the journey, frivolity occurred. Here handing a Reagan-for-President button to Bobby Kennedy; there, debating a bumbling, cartoonish imposter leftist before a fooled Indiana University audience. One gleans that writers flocked to The American Spectator for the last 56 years because it took on the personality of its editor.
The autobiography overflows with interactions with the powerful, including Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump. The more enduring friendships with lesser knowns — many of whom, nevertheless, à la Prince and Madonna, require but one name (Taki, Wlady, the Baron) — overwhelm in terms of captivating the reader.
We meet in How Do We Get Out of Here? a main character who values humor, fun, truth-telling, and loyalty.
Three of these four qualities made R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., a fantastic writer. All four of them made him a better friend.